Flutterby™! (short)

Ya know, Typescript, if you're smart enough to figure out what that function is returning, maybe don't whine when I don't explicitly specify a return type for it?

(I'm stuck in a maze of little Mithril types, all different.)

Oxford Internet Institute: AI-powered social media can subtly manipulate opinion at scale, new study finds.

The study AI-Mediated Communication Can Steer Collective Opinion, authored by Dr. Stratis Tsirtsis, Dr Kai Rawal, Dr Chris Russell, Professor Brent Mittelstadt and Professor Sandra Wachter, has been accepted for presentation at the AI4Good and Technical AI Governance Research workshops at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) in Seoul, South Korea.

arXiv: AI-Mediated Communication Can Steer Collective Opinion. They focus a lot on Grok, but as I watch people adopt these things as a general information filter, I'm super concerned about this effect.

Tech Xplore version of the press release.

Via The Guardian, which adds a few examples but doesn't actually link to these sources.

NBER: Congestion Pricing and EMS Response Time: Evidence From New York City

Exploiting the sharp geographic boundary of New York City's congestion relief zone at 60th Street and a difference-in-discontinuities design applied to approximately 1.6 million EMS incidents, we find that the January 2025 implementation of congestion pricing reduced passenger vehicle traffic by roughly 21 percent near the boundary and improved total EMS travel times by 63–70 seconds, approximately 5–6 percent. Effects emerged quickly and show little evidence of displacement to adjacent areas.

Via.

It's 1996. The free cross-platform may-be-ugly-but-it-works widget set is Tk.

It's 2026. The best Rust widget set appears to be... Uh... Tk.

Ad said "Keep your furry loved ones healthy", and I thought "finally, coverage for my polycule!"

Alas, not those furry loved ones.