How much grace should we extend to people who screw up'like, really screw up' After many years as an addict and a general failson, Hunter Biden's history includes felony gun convictions, tax evasion, smoking crack, and smoking Parmesan cheese that he thought was crack. But in the past few weeks, the son of the former president has launched a new career as'a sober counselor' A life coach' Since reviving his dormant X account on May 19, the younger Biden has fully embraced a persona he soft-launched last year, when the Gen Z influencer Andrew Callaghan interviewed him about his past drug addiction. His strategy is not to deny his past transgressions, but to flagellate himself so thoroughly for them that no one else can land a hit. 'I was definitely a degenerate crackhead, 100 percent,' the 56-year-old recently told Soft White Underbelly, a YouTube channel that encourages sex workers, homeless people, and drug users to tell their stories in their own words. His addiction had been a form of 'suicide,' but he was saved by his current wife, Melissa, who 'erased every other phone number from my phone. Literally, if it didn't have the last name Biden in it, she took it out.' His Substack bio reads, 'Artist. Author. Recovery Advocate.'...

The role of advanced analytics in sports is a contentious subject. To its defenders, data-driven pragmatism is a natural evolutionary step in the way we play and watch games. For detractors, the approach prioritizes results above all else and drains the soul from a pursuit that should be spontaneous and joyful. As someone who is neither pragmatic nor spontaneous, I don't qualify for either camp, though I find the very notion of applying this kind of research to soccer fascinating and even admirable. The game is resistant to orderly examination by design. Like preparing a tax return for a housecat, it takes a stupendous amount of ingenuity just to figure out which questions to ask, to say nothing of finding the answers. While baseball can be a spreadsheet task, soccer matches amount to meandering free-verse written in 90-minute chunks. Luke Bornn is a data scientist who specializes in movement studies. Thanks to his background analyzing complex bodies in motion, he realized he was uniquely suited to explore the nature of such an evasive game. While at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Bornn worked on ways to detect how much damage helicopter blades can sustain before it compromises the chopper's ability to stay airborne. He has mapped climate data to predict crop yield and studied how herds of massive land mammals move about the fruited plain. The ebb and flow of a soccer match, while mysterious, were not altogether unfamiliar, and he has pioneered ways to quantify some of the game's amorphous spirit....

The Transformer is currently the reference architecture for serious AI. Not because it is obviously the most brain-like, elegant, or efficient design, but because it has the best scaling story. You add data, parameters, compute, context length, better training recipes, better post-training, and the model gets better in a surprisingly smooth way. That is rare. In deep learning, many ideas are clever. Few are industrial. The Transformer's superpower is attention. Every token can look at every other token and decide what matters. This is an incredibly general operation. It works for language, code, images, audio, video, protein sequences, robotics tokens, and tool traces. The architecture is simple enough to scale, parallel enough to train efficiently, and expressive enough to absorb huge datasets. But it has an obvious tax: attention is expensive. Full self-attention scales badly with sequence length. In autoregressive generation, the model accumulates a key-value cache, which grows with context. A Transformer remembers by keeping a large, explicit, token-indexed memory. That is powerful, but it is not how you would design every intelligent system from first principles....

The expansion of the list increases the chance that the Department of Defense could make it harder for U.S. companies to do business with these entities. It's also likely to further strain the tension between the U.S. and Chinese governments. The list ' known as the 1260H list, for the specific section of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act that created it ' is just one tool that the U.S. has used to place restrictions on Chinese tech. President Donald Trump has used tariffs in both of his terms to put pressure on China, including a 100% tax on imported Chinese EVs. Most of China's biggest artificial intelligence players are now on the list, with Tencent added last year. This comes as Trump has said he's weighing whether the U.S. should take equity stakes in the country's top AI companies. The Pentagon added a handful of automotive industry players to the list this year. In addition to BYD, trendy EV company Nio and battery companies CALB Group and EVE Energy were added. RoboSense, one of China's leading makers of lidar sensors, has joined its rival Hesai on the list, too. Baidu is also one of China's leaders in autonomous vehicles....