Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * 18 large language models from six AI labs now generate everything from code explanations to creative fiction. Even in a single short paragraph, every model leaves subtle clues in its word choice, tone, and sentence structure. Each lab's training data and post-training choices leave behind distinct stylistic fingerprints in vocabulary, phrasing, and punctuation. The October Kaggle competition requires participants to build models to classify ~4,000 unlabeled text passages across 18 frontier language models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Qwen, ZAI, and Moonshot AI. The goal is to find out how reliably today's frontier models can be fingerprinted from short text alone.  * Experiential Labs is an OpenAI-compatible model gateway. A user reported that they're injecting ads into free tier model  responses without disclosure. It turns out it is mentioned in their long privacy policy that no one really reads.  * How Misanthropic! According to ...

Cartoon co-created with Gemini. See more of my AI co-creations ~ The Priest-King is a roughly 4,500-year-old sculpture discovered at Mohenjo-daro in present-day Sindh, Pakistan by the archaeological team led by Sir Mortimer Wheeler. They gave it that name as Mesopotamian cities were often ruled by religious monarchs. The name stuck, even though there’s zero evidence the Indus Valley people were ruled by kings or priests at all! Since the Indus script remains unreadable, we can only guess.

This Week I Learned -  * " We are making Markdown files work natively across Google Drive and Docs. You can now preview .md files in Drive, open them in Docs, edit them, comment on them, and collaborate without converting the file into a Google Doc! Markdown has become the common language between humans and AI agents - specs, plans, READMEs, tables, task lists, generated docs - so much of this starts as .md. Now you can keep the file as Markdown and still use Google Docs collaboration workflows. " - Chandu Thota , VP at Google * Article 50(2) of the EU AI Act requires providers of generative AI systems to ensure AI-generated or manipulated content, including text, is marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially-generated or manipulated.  OpenAI will begin adding an invisible watermark to eligible text generated by ChatGPT and Codex in the European Union (EU). OpenAI's text watermarking technology, called textGrain, adds an invisible statistical signa...