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Ukraine's President Zelenskyy is pressing hard on a critical issue heading into winter. Restrictions on the Starshield satellite communications system, a military variant of Starlink, are making it harder for Ukrainian forces to detect and intercept incoming Russian drones. Zelenskyy appealed directly to both the United States government and Elon Musk, urging them to lift those limitations and stand on what he called the right side of history. The stakes are high as cold weather arrives and energy infrastructure becomes an even more vulnerable target.
On a lighter but genuinely fascinating note, a developer has built something called PongArena, a browser-based experiment asking a deceptively simple question: how small can a neural network be and still play a meaningful game of Pong? Users can challenge the models directly from their phones or desktops, no account required. It is a rare chance to watch a tiny artificial mind reason in real time, and for many people, that turns out to be surprisingly compelling.
And in a story that cuts across artificial intelligence and ancient history, a piece circulating on LessWrong asks what the oldest text in an AI model's training data actually is. It is a quiet but important question about what humanity has fed into these systems, and whose words, written thousands of years ago, might still be shaping the machines we build today.
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