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The 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize is facing backlash after several winning entries were accused of being AI-generated, with one Caribbean winner's story flagged as fully AI-written by a detector that WIRED says it independently confirmed. From the report: Each year, the Commonwealth Foundation, a nongovernmental organization in London, awards its short story prize to one writer in each of five regions: Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. One overall winner is then selected from that short list. Regional winners take home [about $3,350], while the top winner, to be announced next month, claims [about $6,700]. On May 12, the respected UK literary magazine Granta published the top five 2026 entries -- all previously unpublished, per the rules of the contest -- on its website. (It has hosted the winning submissions for the prize since 2012.) Within days, however, one entry aroused suspicion. "The Serpent in the Grove," a story by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad and Tobago, which had taken honors for the Caribbean region, struck a few people as bearing the stylistic tells of AI-generated text. "Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize," wrote researcher and entrepreneur Nabeel S. Qureshi, a former visiting scholar of AI at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, in a post on X on Monday. "'Not X, not Y, but Z' sentences everywhere, the 'hums' trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing. A major milestone for AI, at any rate..." "They say the grove still hums at noon," Nazir's mysterious and atmospheric tale begins. In his screenshot of the opening paragraphs, Quereshi highlighted the second line as what he considered to be a signature example of AI syntax: "Not the bees' neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound -- as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there." As the literary community undertook a closer read of Nazir's story, many criticized its language and metaphors as nonsensical, wondering how the Commonwealth judges could have seen any merit to them. Others shared screenshots showing that the AI-detection tool Pangram flagged "The Serpent in the Grove" as 100 percent AI-generated, a result that WIRED independently confirmed. (While no AI-detection software is perfect, third-party analysis has consistently determined Pangram to be the most accurate, with a near-zero rate of false positives.) [...] Besides Nazir, two more winning authors have drawn allegations of using AI in their work. Pangram finds that "The Bastion's Shadow," by Maltese writer John Edward DeMicoli, winner for the Canada and Europe region, is fully AI-generated; it scans "Mehendi Nights," by Indian writer Sharon Aruparayil, winner for the Asia region, as partly AI-generated. Neither DeMicoli nor Aruparayil immediately returned requests for comment when reached through their respective social media accounts. The other two short-listed stories, by Holly Ann Miller of New Zealand and Lisa-Anne Julien of South Africa, deliver "fully human-written" results from Pangram. Wired also reports that one of the judges for the prize has been "accused of using AI to craft her descriptive blurb that accompanied the listing of 'The Serpent in the Grove' as a regional winner.'" Pangram labels the text as "AI-assisted."

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Claude Code Telegram Bot provides remote access to Claude Code. Chat naturally with Claude about your projects from anywhere — no terminal commands needed. What is this? This bot connects Telegram to Claude Code, providing a conversational AI interface for your codebase: Chat naturally — ask Claude to analyze, edit, or explain your code in plain […]

Hisabumi Hatsugai has tried implementing virtual memory using two MC68000 chips. The MMU was configured using SRAM. There were two SRAMs: one was TransRAM, which converts logical addresses to physical addresses, and the other was AccessRAM, which records access to physical pages (read/write). The logical space is 8 Mbytes, ranging from 0xFF800000 to 0xFFFFFFFF. The […]

3D Hangouts – Prop Game, Compass and Flexi Raptor https://youtube.com/live/evHG1X0T5Lo This week @adafruit we’re checking out Noe’s prototype of his new handheld game design using PropMaker Feather. Pero is working on a new compass project. This week’s timelapse features a velociraptor flexi dino. Feather RP2040 Propmaker: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5768 Alpanumeric LED Display https://www.adafruit.com/product/2158 Timelapse Tuesday Velociraptor Flexi […]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The AI coding boom is now coming directly for Android app development. On Tuesday at Google IO 2026, the company announced new native Android app creation capabilities in its web-based Google AI Studio, shrinking a process that takes weeks of setup and coding down to minutes. The company also said that consumers will be able to use Gemini AI to find the apps they need, both on the Play Store and the web, expanding opportunities for developers to have their apps discovered. Google says the new capabilities could make sense for anyone from a seasoned developer looking to prototype a new app quickly to a first-time creator. [...] The apps are built with the Kotlin programming language using Google's Jetpack Compose toolkit and with support integration with hardware sensors like GPS, Bluetooth, and NFC, the company says. However, the resulting creations, for now, are only meant to be used personally, as publishing for family and friends is still on the roadmap. The company suggests the technology could be used for the creation of personal utilities and simple social apps, hardware-enabled experiences, or AI-powered experiences. Google is also adding an "Ask Play" AI overlay to the Play Store that lets users discover apps through natural-language conversations. "Perhaps more importantly, apps will begin to be surfaced with users' conversations with Google's Gemini virtual assistant, exposing developers' apps to millions of users," adds TechCrunch.

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The best answer to "what country has the most gay people" is not a single permanent country, because survey estimates depend on whether they measure identity, attraction, behavior and willingness to answer.

What does Israel do for the United States? That's a question about what the U.S. receives from a close, costly and contested alliance as of May 2026.

image via Jim Henson’s Creature Shop Tours   Whether you live in or are visiting NYC, going behind the scenes at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in LIC has got to be worth budgeting for! Enjoy a truly unique opportunity to tour Jim Henson’s Creature Shop,the elite puppet-building workshop in Queens, New York City, where legendary […]

Temuri Takalandze on abgeo.dev looks at a smart doorbell bought on Temu. Recently I bought a smart doorbell off Temu, the Chinese marketplace that has been gaining popularity worldwide over the past couple of years. I wanted to know how secure the cheap connected hardware sold on that platform actually is. The unit ships under […]

While there are only 11 days left in the month, NYPL has 30 remaining planned events celebrating Asian American, Native Hawaiian & Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Scroll through them all here!

Google is again pressuring some longtime G Suite Legacy users to move onto paid Workspace plans, warning that accounts flagged as "commercial use" could lose access to Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and other services if appeals fail. "The trouble, according to users, is that the appeals system appears about as transparent as a brick," adds The Register. From the report: A reader alerted The Register to what appears to be a new crackdown on long-standing G Suite Legacy accounts, with similar complaints now piling up on Reddit from users accused of violating Google's non-commercial use policy, despite insisting they use the accounts only for family email and personal domains. Reports have been stacking up on Reddit's r/gsuitelegacymigration subreddit from users who say their long-running personal G Suite Legacy accounts are suddenly being classified as "commercial use" accounts and pushed toward paid Google Workspace plans by May 2026. A lot of users have been through this before. Google spent part of 2022 trying to wind down free G Suite Legacy accounts, then changed course after users running family domains made enough noise. Now some of those same users are being told they have fallen outside Google's rules after all. Emails seen by The Register warn users their accounts have been "identified as being used for commercial purposes" and say Google may start suspending Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Meet, and other Workspace services if they do not either win an appeal or begin paying for Workspace subscriptions. "Please upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription to continue using your services. Look out for a notification regarding the appeal process in Google Admin console or email," the email reads. "If you don't take action during your 45-day appeal period, Google will begin suspending your Google Workspace core services, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Meet. As a result, you will lose access to these core services and data." One wrongly-flagged user said the company reversed its decision after they filed a GDPR data request seeking evidence. Others were less fortunate, with some reporting that family-only custom domains were permanently classified as commercial despite failed appeals.

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Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified an ultra-faint galaxy seen just 800 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy contains almost no heavy elements, shows signs of intense early stellar radiation, and could offer a rare glimpse into the first stages of galaxy formation. Phys.org reports: In a paper published in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Kimihiko Nakajima, an astronomer at Kanazawa University, Japan, describes how they used the telescope to study a part of the deep universe and discovered a faint galaxy called LAP1-B. "LAP1-B establishes a 'fossil in the making,' a direct high-redshift progenitor of the ancient ultra-faint dwarf galaxies observed in the local universe," they wrote. Because the galaxy is so small and distant, it would normally be impossible to see. However, it was spotted due to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, in which a massive cluster of closer galaxies acts like a giant magnifying glass, boosting the light from LAP1-B by 100 times. The scientists realized that most of the light from the galaxy wasn't coming from the stars, but from glowing clouds of gas. They analyzed this light by splitting it into a spectrum and studying the emission lines, which revealed the chemical composition of the gas. They found that the galaxy contains almost no heavy elements, and its oxygen abundance is about 240 times lower than the sun's, making it one of the most primitive star-forming galaxies ever observed. The emission lines also revealed intense ionizing radiation, which is what scientists expect to see from the first generation of stars. The team also measured an elevated carbon-to-oxygen ratio. This matches the predicted chemical signature for the first star explosions in history from Population III stars, the first stars to exist in the universe. The stars we see today are Population I stars, which formed later and contain more heavy elements. Another fascinating finding is that, after measuring the gas's motion and speed, the researchers concluded that the galaxy is held together by a massive cloud of invisible dark matter.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has signed the nation's first law banning prediction market sites from operating in the state, and in response, the Trump administration has sued, teeing up a legal battle over the most far-reaching crackdown on popular services like Kalshi and Polymarket. It comes as states confront a growing standoff with the Trump administration over how to regulate the industry, which allows people to bet on virtually anything. The new state law makes it a crime to host or advertise a prediction market, which it defines as a system that lets consumers place a wager on a future outcome, like sports, elections, live entertainment, someone's word choice and world affairs. The prohibition extends to services supporting prediction markets, like virtual private networks, that could allow consumers to disguise their location and get around the ban. It would force prediction market sites like Kalshi and Polymarket to leave the state, or face possible felony charges. The law takes effect in August. The law has a carve-out for event contracts that serve as an insurance policy in the event of "harm, or loss sustained" and for the purchase of securities and other commodities. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission's lawsuit seeks to block the law before it starts, arguing the prediction market industry should be exclusively regulated by federal officials. "This Minnesota law turns lawful operators and participants in prediction markets into felons overnight," said CFTC Chairman Michael Selig. "Minnesota farmers have relied on critical hedging products on weather and crop-related events for decades to mitigate their risks. Governor Walz chose to put special interests first and American farmers and innovators last." An updated version of the prediction market bill allows trading on weather, an exception that followed pushback from the agricultural industry, which has historically used futures trading on weather as a hedge against storms and other inclement weather that can affect a harvest. Walz is expected to sign it soon. "We as a state should decide how best and what regulations we think should attach to gambling, to protect public safety, to protect our kids," said Minnesota Rep. Emma Greenman, the Democrat who introduced the measure. Kalshi spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana called the ban a "blatant violation" of the law. "Minnesota banning prediction markets is like trying to ban the New York Stock Exchange," said Diana, adding that "this actively harms users because it reduces competition and drives activity offshore."

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Plex is raising the price of a new Lifetime Plex Pass from $249.99 to $749.99 on July 1. That's a $500 increase for media server software. Plex says it needs the money for "long-term development" and future features, but a lot of self-hosting folks are already wondering if this is basically a soft way of killing the Lifetime option without officially removing it. At nearly $750, are people just going to move to Jellyfin instead? As for those future improvements, Plex said the roadmap includes better downloads support, restored music and photo library support in mobile apps, NFO metadata support, IPv6 support, playlist editing on mobile, audio enhancements, and transcoding improvements.

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Google is giving its iconic search box its first major redesign since 2001. The new design incorporates, you guessed it, artificial intelligence, "getting bigger and more interactive so that people can ask even longer questions and upload photographs and videos into queries," reports the New York Times. "In addition, people can ask follow-up questions with a chatbot on Google's main search page." From the report: The company will also offer digital assistants, known as agents, to automate searches so that someone who may be apartment hunting can be notified of a new listing without opening a real estate site like Zillow. The search features will be powered by a new artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. Google said the model had improved on creating software code and performing autonomous tasks, worked faster and was less expensive to run than comparable models. [...] Google is also bringing one of A.I.'s biggest breakthroughs -- software coding -- to search. When people research complex topics like astrophysics, Gemini can build interactive graphics and simulations behind the scenes to provide a deeper answer than its previous listing of websites. Google said it was introducing an alternative to the agents powered by Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Called Gemini Spark, the service is embedded in Gmail, Docs and other Google products, where it can turn meeting notes spread across emails and chats into a single document. It can also read and draft emails. "The open web is on its way out," says Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research. "With A.I., Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers."

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It has been a very busy month so far, but one of the highlights was getting an early adopter Pebble HF kit.  Sadly other things seemed to pop up every day and delayed my beginning the assembly process. At this … Continue reading →

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: A proposed merger of the largest utility in the country by market value, NextEra Energy, with the sixth-largest, Dominion, would create a megacompany at a time when data centers and rapid increases in electricity demand are reshaping the industry. The proposal, announced Monday morning and contingent on state and federal regulatory approval, would result in a company that leads in nearly every aspect of the US power and utility industry, including overall electricity generation, natural gas generation, and renewables. The $67 billion deal combines NextEra's size and reach with Dominion's positioning as the local utility for the world's largest concentration of data centers in northern Virginia. But the results are likely bad for consumers and the environment, creating a company with enormous financial and political strength that will be difficult to effectively regulate, according to consumer advocates and analysts. For perspective, only Exxon Mobil and Chevron would be larger based on market value among US-based energy companies. "Mergers are not about consumers; they're about shareholders," said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. "For the Dominion shareholders, they are selling their shares at a premium. The executives are getting massive payouts for facilitating this, assuming it all goes through, and obviously NextEra believes the transaction is going to add value to the company. Ratepayers are all an afterthought." The deal makes financial sense for both companies, said Andrew Bischof, an equity analyst for Morningstar. "We view the transaction as allowing NextEra to accelerate its data center ambitions, which had trailed those of its regulated peers, by using Dominion's expertise and relationships to expedite NextEra's data center hub plans," he said in a note to clients. NextEra, based in Juno Beach, Florida, includes Florida Power & Light, the largest regulated electricity utility in the state, and NextEra Energy Resources, a wholesale electricity supplier that owns power plants across the nation. Dominion, based in Richmond, Virginia, includes regulated utilities serving much of Virginia, parts of North Carolina and South Carolina, and other assets across the country. The company would be called NextEra Energy, and NextEra CEO John W. Ketchum would serve in the same role after the deal closes. Robert M. Blue, Dominion's CEO, would be the CEO for regulated utilities for the merged company. The parties said they expect regulatory approvals to take 12 to 18 months. NextEra shareholders would own 74.5 percent and Dominion shareholders would own 25.5 percent, respectively, of the combined company in the all-stock transaction. "We are bringing NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy together because scale matters more than ever -- not for the sake of size, but because scale translates into capital and operating efficiencies," Ketchum said in a statement. Although the companies claim the deal would produce savings, including $2.25 billion in Dominion customer bill credits, former regulator Marissa Paslick Gillett said she was "flabbergasted by the tone deafness," arguing that major utility mergers rarely deliver the promised "synergies" and often create "a behemoth" that is harder to regulate. Others warned that a larger NextEra could use its political power "to the disadvantage of ratepayers," while climate advocates said expanding methane gas plants to serve data centers would worsen pollution and leave vulnerable communities "at the short end of the stick."

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Patten Studio features Flagscape, the 15’ kinetic sculpture installed last spring on the corner of 42nd Street and 6th Avenue in New York. … We wanted to take a deeper dive into the technical work that brought Flagscape together. We sat down and had a chat with the design team to talk about the plot […]

Come on by for JP’s Product Pick of The Week ! A new product pick will be revealed. The show airs at 4pm ET / 1pm PT, TODAY! Check out the livestream right here inside this product page you won’t want to miss it because there will be a HUGE DISCOUNT during the show! Tune […]