The tortoise known as Jonathan is thought to be the oldest living land animal. Does his genome explain how he’s so long-lived? CC-licensed photo by St Helena on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Lettuce find out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
“Software is over”: bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones • Ars Technica
Kyle Orland:
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For a while, those hoping to avoid the difficulty and expense of dealing with Adobe’s Creative Suite have been able to use several free and/or open-source alternatives that replicate some or all of those capabilities. Now, one developer is using AI-powered reverse engineering to mimic the look, feel, and functionality of Adobe’s well-known software with what he hopes will soon be perfect fidelity.
Artcraft got its start last year as a “controllable AI for artists” that allows for precise post-generation editing of AI-crafted images and videos. Over the weekend, though, the brand debuted its pivot to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the user interface and tools found in Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.
In announcing those new apps on Reddit earlier this week, software developer Brandon Thomas said he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to create “clean-room replacements” for Adobe’s closed source software in Rust (with WebAssembly versions available for use in a browser). And while commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere have taken pains to point out the new software’s many current shortcomings, Thomas make the grandiose promise that the current “super early alpha” state will soon lead to something just as functional as anything Adobe has ever put out.
“We’re going to reach 100% [feature] parity within a month,” Thomas stated on Reddit of his plans to quickly squash bugs and add features with the help of community reports. Days later, on Hacker News, he amended that position slightly to say that “99% parity will take a while, but I’m sure it’ll be measured in months and not years.”
Thomas, who says he has about a decade of experience working on large-scale Rust projects, wrote on Hacker News that he was inspired to create his own open source Adobe software alternatives after being “bit by the dark pattern ‘cancellation fee’ one too many times.”
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So Adobe sort of brought this on itself? But it was inevitable, in a monkeys/typewriters sort of way: give enough people access to LLMs that can reverse engineer software, and one of them will be annoyed enough at Adobe to try to generate open source as-good-as products. As he says, it might take a while, but the question is whether the extra 5% or 10% he can’t do is what a significant proportion of people need.
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‘ChatGPT ftw’: parents are using AI to skip kids’ school photo day • Fast Company
Jude Cramer:
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With a new school year underway, kids everywhere are saying “cheese” for school picture day—but some penny-pinching parents are cutting photographers out of the equation.
In their place, those parents are employing artificial intelligence to generate picture day-style images of their children. Others are getting their kids’ pictures taken as normal, but avoiding paying for the final images by using AI agents to erase watermarks from the proofs. Both methods may be cheaper than shelling out for professional pictures, but they come with their own hidden costs.
On TikTok, user Carlie Bond went viral for what she tagged as a #MomHack: taking photos of her three school-age children against a plain backdrop, then putting them into ChatGPT with the prompt, “Keep them exactly the same but make it look like a school picture.”
ChatGPT added a standard gradient backdrop to each image, making them look much like the standard school pictures from leading companies like Lifetouch and Cady Studios.
“School pictures x3 kids?? In this economy?” Bond wrote in her caption. “So we took our own and let my good friend Chat help us out 🤭 And honestly … I’m not mad about how they turned out.”
…But Bond’s commenters weren’t all on board with her cost-cutting strategy. Several pointed out that AI platforms like ChatGPT tend to distort images during editing. “Every time I put a photo into ChatGPT, it changes how the person looks no matter what I tell it,” one user complained.
Others worried about the implications of feeding photos of children into ChatGPT. “You are putting your children’s image and likeness through AI that can be utilized by AI later and stored in its memory,” one commenter cautioned.
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On the latter point, pretty sure if there’s any image of those children anywhere on the internet then it will have been slurped up. On the former point – about distortion – well, are school pictures ever a true representation?
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The Social Reckoning film review: Facebook sequel is Jaws if the shark ate everyone and kept swimming • Financial Times
Danny Leigh:
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Last time we saw Mark Zuckerberg, he was grimly waiting on a Facebook friend request. We in this context are movie audiences, that last encounter coming with The Social Network — director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin’s barbed account of a boy prince of tech, played by Jesse Eisenberg.
The year was 2010. Prehistory. For Zuckerberg, so much still lay ahead, from allegations that Facebook enabled the genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar to the embarrassment of failed 3D virtual world the Metaverse, while extensive research has suggested deep harms from Meta products. And now, after it all, his personal wealth is reported to be more than 60 times greater than it was back then.
It leaves a lot to catch up with in The Social Reckoning, a hacky, frustrating sequel written and directed by Sorkin. Events are pared back to a crunch point. In 2019, we meet Frances Haugen, strait-laced Facebook data scientist. In 2021, she testifies to Congress about the company profiting from misinformation. The movie mostly takes place between. Haugen is played by Mikey Madison, an Oscar winner for Anora. Jeremy Allen White co-stars as Jeff Horwitz of the Wall Street Journal, to whom she first brings word of algorithmic wrongdoing.
…If social media has made us more stupid, the movie treats us accordingly. A generation ago, Sorkin found fame writing TV political drama The West Wing. His secret then was making viewers feel smart. Now he seems to be addressing the concussed. When Madison reveals that, in 2016, 64% of new members of extremist groups on Facebook were led there by the company, the fact is instantly repeated twice. When one crisis follows another for Zuckerberg, characters wail: “The timing couldn’t be worse!”
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How long until AI hacks everything? • The Atlantic
Matteo Wong:
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“It’s a matter of months, or maybe a year, in which the task of securing the software foundation of civilization will have to be solved,” Stanislav Fort, a former Anthropic researcher who is now the chief scientist at the cybersecurity firm AISLE, told me. And AI is not only making cyberattacks more effective but also increasing the surface area worth hacking. Breaking into a website or executing a ransomware attack takes time, Fort said, so hackers have traditionally chosen large targets with sizable payoffs. But cheap, tireless hacking agents mean any organization or person might be worth targeting. At the same time, the cybersecurity professionals I spoke with were confident they could rise to the occasion. “If we step up our game in cybersecurity, as a field, we can definitely meet the challenge stemming from AI,” Fort said.
The cyberattacks on Minnesota water facilities this past summer offer a preview of things to come. Iran-linked hackers disrupted dozens of water utilities in Minnesota, many in small communities that might not have a dedicated cybersecurity person on staff. “We were fortunate that there was a very alert operator that said, ‘Hey, I saw a pump go offline,’” John Israel, Minnesota’s chief information-security officer, told me. The state received a report from the operator around 3 a.m., and within two hours began investigating and responding. The hackers targeted a weakness in industrial computers that had been announced by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency only days earlier.
…Although AI was not directly implicated in the Minnesota cyberattacks, Emily Zimmer, a spokesperson for Minnesota IT Services, told me, “we assume most adversaries use AI” to amplify their attacks. In other words, it’s hard to imagine a hacker not using the technology today.
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Open source LLMs will only make this more and more common; all that prevents them becoming widespread is the amount of computer power (especially RAM) needed.
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Are Disney adults the happiest debtors on earth? • The New Yorker
Amelia Tait:
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In 2023, Ashley, a freshman at Quinnipiac University, in Connecticut, had fifteen thousand dollars in her bank account. Excited by her newfound freedom as a college student, she decided to start going on solo trips. Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida—a place she had fallen in love with as a child, after visiting for the first time when she was four—seemed like an obvious choice. She went during her winter break. Then she returned, six times, in two years. “It’s just so magical,” she explained. “It keeps drawing me back.” Soon enough, her account balance had dwindled to just five dollars.
Last year, Ashley landed a job with the Disney College Program, a semester-long internship during which college students and recent graduates serve in entry-level roles throughout the parks. For around four hundred dollars a week (her salary, after Disney deducted rent for her company-sponsored housing), she worked as a PhotoPass photographer, taking pictures of guests as they enjoyed various attractions. One of the perks of being in the program was that she had free access to Disney World when she wasn’t on the clock, and so she’d often hang around in the park, spending liberally on food and merchandise. (She collects Disney pins.) As a result, she said, “a lot of my money went straight back to Disney.” She also spent more than what she was earning, accumulating roughly a thousand dollars in credit-card debt, which she had to ask her parents to help pay off.
So-called Disney adults have become a subject of online fascination, with many people now questioning how much it costs to be one. Almost two million people have watched a video, posted in November of 2025, in which a YouTuber asks Disney visitors how much debt they have. It’s a genre of content that has become more popular, recently, with critics seizing on it as evidence that the Disney-obsessed are not only culturally but financially bankrupt.
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Obsessions take many forms. Turns out visiting Disney is one of them.
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‘Jonathan’ is the oldest land animal on Earth. He could hold the secrets to defying death • 404 Media
Becky Ferreira:
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Jonathan the tortoise, the world’s oldest living land animal, is still chugging along at the ripe age of roughly 194. Now, scientists have discovered some of the secrets to Jonathan’s longevity by sequencing his genome for the first time, according to a study published Wednesday in Science Advances.
Jonathan, a Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea), hatched around 1832 in the Seychelles archipelago, and he was already in his twenties when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In his fifties, Jonathan was brought to the remote island of Saint Helena, along with three other tortoises, as a gift to the British colonial governor in the 1880s. He has lived there ever since.
Aldabra giant tortoises often become centenarians, but Jonathan is a major outlier even for his species as he approaches nearly 200 years on this planet. To better understand his extreme lifespan, researchers evaluated Jonathan’s genome based on swabs of his cheeks and compared it with the genomes of several other tortoises, including a 36-year-old named Tank.
The results revealed that Jonathan has “unique gene variants in most aging pathways” including DNA repair, insulin regulation, mitochondrial function, and “low entropy” methylation, reports the study.
“Aging is very complicated, and there’s all these different hallmarks,” said Stephen Clark, an aging researcher at the non-profit Kallel Foundation and an author of the study, in a call with 404 Media. “That’s why this Jonathan study is so interesting. We’re still just at the very beginning of trying to understand aging.”
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In the meantime, just move veeeeeeeery slowly until they have it all worked out.
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Weight-loss drugs show signs of slowing biological aging, say drugmakers • MIT Technology Review
Antonio Regalado:
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Popular weight-loss drugs may do more than help people shed pounds. They might also melt away the years.
Drug giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk say patients taking their drugs age less quickly, according to readouts from molecular “aging clocks.” Such clocks assess a person’s biological age by looking at changes to DNA that accumulate with time, or, in newer versions, by tracking levels of key proteins.
Both companies found that overweight or diabetic patients taking the drugs, called GLP-1s, had reduced biological age compared to those taking a placebo, although the difference varied widely, depending on which type of clock was used, and what organ was tested.
Overall, the difference was around “two to three years,” according to Nikolaj Roed, a global project leader at Novo, who says the company has been seeing “improved biological age in our patients across trials and across different tissues.”
The findings add to wide speculation among scientists that GLP-1 drugs, as they are known, are acting on basic causes of aging and might be a true longevity treatment.
“Two years is a pretty strong effect, in my book,” says Steve Horvath, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who’s credited with inventing aging clocks. Horvath says the emerging data could provide “evidence that these GLP-1 drugs are actually what is known as geroprotectors, medications that slow or possibly even reverse biologic aging.”
The companies shared their findings over the weekend during Aging Research & Drug Discovery, a conference devoted to seeking scientific remedies for old age. While that quest has not yet produced any clear-cut success, some scientists now think Novo’s drug semaglutide (sold under the names Ozempic and Wegovy) is coming close.
“In an unhealthy population, I do think it’s an anti-aging drug,” says Vadim Gladyshev, a Harvard biologist who assisted Novo with its molecular measurements. “But in a healthy population, no one knows.”
The drugs cause weight loss by stimulating a receptor, GLP-1, that tells your brain you’re not hungry. Yet real-world studies have shown much wider benefit. The drugs improve kidney function, reduce blood pressure, and even sharply cut the overall chance of death.
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Maybe we’ve just been underproducing GLP-1 for all these millennia?
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How Britain learned to love Chinese cars—especially a look-alike Range Rover • WSJ
Stephen Wilmot:
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When Mark Thewlis went looking for a new family car this summer, he was struck by how much cheaper the Jaecoo 7 was than luxury brands with a similar look and feel.
The 33-year-old from England’s south coast calculated the upfront cost of his preferred version of the Chinese sport-utility vehicle at the equivalent of around $50,000, half the price of a visually similar Range Rover model. Its resemblance to the 56-year-old British luxury brand has earned the Jaecoo a double-edged nickname: the Temu Range Rover.
“My first reaction was: What’s the catch?” he said. A test drive convinced him that buying the Jaecoo was a “no-brainer.”
No big industrialized economy has embraced Chinese cars more enthusiastically than the UK, where Brits like Thewlis are being won over by the combination of affordable prices with status-signaling styling and technology.
The Jaecoo 7, made by China’s Chery Automobile 9973 -5.39%decrease; down pointing triangle, was Britain’s bestselling vehicle in September, an important sales month in the UK. In the first half of 2026, almost every sixth car sold in Britain bore a Chinese brand, according to Schmidt Automotive Research, a higher proportion than in any other European country except Norway.
Britain’s vehicle imports from China have almost doubled this year compared with the same period in 2025. Only Russia and Brazil—developing economies that mostly buy cheaper models—have imported more. Cratering sales in China, the world’s largest car market, have encouraged its manufacturers to look for growth overseas.
The UK, a cradle of the car industry, showcases what could happen in America if Chinese cars were let in. “Range Over!” began a press release trumpeting the Jaecoo’s early sales success, winking at its likeness to the Range Rover Evoque.
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The Range Rover brand might be strong, but the actual quality of the cars has been terrible for years; an open (garage) door for the Chinese companies to drive through. The appearance of the new Range Rovers is also strange, as though they had melted a bit. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Changes coming to this site • Erdős Problems Blog
Thomas Bloom:
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I launched the site on 28th May 2023, with just over 200 problems; it has grown steadily since then. The biggest change came in August 2025 when I added a comment feature. The site now hosts 1221 problems, over 9000 comments, and almost 2000 registered users. The site typically receives between 10,000 and 25,000 unique visitors each day.
The first few months after introducing the comment feature saw a huge increase in activity, just as I had hoped. A vibrant community arose; people shared ideas on how to solve problems, made observations, gave corrections, and suggested missing references and solutions. Many papers were written and new collaborations formed.
Unfortunately, this level of activity has not been sustained. Some decline was inevitable: over time, many of the natural observations will have been made, mistakes corrected, and discussions between collaborators would move offline. This natural evolution has been dramatically sped up by the coincidental rise of AI and its ability to solve some problems with minimal human intervention.
The main way that people publicly interact with the site now is to advertise their AI-generated proofs, often without any attempt to explain them, but as a way to record a (increasingly meaningless) priority claim.
This is very different to what I imagined, and I don’t want to manage a website which does this.
I believe that websites with this function should exist — places where people can record AI-generated proofs, even if purely formal with no human understanding, to save others wasting their tokens generating the same proof, and so that other people can access and use them if they desire. There are now several candidates for such repositories, and if managed responsibly, they can serve a useful role in the mathematical ecosystem. I personally don’t want to manage one.
Just as one does not open a restaurant in an abattoir, it is important that there be a separation between such repositories and a site which aims to promote the actual questions, place them in an appropriate context, and give a useful overview of the current state of human understanding.
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(Erdös problems are mathematical puzzles set by the famous mathematician.)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? |
Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
