Scientists have used star locations to pin down the exact date when Van Gogh painted The Starry Night. The question is, why? CC-licensed photo by Steven Zucker, Smarthistory co-founder on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Astronomical. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector • The Daily Spark
Torsten Slok is the chief economist at the investment company Apollo:
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Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. Revenue per worker is rising for the Mag[ic] 7 but is flat for the S&P 493, see the first chart [in the article]. Profit margins are rising for the Mag 7 but are flat for the S&P 493 (see the second chart [in the chart]). And there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth (see the third chart [in the article]).
With no impact on the bottom line, mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins.
VC-backed companies are spending more and more on tokens, but mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it. As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited, see the fourth and fifth charts below.
The question looking ahead is whether, even as models become commoditized, mainstream corporate America can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins. That may be harder than it sounds. AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. Judgment depends on context, and the answer varies with which human or which model you ask. Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins.
The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector.
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Of course, one could have made much the same argument about the internet in its early days. And, also, one could have made exactly the same argument about crypto in its early days. One yes, one no.
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Human receives AI-designed virus for the first time to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria • The Register
Brandon Vigliarolo:
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Researchers have administered AI-designed, bacteria-targeting viruses to a person in what they claim is a first, but don’t press them for results: They’re not ready to say how it went quite yet.
Radical Numerics, a San Francisco-based AI lab developing AI models for bioscience, announced the treatment this week, claiming it marks the first time a cocktail containing AI-designed bacteriophages has been administered to a human patient under a compassionate-use arrangement.
These aren’t just any viruses, mind you: Omnii-1, the AI model publicly unveiled by Radical Numerics this week, was used to design viable bacteriophages, a type of virus that specifically infects bacteria.
Therapeutic use of phages isn’t novel in and of itself, with the bacteria-targeting viruses being sought as an alternative to combat the rise of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria that are increasingly rendering antibiotics ineffective.
Phages have a number of potential advantages over antibiotics, most notably their ability to target specific bacterial strains – a big plus when it comes to sparing beneficial gut bacteria that can be affected by broad-spectrum antibiotics.
AI has already shown promise in speeding up phage engineering, as we reported last year when a group of researchers from Stanford University and the Arc Institute created AI-designed phages that targeted E. coli bacteria. The phages, designed using the genetic sequence of a well-studied natural E. coli phage, included several variants that outperformed their biological predecessor in laboratory tests.
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These always feel like the opening credits for a dystopian zombie flick.
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Page Not Found • Apple Music
To celebrate the iPod being 25 years old, Apple added this to its 404 page for Apple Music.
The songs are only 30-second clips; that’s Apple avoiding paying the full price of the song. 30-second clips are effectively free.
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Meta Muse exposes users’ personal and business secrets when they share conversations • Ars Technica
Dan Goodin:
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Muse, the new general-purpose AI agent from Meta, can expose sensitive information when users share conversations through web links, researchers reported last week. In response to questions from Ars about the behavior, Meta said it’s suspending the sharing feature while the company reviews it and considers making changes.
Like many online services, Muse has allowed users to share searches, conversations, images, and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that can’t be easily guessed.
Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was “built from the ground up for privacy and security,” seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available, including:
• a candidate’s notes preparing for a confidential executive-search call with a frontier AI lab, naming the lab’s internal contact and the meeting time
• a national marketing company’s internal revenue review, marked for its CEO
• a small-business owner’s loan application, with the amount requested
• a to-do list that included a bank fraud alert, with a partial account number and a transaction amount and time
• a real-estate investor’s internal performance report, with two property addresses and exact return, income, and mortgage figures
• a workplace’s full-year staff vacation calendar, listing dozens of employees against the week each one would be away«
When building something like that you’d probably think that the URLs would be impossible to guess. Turns out people are very good at guessing stuff – or working it out – online. Embarrassing for Meta, certainly.
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JetBlue creditors hire bankruptcy advisers as debt concerns grow • Yahoo Finance
Kirk O’Neil:
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European airlines, including Spain’s Volotea, Swiss charter airline Air Mountain, Latvian carrier AirBaltic, and Romanian airlines AnimaWings and Dan Air sought bankruptcy protection in their home countries in 2026, TheStreet’s Veronika Bondarenko reported.
In the US, after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice in 2024 and 2025, Dania Beach, Fla.-based Spirit Airlines failed to complete a merger and could not find financing or an investor to keep its doors open. The airline ceased operations permanently in May 2026.
And now JetBlue Airways’ creditors are taking a closer look at the company’s debt obligations with help from financial restructuring professionals.
…JetBlue’s fuel cost has risen by 76.3% year-over-year, from $2.40 per gallon in the second quarter of 2025 to $4.23 per gallon in the second quarter of 2026, according to the quarterly report.
The airline’s quarterly revenue increased year-over-year by 14.5% to about $2.7bn compared to about $2.35bn in the same period of 2025, but JetBlue reported a $247m loss in the second quarter of 2026, compared to $74 million in the same period of 2025.
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And meanwhile Spirit Airlines completely closed down in May. Airlines have often skittered along the edge of profitability; we’re starting to see first-order effects from the Iran War now.
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Astronomers unlock a mystery hidden in van Gogh’s The Starry Night • Scientific American
Emma Gometz:
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Researchers say they’ve identified the constellation depicted in Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night—and that the discovery changes what historians have assumed about the timing of the artwork’s creation.
The painting, now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, is said to date back to mid-June 1889, when van Gogh was in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France. But astronomers seeking to use the painting’s stars to pin down the exact time and place it was created have reached conflicting conclusions.
In a paper published on October 22 in Scientific Reports, researchers identified the stars in The Starry Night as those of the V-shaped Hyades cluster within the Taurus constellation, as observed on July 22, 1889.
“To my eyes, the star cluster in The Starry Night was the Hyades in Taurus. But earlier studies explained it as Aries,” says space researcher Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, who is first author of the paper. “At that moment, I was sure this painting was worth studying.”
To find the constellation in The Starry Night, the researchers used a software program called Procrustes, which looked for patterns based on the shape formed by the relative positions of a group of stars rather than likely artistic embellishments such as size or color. This “shape analysis” technique matched five stars in the painting with five stars in the Hyades cluster, which had the strongest statistical fit out of any of the alternative constellations tested, including Aries, which had previously been proposed to be the constellation in the center of the painting. The researchers also tested this method on a van Gogh painting with a known constellation in it, the Big Dipper in Starry Night over the Rhône, and found its match had a comparably strong result to that of The Starry Night and Hyades.
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One always has to admire the scientists who are so determined to find out details like this which are, let’s face it, unimportant. The painting isn’t a celestial map. It’s an impression by a man of what he felt like looking at the night sky.
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Triple-A Minesweeper
Mike Lacher reimagined Minesweeper as a Triple-A video game – with the intro screens, voices, extra intrusive graphics. It’s hilarious and everything you wouldn’t hope for. Gotta sweep these mines!
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The Pentagon is quietly building an elite new tech sabotage agency • POLITICO
John Sakellariadis, Jack Detsch and Paul Mcleary:
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The Pentagon has spent months quietly building an elite new tech agency to help covertly disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs considered threats to American military superiority.
Neither Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor any other senior Pentagon official has publicly mentioned the agency since it was established this April — a conspicuous omission for a department that has reveled in announcing other major changes aimed at modernizing the military or adopting hard-nosed new policies against foreign adversaries.
Information on the Technology Support Office, or TSO as it is called internally, is nearly impossible to find on Pentagon websites, and the agency is mentioned by name only in several previously unreported Defense Department historical records and memoranda.While the specifics of its work are highly classified, POLITICO spoke with 12 current and former US national security officials with varying degrees of knowledge about TSO to understand how the agency came to be, the broad contours of its mission and why its operations are shrouded in secrecy.
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Pete Hegseth probably thinks they’re all dweebs and nerds, sitting there looking at screens. They don’t even do pull-ups!
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Copyright and the vibe-coded Adobe clones • Plagiarism Today
Jonathan Bailey:
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Adobe (and Microsoft/Autodesk) are not likely to be thrilled to see open‑source alternatives to their products distributed for free. What legal alternatives could they pursue to nip the Artcraft apps in the bud?
The answer is surprisingly complex and could, in theory, become a test case for “clean room” AI programming. That said, the bigger potential issues may have nothing to do with copyright at all.
To understand the potential legal issues, we first need to understand what Thomas did and what the Artcraft apps are. Using Claude Opus 5.5, Thomas generated a series of apps that are designed to clone the functionality of the original software.
All of the Artcraft applications were written in Rust, a relatively new programming language that is designed for speed and security. Adobe and Microsoft both primarily write their applications in C++, a more mature language that has been around for over 40 years.
What this means is that, while the Artcraft apps likely reverse‑engineered elements (such as file formats), it is highly unlikely that they share any code with the original applications. This is bolstered by the fact that Adobe has never released its source code, and neither Thomas nor Claude Opus had access to it.
From a purely copyright perspective, the Artcraft apps are likely on decent footing. Copyright protects software code, not functionality. Copying some code to ensure interoperability with the original software is not a copyright infringement, as per the Google v. Oracle ruling. So even if elements of the file formats were reverse‑engineered and copied, that wouldn’t likely amount to a copyright infringement.
As long as everything said about these apps is true, the Artcraft apps should be able to defeat traditional copyright infringement claims. However, that is not the major legal issue for these apps, and even if Thomas is able to win such a case, that doesn’t mean he can fight it.
…since this fight started over an Adobe cancellation fee, it is likely that he did sign Adobe’s terms of service [which prohibit studying the inputs and outputs to recreate the system].
There are also potential patent issues. Adobe holds thousands of patents, and it is unclear which, if any, could be wielded against the Artcraft apps.
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(Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The man who saved the internet • The Atlantic
Charlie Warzel:
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Once the [PHP] patch was released [on Wednesday], websites everywhere went offline to implement the fix. These included government websites in Germany and Finland, some hospital and school websites in Europe, and international sites such as 4chan. During this race to secure the majority of the internet, I noticed one name pop up in posts on Reddit and X: Ondřej Surý.
“Explaining to my wife how there’s this one guy. And he alone is responsible for most of the world’s distribution of PHP,” a software developer named Ian Landsman wrote on X. “And if anything happens to this guy, that’s just it. Everyone is screwed.” He was referring to Surý.
Surý, who lives in Czechia, does not work for the PHP Foundation. But alongside his day job as director of domain-name-system engineering at the nonprofit Internet Systems Consortium, in a volunteer capacity, he maintains and helps automate patches for the coding language. His work, with that of just a handful of others, has allowed countless websites and organizations to fix these vulnerabilities quickly. Over the past 48 hours, he’s become arguably the unsung hero of the entire internet—despite the fact that the only compensation he receives is from modest donations. “Ondřej will save the internet today,” a user in the PHP Subreddit wrote.
I spoke with Surý today from his home about the unfolding AI-cybersecurity crisis, how the internet’s infrastructure is maintained by small crews of volunteers such as himself, and how it feels to go to bed after saving the web as we know it.
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The nut of the interview:
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even without me, people would still be able to get PHP from other sources and compile it themselves. But it would be more complicated for everyone. And some people don’t immediately have the skill to upgrade the PHP. What the PHP project did was release the source code for the language. What I am doing is preparing it into these things called packages that people can install on their servers. It’s very convenient, and it’s faster, and you can automate it and can install the same package over hundreds and thousands of servers, and you don’t have to compile it. If I was not available, it would take more time; some of them wouldn’t have the skills.
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(Gift link.)
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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
