ai
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The Thinking Layer
Two years ago, a rumour about a breakthrough called Q* nearly toppled OpenAI's CEO. Today, the breakthrough is open-source and running on hardware you can buy. The question is no longer whether machines can reason. It is whether you own the machine that does your reasoning.
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The $70,000 Illusion
Mintlify says sandboxes for their AI assistant would cost $70,000 a year. The actual cost on self-hosted hardware is $1,368. The 51x gap between the headline and the math tells a story about how infrastructure decisions get made in AI.
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The Prompt You Thought Was Private
A class-action lawsuit filed April 1, 2026 alleges that Perplexity AI shares the full text of user prompts with Meta and Google via hidden tracking scripts – including prompts entered in Incognito mode. The privacy setting controls what Perplexity saves. It does not control what Meta and Google receive.
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The Machine That Learned to Click
A year ago, autonomous agents completed one in five desktop tasks. Today they match human performance on the benchmark that was supposed to be years away. The number is real. What it means is harder.
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The Confidence Engine
LLMs don't make developers smarter. They make developers feel smarter. A GitClear analysis of 211 million lines of code shows quality declining as AI adoption rises. A METR trial found experienced developers were 19 percent slower with AI tools, yet believed they were 20 percent faster. The confidence engine is running. The code is getting worse.
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The Bridge Protocol
Google's AI works with Google's tools because Google owns them both. Microsoft's AI works with Microsoft's tools for the same reason. For every other tool on earth, interoperability requires a protocol, not a platform. The protocol exists. The misconception that open-source licensing prevents using it does not survive contact with the actual license text.
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The Agent You Don't Own
GPT-5.4 scores 75 percent on computer-use benchmarks. It can browse, code, patch, and deploy. The question nobody is asking: who owns the loop?
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Screen Door on a Submarine
Incognito mode. VPN. Privacy settings. None of them stop tracking scripts from reading your AI prompts. TOR blocks the scripts. Self-hosted AI eliminates the scripts. One protects your identity. The other protects your thinking. You need both.
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Same Table, Both Sides
Kleiner Perkins invested $12 million in Google in 1999. John Doerr joined Google's board and remains on Alphabet's board today. In February 2019, Kleiner Perkins led Loom's Series A. In March 2019, Google killed the free screen-recording app that was Loom's entire product category. There is no law against this. That's the problem.
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Quality Assurance Died. Nobody Noticed.
Google dissolved its QA team. Facebook never had one. The industry followed. A decade later, AI agents write the code and the tests. The green check mark has never been less trustworthy, and nobody has the job title or the mandate to say so.
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Canada's AI Moat Is a Mirage
Canada invested $240 million of public money into Cohere as its first sovereign AI project. The data centre is in Ontario. It is built and operated by CoreWeave, a company headquartered in New Jersey. The U.S. CLOUD Act allows American law enforcement to compel data disclosure from U.S. companies regardless of where the servers sit. The sovereignty is geographic. The jurisdiction is American.
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Burnout by Design
A developer tool published by Y Combinator's president scores users on "founder signals," delivers tiered recruitment pitches, and documents its emotional targets in the source code. The tool is open-source. The manipulation is too.
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The Licence Nobody Teaches
The MIT licence is 170 words. It gives everything away. The AGPL protects everything. Most CS graduates have never heard of it.
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Finding Our Voice within AI
Beyond the hype: how constructionist pedagogy can keep students from becoming digital puppets in the age of generative AI.