Archive: 2026-03

Mirage: The Illusion of Visual Understanding — "In the most extreme case, our model achieved the top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images." —models act as “super guessers” acting on context clues, and hidden structures in the benchmarks. (2026-03-29 · ai, mlp, vision )

China battery trio gain $70bn as Iran war sparks ‘paradigm shift’ — Not the way we hoped the climate transition would happen. (2026-03-27 · battery, climate-hope, mlp )

Suddenly, the US manufactures a ton of grid batteries | Canary Media — Up from roughly zero capacity in 2024, US now on track to has capacity for 96 GWh of grid spec battery cells by end of 2026. Huge transformation, dependent on IRA as not cost competitive with China. (2026-03-27 · IRA, US, battery, climate-hope, mlp )

Swamp Club — AI automations framework (2026-03-24 · ai, infra, mlp )

optimize_anything: A Universal API for Optimizing any Text Parameter - GEPA — "The key insight is that a surprisingly wide range of problems can be formulated as optimizing a text artifact". (2026-03-14 · ai, llm, mlp )

FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale - Engineering at Meta — "Meta executes ffmpeg and ffprobe binaries tens of billions of times a day" -- ffmpeg is one of the CLIs I've found that can still consistently break an AI's "brain". (2026-03-09 · facebook, ffmpeg, infrastructure, meta, mlp, video )

AI Didn't Break the Senior Engineer Pipeline. It Showed That One Never Existed. — “Most organizations have never had a model for developing software engineers. They had an environment that happened to produce growth, and they mistook the environment for a system.” (2026-03-09 · ai, engineering, leadership, mlp, software )

Integrated Capture and Conversion of Dilute CO2 Using an Oxygen Tolerant Porous Carbon Modified Gas Diffusion Electrode | ACS Energy Letters — Lab-scale demonstration of 3rd wave direct air carbon caption addresses key challenges with DAC: it doesn't waste energy on oxygen, operates at room temperature without the superheating step to release CO2, and produces a valuable output (formic acid) vs something that needs to be sequestered. (2026-03-08 · carbon, climate, climate-hope, co2, dac, mlp, paper, science ) (via fixthenews)

prime-radiant-inc/clearance: A Markdown viewer for macOS — A file browser for .md files from Jesse. (2026-03-06 · ai, jesse-vincent, markdown, mlp )

Knuth on Claude — "I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6" (2026-03-03 · ai, claude, knuth, mlp )