activescott's Notes

Public notes from activescott

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

Monday, August 17, 2026

Gravis Robotics AG said today it has bagged $200 million in funding from SoftBank Group Corp. in what is the largest-ever Series A round for a construction robotics startup.

The startup was founded in 2022 after being spun out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, having developed intelligent, software-defined systems for heavy excavators. Its software transforms them into self-operating machinery that’s able to navigate busy construction sites and perform work autonomously, without human drivers.

Completely false. I like Gavin's takes, but whoever he heard this from is lying so that it fits the narrative some people so desperately want you to believe. The same people will try to convince you Anthropic has no moat, and a sentence later that it might become so powerful it could be the only company left. In fact, one of the things we are _most_ worried about is economic concentration of power. There is no world where the government should let any company have that much influence. We need competition and capitalism. darioamodei.com/essay/the-adol… The AI market is literally the most competetive market in the world right now - every single one of the largest companies on earth is singularly focused on getting you smarter, cheaper models. If it all works out, we'll succeed in reducing the cost of everything to the cost of energy. This is awesome, but it threatens a lot of people's old moats. They are frightened. For sure with AGI capitalism gets _super_ weird and what a company even is might look different. Good takes here: dwarkesh.com/p/ai-firm.

Sunday, August 16, 2026

The alarming milestone at Lake Powell, reached Saturday, comes about a week after the river’s other major reservoir, Lake Mead, also hit a historic low. Plummeting water levels pose a major threat to the Colorado River Basin, which is a key resource for wildlife, hydropower and more than 40 million people in seven U.S. states.

The reservoir is now about 30 feet (9.1 meters) away from the point at which turbines would stop producing hydroelectric power. Federal officials warned in April that a “major intervention” would be necessary to avoid reaching that threshold by the end of this year.

The crisis has been in the making for years. Both reservoirs are at the lowest they have been in nearly seven decades, and levels may continue to drop, USBR data shows.

The last time their combined storage was this small was in May 1957 when Glen Canyon Dam that holds back Powell was being built, according to a recent paper published by a group of academics and retired water officials. Powell began to fill in 1963.

JERUSALEM (AP) — An extremist Israeli lawmaker in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition publicly advocated for killing “30 to 40” people in Gaza each night, comments that surfaced Sunday and were quickly shared by Palestinian media.

Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir made the statement while speaking to a former Gaza-held hostage, Rom Braslavski, on Braslavski’s podcast. The two were discussing Israel’s recovery from the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, when Ben-Gvir criticized Israel’s recent drawdown of strikes in Gaza.

“It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”

JERUSALEM (AP) — An extremist Israeli lawmaker in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition publicly advocated for killing “30 to 40” people in Gaza each night, comments that surfaced Sunday and were quickly shared by Palestinian media.

Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir made the statement while speaking to a former Gaza-held hostage, Rom Braslavski, on Braslavski’s podcast. The two were discussing Israel’s recovery from the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, when Ben-Gvir criticized Israel’s recent drawdown of strikes in Gaza.

“It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”

Self-hosted, semantically-connected personal knowledge base

A personal knowledge base that turns markdown notes into a semantically-connected, AI-augmented knowledge graph.

Atomic stores knowledge as atoms — markdown notes that are automatically chunked, embedded, tagged, and linked by semantic similarity. Your atoms can be synthesized into wiki articles, explored on a spatial canvas, and queried through an agentic chat interface.

Saturday, August 15, 2026

We’re implementing watermarking to comply with the EU AI Act. Anthropic, along with several other major AI model providers and around 190 total signatories, signed the EU Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content in July 2026. This requires AI system providers to use methods of “marking” AI-generated text. We’re applying watermarking globally at launch because we don't yet have a durable way to scope it by region. However, we will continue to evaluate different approaches, and will share updates when we have them.

We will soon be offering a watermark detection API. We’re in the process of working out the details of its implementation.

When Claude produces a file of a supported type (such as a .png, .jpg, or .svg), it will attach a content credential in the form of a small, cryptographically signed note in the file’s metadata, saying that the file was made or processed with Claude. This is an open industry standard called C2PA—the same used by camera manufacturers and in photo-editing software to record where an image came from. Any C2PA-aware tool can read it; we’ll be providing our own where you can drop a file and check.

This metadata label is very different from a watermark. Nothing in the file changes—it is not embedded or hidden. As with text, the credential only says Claude was involved in producing the file; it doesn’t include any identifying information.

AI detection software uses a different method, because the companies that provide it don’t have our key. Among other things, those services look at aspects of the text like the subtle (and not-so-subtle) “tells” that often appear in AI’s phrasing. For example, AI models appear to be fond of the construction “this isn’t [X], it’s [Y]”, and use the word “quietly” a lot more than you might expect. Picking up on these patterns is fundamentally different from checking for a watermark.

No. A watermark only helps test whether Claude might have produced or processed the content. It doesn’t say anything about ownership or authorship, and doesn’t change a user’s rights under our terms. We only apply the watermark when Claude was involved in processing the content or file.

Intuitiveness for the implementation details:

A useful analogy is to imagine you’re playing a game like Monopoly. On each turn, each player moves a random number of spaces around the board according to the roll of a die. Suppose that, instead of rolling the die to get this randomness, we decided to use a book of the digits of pi.2 We start from a randomly-chosen digit (say, the 1,012,845th after the decimal place, which happens to be a 6), and from that point on each player simply uses the next digit in the sequence as their next “roll."

For all intents and purposes, the moves are still random: it makes no difference to the players—or to the outcome of the game—whether the randomness comes from pi or from dice rolls each time. But if we could see the sequence of all the moves after the game (and we knew the value of pi), we could work out whether this was a game that likely used pi to determine its moves. The game that used pi is, in a sense, “watermarked."

Friday, August 14, 2026

Thursday, August 13, 2026

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

The Washington Post first reported on Monday that the US thought there was a credible enough threat against Trump that he secretly swapped planes when he departed Turkey.

Missing from the Post report was where the intelligence about a plot against Trump came from. According to Middle East Eye and also a report from The Wall Street Journal, it came from Israel, which aligns with reports from the time.

Sources told MEE that the Israeli intelligence report warned that Iranian covert forces could target Air Force One at the airport in Ankara using shoulder-fired rockets, known as MANPADS, from just one kilometer away. Due to the alleged threat, the Secret Service moved the departure point from Ankara Airport to Esenboga Airport and wanted to switch from the new Air Force One to the old one.

“Of course, we took the report very seriously and tried to assist our American counterparts as much as possible,” a source, described as a person familiar with the matter, told MEE. “Yet it was very clear to us that there was no way this report was true.”

The report said Turkish officials believe that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu devised the plot to make it appear that Israel was protecting Trump, further derail diplomacy between the US and Iran, and also strain relations between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom the US president repeatedly praised during the summit. Israel has strongly opposed the idea of the US selling F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, something Trump has said he’s strongly considering.

The United States-backed initiative includes provisions for a phased Israeli withdrawal, the gradual disarmament of Hamas, a Palestinian-led civilian administration and steps towards humanitarian aid and reconstruction.

But on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel “rejected” the plan, saying its forces will not withdraw until Hamas is “genuinely disarmed”.

Since the October “ceasefire”, Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,258 people, bringing the overall number since the start of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023 to at least 73,386.

In a statement late on Sunday, Hamas said it remained committed to fully implementing the plan. It also urged mediating and guarantor countries to “assume their responsibilities” and prevent any “violations or breaches” that could obstruct the process.

The Gaza Government Media Office also blamed Netanyahu for what it described as a reversal of the negotiations and called for international pressure to prevent further escalation.

In a statement issued on Monday, the office said Netanyahu’s rejection of the 15-point document, along with demands including opposition to an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, represented “a clear and unequivocal reversal of the negotiation track”.

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Skill builder ride, nice quick after-work destination. It takes 1-2 hours to ride everything. This is a small system of trails that are tightly wound to make the most of a power utility company lot. There are now six trails: Crop Circles (only 1/2 can be ridden), The Tapeworm, Parasite, Mr. DNA, The Silkworm and BermSled. The CycoActive map is out of date and currently only lists a few of the trails, but it will get you started in the right direction. This is a trashy section of young deciduous trees, don't expect nice forest (this area is great night riding, just be cautious of low hanging branches).