Hungary is among the most drought-exposed countries in Europe and ranks 16th globally
https://apnews.com/article/hungary-drought-lakes-rivers-water-retention-1f28a070851933675e04b8417f85b452

Walmart is cautious with expectations after slowest sales growth in 6 years
https://apnews.com/article/walmart-quarter-earnings-inflation-tariffs-955945e03ffcc111389d62fa3103a051

Debbie says: Choose (your foods) wisely.

^{Read the last paragraph}
FDA tracking 18 active outbreaks | Food Safety News
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/08/fda-tracking-17-active-outbreaks/

Jalapeño Salmonella outbreak grows to 431 sick in 32 states; illnesses ran into August and the grower is still unnamed | Food Safety News
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/08/jalapeno-salmonella-outbreak-grows-to-431-sick-in-32-states-illnesses-ran-into-august-and-the-grower-is-still-unnamed/

CDC adds more than 3,000 more patients to count in Cyclospora outbreak linked to lettuce | Food Safety News
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/08/cdc-adds-more-than-3-000-more-patients-to-count-in-cyclospora-outbreak-linked-to-lettuce/

Alfalfa sprouts linked to food poisoning illnesses in these states - ABC News
https://abcnews.com/Business/wireStory/alfalfa-sprouts-linked-food-poisoning-illnesses-minnesota-wisconsin-135821184

Blueberry recall in 8 states upgraded to FDA's highest health risk level
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/nation-world/blueberry-recall-in-8-states-upgraded-to-most-dangerous-classification/507-13ecdd2b-9e5a-427c-b889-b6d394d180c4

Salmonella infections climb to 431 cases across multiple states: CDC
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/6041051-cdc-salmonella-jalapeno-outbreak/

OpenAI glitch locks out vetted cyber researchers – and some can't get back in
Affected users say support cannot restore their previous approval or override the new decision

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/20/openai-glitch-locks-out-vetted-cyber-researchers-and-some-cant-get-back-in/5290238

> bots reading web pages written by other bots

This could lead to the feared "model collapse" where there isn't actually more data going into the models, but rather the same data more times.

You can still see some of this with variants of this classic riddle: the standard version is: A boy and his father get into a car accident. The father dies, but the boy survives with grave injuries and is rushed to the hospital. When they arrive at the hospital, the surgeon says, "I can't operate on this patient. This is my son." How is this possible?

As we all know, the surgeon is the boy's mother.

If you alter it, though, even the current models struggle. I just tried this variation with Claude Sonnet 5:

QuoteA young boy who has been in a car accident is rushed to the emergency room. Upon seeing him, the surgeon says, "I can operate on this boy!" How is this possible?

This is a classic riddle that plays on assumptions — the surgeon is the boy's mother.

The riddle trips people up because many people unconsciously picture a surgeon as male, so the "twist" doesn't occur to them. It's often used to illustrate implicit bias in how we imagine certain professions.

(Other valid answers work too — the surgeon could be his other parent in a same-sex couple, for instance — but the classic version highlights the assumption that surgeons are men.)

Note, that in my version, there is no mention of a parent. There is no reason to assume that the surgeon is the mother. When the LLM considers "other valid answers" it considers the other parent in a same-sex couple but does not consider the father. But above all, it doesn't catch the basic idea that both parents are still alive. There is no "other" parent, there are just the two parents, neither of whom are part of the story.

In just slightly older models, even if you tell the LLM that the mother died and that the surgeon can't operate because he is the father and ask how is it possible, they would still answer that the surgeon was the mother.

Why? Because the original riddle has been posted thousands, maybe millions of times on the internet, no doubt many times by bots.

Since an LLM is just a probability machine, it recognizes the setup and the probabilities say that the surgeon is the mother.

Now there is some improvement. Now, unlike a year ago, if I explicitly say the mother died, Claude at least understands.

QuoteA young boy and his mother get in a car accident. The mother dies but the boy survives and is rushed to the emergency room. Upon seeing him, the surgeon says, "I can operate on this boy!" How is this possible?

Since the mother has died, the twist doesn't work the same way — but the answer is simpler than it seems: the surgeon is the boy's father. There's no real riddle left once the mother is removed from the picture.

People have done a lot of versions of this test and I stole the both versions from versions I've seen here or there.  The first version, I stole from Ethan Mollick who is responsible for the wave of people using variants of this riddle to torture LLMs
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/on-jagged-agi-o3-gemini-25-and-everything

Anyway, the point is that LLMs actually work a lot like very dumb people in this case. Among humans there is a well-documented phenomenon where hearing the same "fact" many times from the same source is almost as convincing to people as hearing it many times from different sources and much more convincing than hearing it once.

LLMs are like that, but they are also too dumb to know that if neither parent is present in the story, the pattern does not match the classic riddle they have read thousands of times.

For the first time, Waymo revealed key details about the heavy compute "brain" housed in the trunk of its robotaxis, including chip architecture, processor specs, and internal component details.

Waymo lifts the lid on the 'brain' powering its robotaxis | The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/982653/waymo-brain-computer-chip-robotaxi-hardware-suppliers

^{Welcome to my world, Yorkshire.
I have a couple of related stories about this.}

Frustrated GP patients hang up as Yorkshire accent baffles AI receptionist | GPs | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/aug/20/yorkshire-rotherham-ai-gp-receptionist-cannot-understand-accent

US: What happens when your hospital is also your insurance company? We're starting to see the effects
https://theconversation.com/what-happens-when-your-hospital-is-also-your-insurance-company-were-starting-to-see-the-effects-284637

Europe's new entry rules are confusing travelers. Here's why.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2026/08/19/traveleres-europe-2026-ees-etias/91340965007/

OpenAI falls further behind Anthropic, with disappointing revenue growth and mounting losses - SiliconANGLE
https://siliconangle.com/2026/08/18/openai-falls-further-behind-anthropic-with-disappointing-revenue-growth-and-mounting-losses/

Saw that and thought about posting... but decided I complain too much about the debt.

But we need to be real. It's not just runaway spending. It's also an unwillingness to do anything on the revenue side. Bush 41 raised taxes (hard for a Republican even then - "read my lips") and Clinton did a good job on the spending side (hard for a Democrat and much despised on the left for it), but we ran a surplus for the only time in my life.

Now it's unlimited spending and unlimited tax cuts and no willingness to even enforce the tax law we have and collect what's actually due under current law. Multiple estimates from the IRS and other auditors have put the unpaid tax bill at a trillion dollars.

And you know what they say. A trillion here, a trillion there and it starts to add up.

yesterday:
The long end of the curve is rising because investors correctly price the trajectory of U.S. debt and deficits. Instead of confronting the structural problem — runaway spending — the administration is trying to jawbone and then literally buy the price signal away. This is the opposite of laissez-faire. It is the referee becoming a player, subsidizing its own borrowing at the expense of savers and future taxpayers. The dollar's immediate decline shows markets see through the tactic: if the Treasury must intervene to keep yields down, the underlying fiscal picture is worse than advertised.

Bessent Buys the Long End — Treasury Debt Buybacks Signal Panic Over Yield Spike | Eulerpool
https://eulerpool.com/news/economics/bessent-buys-the-long-end-treasury-debt-buybacks-signal-panic-over-yield-spike

today:
Dow tumbles 700 points, S&P 500 falls as Treasury plan to subdue yields fails
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/19/stock-market-today-live-updates.html?link_source=ta_bluesky_link