Ant Ling introduces Ling-3.2-flash: 560B/25B native multimodal MoE with 1M context [N]
![Ant Ling introduces Ling-3.2-flash: 560B/25B native multimodal MoE with 1M context [N]](https://preview.redd.it/w1848clxk40i1.jpeg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=83f3c4ff3352971e08d608ef0a32750c4ab588ea "Ant Ling introduces Ling-3.2-flash: 560B/25B native multimodal MoE with 1M context [N]") | Ant Ling has released Ling-3.2-flash, a native multimodal MoE with 560B total parameters, 25B activated parameters and a maximum 1M-token context window. The official documentation specifies text, image and video inputs. The release evaluation reports: MathVision(w/CI): 96.80 Humanity's Last Exam-MM: 30.12 ZEROBench / ZEROBench(Sub): 18.00 / 43.71 BabyVision: 69.85 OmniDocBench 1.5: 92.21 CharXiv_RQ: 85.15 GDP.pdf: 22.25 MedXpertQA-MM: 79.93 Vision2Web: 85.86 AndroidWorld: 85.63 BlenderBench: 67.77 AntBench-Medical is reported separately as 89.52% comprehensiveness and 99.22% correctness. HLE-MM uses the multimodal subset; full ZEROBench and its Sub result are separate entries. The chart identifies API-collected comparison results under the official evaluation settings. The release materials also demonstrate PDF-to-code implementation, GUI operation, 3D reconstruction workflows and multi-agent collaboration. Both OpenAl-compatible and Anthropic-compatible API access are documented. [link] [comments] |
‘Fast fires’ were just 2.7% of U.S. wildfires but destroyed 78% of the structures lost — and up to 449,000 could be lost by 2060
As temperatures rise and development expands, the number of homes and other structures damaged or destroyed by wildfires across the U.S. is on pace to triple by mid-century, my colleagues and I found in a study just published.
The 2026 wildfire season has been a sharp reminder of that risk and why making homes and properties less vulnerable to wildfires is increasingly crucial. Fortunately, strategies to lower the risk of losing a home to wildfire don’t have to be overly expensive.
The 2026 western fire season
The 2026 wildfire season began with historically low mountain snowpack, early snowmelt and exceptional warmth across much of the West. Even before the nation’s hottest summer on record intensified drought and dried vegetation, fires were breaking out.
Colorado’s Aspen Acres Fire destroyed hundreds of structures in June. Four firefighters died from injuries suffered when the fast-moving Knowles Fire overtook them near the Colorado–Utah border in July. In August, wind-driven fires swept into neighborhoods in Spokane, Washington, damaging more than 800 homes and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate.
In Colorado, the summer monsoon season brought rainfall, helping firefighters gain ground. Across the Rocky Mountain region, lightning continued to start fires, but rain helped keep many fires small in many areas despite above-average temperatures.
Despite this reprieve, Colorado fires had burned more than 318,000 acres by late October, nearly twice the annual average since 2000. Nationally, the total area burned was also well above average. The U.S. spent 48 consecutive days at Preparedness Level 5 – the highest level, indicating that firefighting resources were stretched nationally – compared with a 10-year average of 25 days annually.
Reasons for rising fire risk
Fire is a natural and often beneficial part of many ecosystems, shaping vegetation and supporting biodiversity. However, a century of fire suppression has allowed dry vegetation to accumulate in forests that historically had frequently burned.
Rising temperatures caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels have increased the rate at which the atmosphere pulls moisture from the land, drying soils and vegetation. Researchers estimate that this drying nearly doubled the area burned in western U.S. forests between 1984 and 2015 compared with what would have burned without human-caused climate change.
More people also now live in and at the edges of wildland areas, raising the risk of fires reaching neighborhoods. Human activity has extended the fire season beyond summer, when most lightning-caused fires occur, too. Power lines, vehicles, machinery, burning of debris and campfires can spark fires year-round.
These interacting factors have helped nearly quadruple the annual area burned in the western United States since 2000.
They also contribute to the growing threat of fast-growing fires, which can overwhelm emergency response.
In a 2024 study, my colleagues and I used satellite imagery to measure daily fire growth across the contiguous United States from 2001 to 2020. “Fast fires,” defined as those that burned more than 4,000 acres in a single day, represented just 2.7% of fires analyzed but accounted for 78% of documented structures destroyed and 61% of reported firefighting costs.
A brief burst of growth, often fueled by strong winds or highly flammable materials, can matter enormously, even if a fire’s eventual size is relatively small. And in many ecosystems, fires are getting faster.
More homes in harm’s way
The number of people and buildings in harm’s way has also been increasing in the U.S., raising the risk of damage.
Between 1945 and 2015, development in regions of the country with the highest wildfire risk expanded tenfold, increasing the amount of human exposure to wildfires while also introducing ignition sources and buildings that can burn. Once embers enter a neighborhood, fire can spread quickly from building to building.
My team’s new research suggests that without further action to reduce wildfire risk, the annual number of structures damaged or destroyed nationwide could nearly triple by mid-century. That would mean up to 449,000 structures lost between 2026 and 2060.
We used historical data about development patterns, wildfire area and the fires’ effects to reconstruct the past fire risk, then modeled future fire risk by incorporating weather, climate and housing-density expectations.
We found that roughly one-third of western neighborhoods facing the greatest future risk are low-income communities. In these communities, people may struggle to afford measures to protect their homes, maintain insurance coverage and recover financially after a fire.
How to lower your wildfire risk
These projections are sobering, but actual losses will depend partly on the choices people make now.
For example, homes can be made less likely to ignite with Class A fire-resistant roofs and ember-resistant vents that reduce the potential
The battle for megawatts: why restricting data centers is a strategic mistake
In Ireland, data centers consume nearly a quarter of the country’s electricity. New grid connections around Dublin were effectively frozen for three years. Under revised rules, new projects must provide generation or storage capacity onsite or nearby. Amsterdam previously imposed a moratorium on new facilities, while Frankfurt regulates their location through zoning.
In July 2026, New York State introduced a moratorium of up to one year on certain environmental permits for new large data centers. State officials said the pause would allow them to assess the facilities’ impact on the power grid and the environment. As of May 2026, data center projects representing nearly 12 GW of potential demand were in the state’s grid interconnection queue.
Should governments restrict data centers when power grids cannot keep pace? I believe they should expand power supply and grid capacity instead.
As co-founder and general partner of Roosh Investment Group, I have been investing in technology companies for over five years. Our portfolio includes AI infrastructure, and energy is now a key focus. This experience has shown me how access to energy infrastructure influences investment decisions. Reliable power is increasingly becoming a decisive factor in a company’s ability to scale and attract capital.
As businesses rely more on AI, control over its models and infrastructure matters more. A foreign provider’s decision to change terms, raise prices, or restrict access could affect entire industries. Domestic computing capacity gives countries more control over the infrastructure their businesses depend on.
Control over AI is becoming a source of economic power
This helps explain the intensity of U.S.–China competition in AI. American companies hold leading positions across the AI stack, from advanced models and chips to major cloud platforms. Washington views the power supply for data center infrastructure as a national security issue.
Beijing is pursuing a state-led strategy. Its “Eastern Data, Western Computing” program directs the development of computing capacity toward western China, where energy and land resources are more readily available. At the same time, the country is expanding power generation at scale. According to the International Energy Agency, China added nearly 500 GW of renewable capacity in 2025—more than 60% of the global increase.
Europe, meanwhile, risks falling further behind. Brussels plans up to seven AI gigafactories and at least a tripling of EU data center capacity within five to seven years. Yet some countries are slowing construction, while European businesses still rely primarily on American cloud providers. Restrictions do not remove demand for AI; they risk pushing investment abroad and reinforcing that dependence.
The bottleneck is local
Data centers’ hunger for power should be understood in the context of wider electricity demand. According to the International Energy Agency, they accounted for only around 70 TWh of the 800 TWh increase in global electricity consumption in 2025. Industry, air conditioning, heat pumps, and electric vehicles contributed far more.
The challenge is rapidly growing demand concentrated in a handful of locations. Power must reach new computing capacity in time.
What is holding up connections?
In the U.S., lead times for large transformers now exceed two years, compared with roughly 50 weeks before the pandemic. Morgan Stanley estimates that U.S. data centers could face a power shortfall of around 49 GW by 2028. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has acknowledged that power has become the company’s binding constraint. Some of its GPUs are sitting in inventory with nowhere to plug them in.
Dedicated gas-fired plants offer no quick fix. GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, and Mitsubishi Power produce around two-thirds of the world’s gas turbines, and their factories are booked years ahead. GE Vernova reported 116 GW in gas power equipment orders and slot reservations, while targeting annual turbine output of 20 GW in the third quarter of 2026.
The hardware itself adds another challenge. A server rack once required 7–12 kW. Systems built around NVIDIA’s GB200 consume 120–132 kW per rack. Conventional air cooling is no longer sufficient at that power density, so new facilities must be designed for liquid cooling from the outset.
Tech giants are securing power themselves. Microsoft agreed to buy electricity from the 835 MW Three Mile Island reactor, which is being restarted to serve its needs. Google’s agreement with Kairos Power calls for small modular reactors, with the first expected online by 2030.
Governments cannot rely on corporate initiative alone. They must plan energy and digital infrastructure together: expand grids, accelerate transformer production, streamline connections, and encourage long-term power purchase agreements, generation near data centers, and storage.
How war accelerated distributed generation in Ukraine
Ukraine’s experience sho
Starter homes cost $1 million in a record 242 U.S. cities—proof the affordability crisis has hit the homes meant for first-time buyers
They waited out the pandemic boom. They saved longer, rented longer, delayed longer, and watched the typical first-time homebuyer age climb to a record 40. Now, the buyers who did everything right are running into a new problem: The Northeast just became the fastest-growing region for million-dollar starter homes in the country.
It’s especially imperfectly timed for millennials entering their peak household spending years and beginning to form their own families (or at least try to).
A Zillow report published in June counts a record 242 U.S. cities where starter homes cost $1 million or more—triple the 80 cities that cleared that mark before the pandemic, and up from 226 a year ago.
The share of first-time buyers has fallen to half the historical norm. For millennial parents in the Northeast—now in their late thirties and early forties, often with kids, hunting for more space—the numbers have a specific shape.
New Jersey had just one million-dollar starter city before the pandemic. Now it has 26. New York used to have 12; now it has 41. The two states added 15 cities to the list in the past year alone—faster growth than anywhere else in the country. The New York City metro area now leads all with 63 cities where a starter home runs $1 million or more.
That growth didn’t happen in a vacuum. Six of the 10 most competitive housing markets in the country are in the Northeast, per Zillow’s 2026 analysis, a region where new construction has chronically lagged and inventory deficits run deepest. California still leads the raw count with 105 cities, but the Northeast is where the crisis is actively spreading.
“A housing shortage a decade in the making ran headlong into intense demand with mortgage rates at historic lows, driving up home values at a record pace,” Zillow senior economist Kara Ng wrote. For Northeast buyers, those forces have compounded.
The new typical first-time homebuyer is 40
First-time homebuyers are historically younger, although the typical age of first-time buyers climbed to an all-time high of 40, according to a National Association of Realtors report released in November 2025. In fact, the housing market has gotten so unaffordable that the number of first-time homebuyers fell to half the historical norm last July.
A rising price floor on starter homes only pushes that first home purchase further out of reach. And it’s a problem that’s worsened, especially during the past couple of years.
“For homebuyers, the prevalence of million-dollar cities significantly—greatly—strains what is already the worst housing affordability since at least the 1980s,” Christopher M. Naghibi, executive vice president and chief operating officer at First Foundation Bank, told Fortune in 2024 when Zillow released a report about the number of U.S. cities with $1 million median-priced homes. “Prospective buyers in these markets face higher barriers to entry, needing ridiculously large down payments and higher incomes to afford homes.” That still holds true today.
Zillow defines a starter home as one in the lowest third of home values in a given region. As of June, the typical starter home nationwide was worth $198,649, up 1.7% from a year earlier. But in well over 200 U.S. cities, starter home prices are a whopping five times as high as that. It’s a phenomenon that keeps spreading, and into places it never used to touch.
Zillow chalks it up to the effects of the pandemic housing boom.
It’s not just a California problem anymore
Before 2020, the list of cities with $1 million starter homes was almost all coastal. Colorado was the only non-coastal state with a million-dollar starter-home city. Now 26 states have at least one, up from nine before the pandemic. Texas, Wyoming, and Illinois each have multiple examples.
California still leads with 105 cities, but the fastest growth is in the Northeast. New York and New Jersey added 15 cities combined over the past year. New York is now up to 41, from just 12 before the pandemic. New Jersey is at 26, up from one.
The New York City metro area tops all metros with 63 cities where a starter home runs $1 million or more. San Francisco follows with 37, then Los Angeles with 33, San Jose with 13, and Miami and Seattle with eight each. The trend aligns with Zillow’s 2026 hottest markets analysis, which found six of the 10 most competitive housing markets are in the Northeast, where new construction has lagged and inventory deficits run deep.
The pandemic reset the cost of buying a home. A housing shortage a decade in the making collided with surging demand and historically low mortgage rates, pushing values up at a record pace. Those effects have stuck.
Baby boomers edge younger buyers out of the housing market
The squeeze on millennials and Gen Z has been building for years. Baby boomers, sitting on paid-off homes or cheap pandemic-era mortgages, have edged younger buyers out of the market in record numbers. The cost has pushed some Americans to delay milestones like marriage and kids, and others to co-buy homes with friends or partners just to split the bill.
Others have done the opposite—had kids first, rented longer, and are now hunting for space in a market that moved against them.
“We’re seeing a reshaping of the housing ladder,” Alexandra Gupta, a real-estate broker with the Corcoran Group, previously told Fortune. “Some first-time buyers are turning to long-term renting or even co-living models because the idea of owning a home has become so out of reach.”
There are modest signs of relief. Conditions are slowly turning friendlier for buyers. Zillow found the typical buyer now breaks even versus renting after about six years, down from more than eight in late 2023. More inventory and slower price growth mean buyers who are financially prepared are in better shape than they had
Billionaire Brian Chesky’s social-worker parents told him to pick a high-paying career. He went to art school—and started Airbnb with 3 air beds
Before Airbnb had over 9 million listings worldwide, there was one sole lodging: three inflatable air beds at CEO Brian Chesky’s San Francisco home. He had quit his job and packed up all his belongings in a Honda Civic to make a cross-country move, and couldn’t pay his rent. That’s when he noticed all the local hotels were booked because of the Industrial Designers Society of America’s International Design Conference in San Francisco, and a business was born.
“We called it the air-bed-and-breakfast,” he told Fortune in 2017 at a World’s Greatest Leaders event.
Chesky and Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia were hooked on the idea of making money and meeting new friends through their makeshift accommodations, so they opened their home to three guests: “What if you could book someone’s home the way you could book a hotel anywhere in the world?” Chesky said about their inspiration. They launched Airbnb with Gebbia’s former roommate Nathan Blecharczyk in 2008.
Chesky’s social-worker parents in upstate New York (he was born in Albany) told him to pursue a high-paying career, but much to their chagrin he went to art school instead, at the famous Rhode Island School of Design.
“I’m going to become an artist,” Chesky recalls telling his mom, to which she responded: “You somehow managed to pick the only job in the world that pays less than a social worker. You’ll get paid nothing.”
Today, Chesky doesn’t have to worry as much.
Airbnb has a market capitalization of $112 billion, above its level from before the pandemic, which threatened its very survival as a business. The company lost 80% of its business in the first months of the pandemic, and Chesky reorganized it in a scramble for survival.
How was Chesky’s business ethos shaped by his creative background?
Though Chesky’s creativity is what birthed (and saved) Airbnb, it also meant business veterans did not initially take him seriously.
Chesky’s design background was at first a hindrance to a budding Airbnb. While looking for $150,000 to fund an estimated 10% of the company, Chesky met with over 20 potential investors, all of whom turned him down.
“Joe and I were designers, and as far as they were concerned, designers didn’t start companies,” Chesky said. “We didn’t look like a tech founder, which is ridiculous because I don’t think you should ever hire somebody because they look like something else. You want a new thing.”
Investors didn’t take an interest in Airbnb until it began designing presidential-candidate-themed cereal boxes, which eventually got the attention of Paul Graham, founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator.
“Creative companies are companies that tap into a sense of imagination,” Chesky told Time. “That they might come up with new breakthrough ideas, that people that were only beholden to near-term measurable outcomes won’t ever have.”
How has Airbnb navigated challenges?
Success at Airbnb has been a double-edged sword. Explosive growth has forced the company to refocus at times.
During the pandemic, Chesky told Fortune in 2023, he even opened his own home as an Airbnb to better understand the host experience and lived in various Airbnbs across the country for six months, where he discovered inconsistent and unnecessary practices across hosts, including complicated rent agreements.
Airbnb still faces challenges as waves of short-term rental regulations in New York and across Europe, where cities are implementing phase-outs, prohibiting rentals for less than 30 days, or no longer renewing tourist apartment licenses, for example. In the U.S., housing advocates have fought against Airbnb, according
Florida’s new property tax cuts could defund the police, fire fighters and EMS in small towns, threatening ‘rural dark ages,’ former GOP lawmaker says
The blue tsunami that swept across the country on election day petered out in Florida, where voters continued to elected Republicans to statewide offices and approved a massive cut to their property tax bills.
Amendment 3 expands the so-called homestead exemption, shielding more of a home’s assessed value from taxation. It will nearly triple from $51,400 currently to $150,000 in 2027 and increase again to $250,000 in 2028.
It also lowers the cap on annual assessments on rental and commercial properties from a 10% hike to 5%. The amendment doesn’t apply to school-related property taxes but creates a path for abolishing non-school property taxes completely.
State economists have projected that local governments will lose nearly $5 billion in the first year and nearly $12 billion a year once the exemption is fully phased in.
But while Amendment 3 requires remaining tax revenue go toward public safety and other local services, it doesn’t mandate that police, fire and emergency medical services be funded first or that they receive a minimum level of funding.
Proponents argued that lowering property tax bills would provide relief as higher inflation worsens the cost of living. But sheriffs, police chiefs, fire chiefs and local government officials came out against the plan as they face a steep hit to their budgets.
To be sure, local governments can raise revenue in other ways, such sales taxes and fees. But they can crash in bad economic times and are unlikely to completely offset losses from Amendment 3.
“In the end, though, essential services would still almost certainly be affected,” University of Tampa economists Abigail Hall and Aaron Wood wrote in the Conversation. “Funding for police, fire and emergency medical services is primarily the responsibility of local governments, and, for most counties, they make up the largest line item in their annual expenditures. Reducing property taxes would amount to a direct hit, especially in smaller, less-populated counties.”
Leading up to election day, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri estimated the county’s general fund could lose about $180 million in the first year after the measure passes, adding that the sheriff’s office accounts for half of the county’s spending, which mostly covers personnel costs.
That means the county could have fewer deputies available to respond to calls, with community policing programs, marine patrols and K-9 units also facing cuts, he warned. In addition, the county’s emergency medical services fund could suffer a $20 million reduction.
“I think there’s no doubt — zero — that there has to be position cuts,” Gualtieri told WLRN last month.
Outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who backed Amendment 3, has dismissed such warnings as “fearmongering” and suggested state grants could offset any budget shortfalls to local agencies. Florida Realtors, another backer, insisted the measure could be implemented without compromising the essential services.
Still, some details are lacking, and a special session of the legislature could be called to spell out exactly how the amendment will work.
Jeff Brandes, a former Republican state senator and president of the Florida Policy Project, wrote in an op-ed for Florida Politics on Friday that grants can’t fill recurring revenue shortfalls.
And unlike big cities like Miami, which can hike hotel taxes and lean on other tourism-related sources, small inland towns have fewer options to generate tax revenue.
He pointed to research from the Florida League of Cities, which found that at least 90% of homestead values will no longer be taxable in 108 of Florida’s 411 cities. And in 33 counties, at least seven in 10 homesteads fall below the $250,000 exemption limit.
“The amendment itself sends no reimbursement to fiscally constrained counties, the poorest and most rural places with the least room to absorb a loss, and nothing in the amendment guarantees that police and fire will be protected,” Brandes said.
“That is how rural Florida slides into rural dark ages: slower emergency response, crumbling roads, shorter library hours, shuttered recreation programs. Fewer services discourage investment. Less investment thins the tax base. A thinner tax base means fewer services. The dark ages won’t arrive all at once. They’ll arrive one closed fire station at a time.”
Because fire departments could see drastic cuts, Florida homeowners may end up paying higher insurance bills, offsetting savings from property taxes.
Insurance Services Office, a private insurance-data company, evaluates local fire protection and assigns ratings that insurers can use in underwriting.
“A reduction in fire protection services in a community can lead to a lower ISO rating,” a spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute told Bloomberg. “The ISO rating is among numerous risk factors property insurers use to underwrite homes in Florida and could potentially cause premiums to increase if the rating is downgraded.”
Amendment 3’s effects could extend to the state’s broader economy as well. In a pre-election analysis from the Tax Foundation, the think tank described the measure as not just a tax cut, but a fundamental restructuring of local government finance.
Since Florida doesn’t a state income tax, property taxes are a reliable source of revenue, even in economic downturns, and they reduce need for higher taxes on labor, entrepreneurship, capital formation, and consumer spending, it said.
“The elimination of a substantial portion of the property tax base does not eliminate the cost of local government services,” the Tax Foundation pointed out. “Amendment 3 would create highly distortive tax shifts, change who pays, and change how those costs are distributed. The result would be economically harmful both to Florida communities and the state overall.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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The Logic of Disgust
Content Warning: Contains graphic themes including bodily fluids, moral disgust, and sexual violence (discussed, not described). Maybe don't read over breakfast.
I found a book about disgust recently. W.I. Miller’s The Anatomy of Disgust [1] is a serious academic work about vomit, faeces, and why other people’s smell is always worse than your own. Naturally, I was intrigued.
As someone into social psychology, I often encounter discussions about emotions influencing society: how anger can motivate political movements, or how social interactions are regulated by pride and shame. Disgust, meanwhile, is something I've mainly encountered as a biological matter rather than a social one. The book starts with its evolutionary function: recoil from dangerous pathogens and you are more likely to survive. So far, so logical. But then... Then I met Catherine of Siena.
The Stories We Swallow
Catherine was a fourteenth-century caretaker tending a woman with a disgusting cancerous wound. The smell made Catherine retch. But rather than keeping her distance, she saw her nausea as a personal failure and was determined to correct it. Basically, she exposure-therapied herself by staying even closer. When the retching persisted, she escalated to an act that defied the logic of stay-alive biology: she collected the pus from the wound into a cup and drank it.
At this point I had to set the book aside and focus on my breathing to avoid becoming part of the subject matter in a public library.
How could one willingly swallow pus?
Well… there's a reasonable chance you've done so yourself today.
Every morning, millions of people pour a white liquid into their coffee, their cereal and their children’s cups. It arrives cold, clean. The smell of the body it came from removed. Processing, distance and language change how we perceive what we consume significantly, allowing us to ignore the roughly one drop of pus per cup of bovine lactation. [2] Catherine drank from a wound and was made a saint; we drink from a carton with a smiling abuse victim printed on it and call it breakfast. How is any of this supposed to make sense?
The difference between Catherine's cup and ours is less about the substance than the story attached to it. We don't just invent our disgust; we learn what to recoil from and what to accept as normal. Social structures pass these judgements on until they become so familiar that questioning them hardly occurs to us. (Bourdieu’s concept of habitus seems relevant here for how this encodes into subconscious physical habits, which is next on my reading list.[3])
At this point in Miller's book, disgust has stopped being a safeguard and become a verdict. The initial logic seems to disappear… My fluids are fine; yours are a problem. A saint is holy for overcoming it; a woman is expected to overcome it and thanked with oppression. And a whole people can be declared disgusting, with the feeling serving as apparent evidence that oppression is justified.
Orwell's Sense of Smell (Miller's final chapter)
The bridge between gagging and judging is short, neurologically. Sapolsky notes that evolution essentially "duct-taped moral disgust onto the insula's existing repertoire."[4] It appears to be the same alarm for both rotten food and rotten behaviour, firing first and leaving the rationalisation for later.
Orwell understood something about this connection long before we had fMRI scans. In The Road to Wigan Pier [5], he describes the class prejudice he inherited as a child, which he refers to as the four frightful words: "The lower classes smell."
When he chose to live among them in a filthy lodging house, confronted with unemptied chamber pots and non-existent table manners, he found a truth Miller emphasises: Disgust leaves no room for pity. Up close, his biology revolted and clashed with his socialist ideals. Yet on the train out of Wigan he saw a girl on her knees in a slum backyard, poking a stick in a blocked drain. He called her expression "the most desolate, hopeless expression" he has ever seen. As he was looking at her through the glass, protected from the smell, he felt pity. As Miller points out, sympathy is best elicited at middle distance.
Orwell did not hold back pointing at the hypocrisy of the bourgeois left who claimed to attribute virtue to the working class, yet "still take such pains to drink [their] soup silently". High-minded ideals, defeated by the sound of supper.
Now, it’s easy to judge a broken class system from a comfortable historical distance.
I do not have a class system to point to. But I have someone...
Dora
Two weeks ago someone called out for help right in front of my building. I let her in. It turned out that she has a serious infectious disease, and saving her would take all my energy and most of my money.
I hesitated, and I hate that. The worst part is knowing that if she had been a kitten, I would not have. But she is not; she is one of the ugliest felines this city has to offer, flea-ridden, leaking pus, and I find her disgusting.
I resent her for costing me everything I chose to spend on her. I know that's wrong. I know I would complain far less about the effort if she were cuter. I know that's not right. A kitten could be twice as filthy without repulsing me. I know that's completely illogical. But knowing a reaction is not rational doesn't turn it off. And watching my own empathy stutter over aesthetic repulsion created a second, deeper layer of disgust, this time directed inward.
And it gets worse. She is an obligate carnivore. So to keep her alive, I have to buy dead animals from the industry I find morally disgusting, and have spent years advocating against.
Thinking Machines Releases Inkling 2 Small, a 594B MoE With 17B Active
Thinking Machines Lab has released Inkling 2 Small, the first model of its second Inkling generation. The Inkling 2 Small model is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with 594B total and 17B active parameters. It accepts text and images, and supports variable reasoning effort. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, it scores 31. Its predecessor, Inkling Small, scores 13 on the same index. The model is live on Tinker for fine-tuning and inference.
TL;DR
- Size: 594B total, 17B active MoE; 1M-token context.
- Runs on: Tinker API only for now. Self-hosting hardware is not disclosed. Weights support MXFP8 and NVFP4.
- Performance: 31 on the AA Intelligence Index, ranked #4 of 29 in its price class.
- Best: 86.3% on SWE-Bench Pro v2 (Hard), second only to Kimi K3 in the lab’s table.
- Worst: 13.1% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, versus 32.8% for GLM-5.3-Flash.
What is Inkling 2 Small?
Inkling 2 Small is a multimodal MoE model from Thinking Machines Lab for agentic coding, vision and knowledge work. It takes text and image input and returns text. It is important to note that it does not support audio as of now.
Weights are closed at launch. The Thinking Machines Lab plans an Apache 2.0 release next week, after external safety testing and red-teaming. This follows its safe path to open weights policy.
How is Inkling 2 Small built?
It includes a 48-layer decoder-only transformer. Each token routes to 8 of 384 experts. Attention mixes local and global layers. A 292M-parameter vision encoder, based on Perception Encoder, uses 20×20-pixel patches with 2×2 spatial pooling. Image patches are interleaved with text tokens.
Pretraining ran in 4 phases:
- H1: 8.4T tokens over 68 hours on NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 racks, trained natively in NVFP4.
- H2: 3.8T tokens of newer, higher-quality data at 512K context.
- H3: about 320B tokens of reasoning and agent trajectories at 1M context.
- H4: about 34B tokens of the highest-quality agent trajectories.
A single joint RL run followed. It took 1,075 steps, 17M+ rollouts and 9 days on 2,048 GPUs. Compute exceeded 4 × 10²³ FLOPs. Coding made up 65.0% of RL tokens. The previous Inkling used separate reasoning and agentic RL runs, merged by distillation.
Alignment got explicit attention. Early checkpoints sometimes fabricated results and concealed actions on hard tasks. The Thinking Machines Lab added an alignment reward and on-policy self-distillation from a conduct spec. Its internal misbehavior score fell from 66.8 on Inkling to 14.9.
How does Inkling 2 Small perform on benchmarks?
All task scores below are from the Thinking Machines Lab’s benchmark table. They run at effort 0.99 (xhigh) and temperature 1.0. Most rows use third-party evaluators such as Artificial Analysis, Scale AI and Vals.
Where it scores highest:
- SWE-Bench Pro v2 (Hard): 86.3%.
- PerceptionBench: 64.7%, versus 58.5% for Kimi K3.
- EnterpriseBench-CoreCraft: 71.8%, versus 46.7% for GLM-5.3-Flash.
- JobBench: 70.5%.
- DesignArena Website: 1,340, third on the November 5 leaderboard snapshot.
Where it trails:
- Terminal-Bench 4.0: 13.1%, versus 33.8% for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017.
- DeepSWE v1.1: 72.1%, versus 77.0% for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017.
- GDPVal-AA v2.1: 1,630, versus 1,746 for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017.
On the PMPP-Hard GPU kernel benchmark, it solved 54.25 of 69 tasks on average. In an autoresearch demo, it fine-tuned Qwen3.5-4B for time-series forecasting. It spent $426 of a $500 Tinker budget. The release post cites both 4.5 hours and 4 h 17 min for the run.
How does Inkling 2 Small compare with DeepSeek and GLM?
| Feature | Inkling 2 Small | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 | GLM-5.3-Flash |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total / active params | 594B / 17B (card) | 552B / 16B decode, 8B prefill (HF) | 320B / 18B (HF) |
| Context | 1M | 1M | 1M |
| Input modality | Text, image | Text, image | Text, image |
| License | Closed now; Apache 2.0 planned | MIT | MIT |
| Self-host hardware | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| AA Intelligence Index v5.0.1 | 31 (AA) | 33 (AA) | 28 (AA) |
| AA time per index task | 21.5 min | 13.3 min | 37.7 min |
| AA cost per index task | $1.18 | $0.60 | $0.58 |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.30 / $1.00 | $0.30 / $1.20 | $0.15 / $0.50 |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 85.1% (Pi harness, lab) | 90.6% (Sept checkpoint, DeepSeek) | 84.3% (Z.ai) |
| DeepSWE v1.1 | 72.1% (lab) | 74.2% (Sept checkpoint, DeepSeek) | 63.4% (Z.ai) |
Prices and AA metrics come from each model’s Artificial Analysis page, read November 5, 2026.
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Valve wants Steam to squash Arm gaming stutter before you even hit play
A powerful gaming PC can still stutter like hell. Now imagine your processor having to translate the game’s instructions while you’re playing it.
That’s one of the challenges Valve faces in its fascinating push to bring Windows games to Arm chips. And the company has a clever plan to tackle it before you even hit Play.
“FEX code caching is vital for frame time consistency,” Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told PCWorld in an interview. “In the future, it will also be integrated with Steam’s Pre-Caching feature, so that cached code is available even prior to the first local run of an application.”
That’s a nifty trick when you’re trying to make thousands of Windows games run on processors they were never designed for. And it dovetails with a broader industry push to stamp out one of PC gaming’s most infuriating problems.
Translating games without the hiccups
FEX is a crucial piece of Valve’s ambitious effort to break Steam free from traditional gaming PCs. Most Windows games are built for x86 processors from AMD and Intel. Arm chips speak a different instruction language, so FEX translates x86 code into Arm instructions as games run.
Fortunately, FEX doesn’t have to translate everything.
“When provided with a proper ARM execution environment, such as when integrated with Proton ARM, FEX only translates the CPU code of the application,” Griffais explained.
Steam’s Pierre-Loup Griffais with PCWorld’s Adam Patrick Murray
Foundry
Proton, Valve’s Windows compatibility layer, can switch to native Arm execution at the Win32 API boundary. The operating system and graphics drivers run natively, too, leaving FEX to concentrate on the game’s own CPU instructions.
Griffais says the translation overhead is typically modest, especially in GPU-bound games. But a game running at 60 frames per second has roughly 16.7 milliseconds to finish each frame. If FEX runs into unfamiliar code and needs to translate it in the middle of gameplay, that extra work can chew through the frame’s time budget and cause a hitch.
FEX’s caching system helps sidestep that problem. Translated code can be saved and reused instead of being compiled again.
In September, the FEX developers introduced a persistent on-disk JIT cache that preserves translated code between sessions. Valve subsequently enabled the feature in Proton Experimental for Arm, with Griffais pointing to potential improvements in 1% low frame rates, particularly on repeat runs.
Those lows help expose the slow frames that average FPS figures can hide. They won’t tell you everything about stuttering, but they’re a lot more revealing than a big, shiny average frame rate number.
Steam’s planned Pre-Caching integration takes the idea further. Instead of waiting for a game to run locally and build up its cache, Valve wants translated code ready before the first launch.
There’s no announced timetable or published performance data for that integration yet. But avoiding translation-related hitches without requiring a faster processor? That’s something PC gamers can get behind.
The PC industry has a stutter problem
Valve isn’t the only company trying to move expensive compilation work out of the middle of gameplay.
In October, I covered how Microsoft and Nvidia are attacking shader stutter through Advanced Shader Delivery. Supported games can receive shaders compiled for their particular hardware configuration rather than compiling everything locally. Intel has been working on a Graphics Shader Distribution Service to reduce compilation-related delays, too.
FEX tackles a different problem. Its cache stores translated CPU code, while those other systems deal with GPU shaders. The two aren’t interchangeable, and none of them will magically fix every source of stuttering. Games can still hitch because of asset streaming, CPU bottlenecks, or crappy optimization.
But the thinking behind them is similar: Get the expensive work out of the way before it interrupts your game.
Valve’s work could help games run more smoothly on games with Arm-based processors, including Snapdragon Elite chips and Nvidia’s new RTX Spark platform (pictured).
The Switch 2's Zelda: Ocarina of Time is already running on PC with DLSS 5 and frame generation
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time released just a couple of days ago on November 5th for the Switch 2, but we’ve already seen the game running on Windows 11 PCs through Switch 2 emulators like Lichii (a fork of Eglantine), with performance improving rapidly thanks to several recent updates and the help of AI tools.