The Nightly Build.
Saturday, August 8, 202651 min read
Investing · Company Analysis

Palantir's price bets on four more years of 40 percent revenue growth

Even after a 93 percent quarter, the price still needs revenue to roughly triple before the multiple looks ordinary, and the stock was 40 percent off its high when it beat.

13 min read10 sources
Daily Reading · Paper of the Day

Attention learned to align long before it was asked to explain

The 2015 model that introduced attention rebuilt its read of the source at every output word, and the alignment maps it drew look linguistic without settling what the weights explain.

10 min read8 sources
Current Affairs · Opinion

A 100-foot worship zone that switches on without warning

The bipartisan bill from Cruz and Slotkin copies New York's buffer statute, then draws its zone at twice the 50-foot radius the state chose.

9 min read9 sources
Technical Practice · Build From Scratch

Two rotated vectors remember only the distance between them

Rotary position embeddings turn a token's index into a rotation angle, the mechanism behind most open-weight models' sense of where each token sits and behind the single-constant edits that stretch a model past its training length.

8 min read10 sources
Daily Reading · Current Events

U.S. payrolls fell by 23,000 in July, defying forecasts of a gain

Downward revisions erased another 103,000 jobs from May and June, and the share of Americans working or looking for work fell to its lowest in more than five years.

4 min read10 sources
Daily Reading · Tech News

One untrusted GitHub issue broke three coding agents at the harness, not the model

At Black Hat, Novee's Elad Meged traced the flaw to the agent harness that wraps each model, reaching remote code execution and credential theft from a single unprivileged issue on the vendors' own default repositories.

4 min read9 sources
Daily Reading · Word of the Day

Anosognosia marks the difference between not admitting a loss and not registering it

Joseph Babinski named it in June 1914 for stroke patients who insisted their paralyzed arms still worked, and it now marks why many people with schizophrenia never accept they are ill.

3 min read6 sources