If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?
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Police said no weapons were recovered from the scene and the last sighting of the suspect was him leaving the Hope Street side of the building on foot.
Timothy O’Hara, a deputy police chief, told a press conference that the suspect is a “male dressed in black” who exited the complex at Brown University.
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Cuban officials denounce the US seizure of the Skipper oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast. Key US politics stories from 13 December 2025
Cuban officials have denounced the US seizure of the Skipper oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast on Wednesday, calling it an “act of piracy and maritime terrorism”, as well as a “serious violation of international law” that hurts the Caribbean island nation and its people.
The tanker, which was reported now to be heading for Galveston, Texas, was believed to loaded with nearly 2m barrels of Venezuela’s heavy crude, according to internal data from the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, as reported by the New York Times.
Continue reading...The jailing of a Sudanese militia leader is an anomaly in a world where Putin, Netanyahu and yes, Hegseth, act without fear of international law
It was a rare success for international courts struggling to resist a rising tide of official lawlessness. Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman, a leader of the notorious, government-backed Janjaweed militia that committed genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region from 2003 to 2005, was jailed for 20 years last week by the international criminal court (ICC). He had been found guilty on 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Although hundreds of militia were involved, Abd-al-Rahman, also known as Ali Kushayb, is the first person to be convicted of atrocities in Darfur, now again the scene of terrible violence in Sudan’s civil war. The ICC has charged Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president at the time, with genocide and war crimes. Ahmad Harun, a former minister, faces similar charges. But both men have evaded arrest.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix: Due to the growing number of GNOME Shell extensions looking to appear on extensions.gnome.org that were generated using AI, it's now prohibited. The new rule in their guidelines note that AI-generated code will be explicitly rejected: "Extensions must not be AI-generated While it is not prohibited to use AI as a learning aid or a development tool (i.e. code completions), extension developers should be able to justify and explain the code they submit, within reason. Submissions with large amounts of unnecessary code, inconsistent code style, imaginary API usage, comments serving as LLM prompts, or other indications of AI-generated output will be rejected." In a blog post, GNOME developer Javad Rahmatzadeh explains that "Some devs are using AI without understanding the code..."
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Wembanyama shines in upset of Thunder
Brunson’s 40 lifts Knicks past Magic
Spurs, Knicks to meet in NBA Cup final
Victor Wembanyama returned from a 12-game absence with 22 points and nine rebounds, giving San Antonio a surge and the Oklahoma City Thunder just their second loss with the 111-109 victory Saturday night putting the Spurs in the NBA Cup final.
The Spurs play the New York Knicks in Tuesday night’s final.
Continue reading...Suspect remain at large as Ivy League university tells students to shelter in place
Police said no weapons were recovered from the scene and the last sighting of the suspect was him leaving the Hope Street side of the building on foot.
Timothy O’Hara, a deputy police chief, told a press conference that the suspect is a “male dressed in black” who exited the complex at Brown University.
Continue reading...Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, says ‘shooter’ still at large, as officials embark on widespread manhunt
At least two people were killed and nine more critically injured in a shooting on Saturday at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, with the suspect still at large hours after the first shelter in place orders were issued.
Police scattered across the campus and into an affluent neighbourhood filled with historic and stately brick homes, searching academic buildings, back yards and porches for hours late into the night after the shooting was first reported in the afternoon.
Continue reading...The R programming language "is sometimes frowned upon by 'traditional' software engineers," says the CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe, "due to its unconventional syntax and limited scalability for large production systems." But he says it "continues to thrive at universities and in research-driven industries, and "for domain experts, it remains a powerful and elegant tool." Yet it's now gaining more popularity as statistics and large-scale data visualization become important (a trend he also sees reflected in the rise of Wolfram/Mathematica). That's according to December's edition of his TIOBE Index, which attempts to rank the popularity of programming languages based on search-engine results for courses, third-party vendors, and skilled engineers. InfoWorld explains: In the December 2025 index, published December 7, R ranks 10th with a 1.96% rating. R has cracked the Tiobe index's top 10 before, such as in April 2020 and July 2020, but not in recent years. The rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language Index, meanwhile, has R ranked fifth this month with a 5.84% share. "Programming language R is known for fitting statisticians and data scientists like a glove," said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe, in a bulletin accompanying the December index... Although data science rival Python has eclipsed R in terms of general adoption, Jansen said R has carved out a solid and enduring niche, excelling at rapid experimentation, statistical modeling, and exploratory data analysis. "We have seen many Tiobe index top 10 entrants rising and falling," Jansen wrote. "It will be interesting to see whether R can maintain its current position." "Python remains ahead at 23.64%," notes TechRepublic, "while the familiar chase group behind it holds steady for the moment. The real movement comes deeper in the list, where SQL edges upward, R rises to the top 10, and Delphi/Object Pascal slips away... SQLclimbs from tenth to eighth at 2.10%, adding a small +0.11% that's enough to move it upward in a tightly packed section of the table. Perl holds ninth at 1.97%, strengthened by a +1.33% gain that extends its late-year resurgence." It's interesting to see how TIOBE's ranking compare with PYPL's (which ranks languages based solely on how often language tutorials are searched on Google): TIOBE PYPL Python Python C C/C++ C++ Objective-C Java Java C# R JavaScript JavaScript Visual Basic Swift SQL C# Perl PHP R Rust Despite their different methodologies, both lists put Python at #1, Java at #5, and JavaScript at #7.
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