Historian Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

In her upcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” Jill Lepore warns that tech companies are increasingly replacing the functions of democratic government. This shift, she said, marks “a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, I…

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IMDb Sentiment Analysis with DistilBERT LoRA, TF-IDF Baselines, Calibration, Interpretability, Robustness Testing, and Semi-Supervised Learning

In this tutorial, we develop an end-to-end sentiment analysis workflow using the Stanford NLP IMDb Large Movie Review Dataset and compare classical machine learning with parameter-efficient transformer fine-tuning. We begin by establishing a reproducible environment and auditing the dataset for class ordering, review-length skew, duplicate leakage, and preprocessing artifacts before training a strong TF-IDF and…

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Meet Shepherd: An Open-Source Python Substrate That Lets Meta-Agents Fork, Replay, and Revert Any Agent Run

Long-running agents accumulate state that no transcript captures. A coding agent at step 10 holds edited files, a running dev server, installed packages, and a warm prompt cache. When it misreads a traceback and rewrites a file that was already correct, neither available recovery path is cheap: patching forward grows the context and the token…

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OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide

NextSlide recently announced that it’s joining OpenAI, with the presentation startup’s team members now working on ChatGPT. The NextSlide website currently displays a note from founder Ahmed Beshry describing the startup’s product as one “that could turn prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation.” The ultimate goal, Beshry said, was “to make…

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