GitHub has announced a slew of updates for Copilot, while also giving a glimpse into a more agentic future for its AI-powered pair programmer.

Among the notable updates includes a feature called Vision for Copilot, which allows users to attach a screenshot, photo, or diagram to a chat, with Copilot generating the interface, code, and alt text to bring it to life.

So for example, someone on a marketing team could take a screenshot of a web page and illustrate some changes they want made to that page. Rather than requesting such changes via text prompts, it’s now possible to upload an image and just ask Copilot to implement the changes as indicated in the file.

We review the rapid recent progress in single-photon sources based on multiplexing multiple probabilistic photon-creation events. Such multiplexing allows higher single-photon probabilities and lower contamination from higher-order photon states. We study the requirements for multiplexed sources and compare various approaches to multiplexing using different degrees of freedom.

Architects these days…

True Turing a birds eye view.

Dinoflagellates play crucial roles in aquatic ecosystems, particularly as major contributors to harmful algal blooms. They can enter a dormant stage, known as the resting cyst stage, that allows them to survive for extended periods—up to 150 years—in marine sediments. This dormancy is essential for their annual population dynamics, blooming cycles, and geographic expansion.

Despite the ecological importance of resting cysts, the molecular mechanisms governing their dormancy, viability maintenance, and germination in natural sediments remain largely unexplored.

To better understand this process, researchers from the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOCAS), in collaboration with scientists from the University of Connecticut, investigated these mechanisms. They utilized a dinoflagellate mRNA-specific spliced leader as a “hook,” along with single-molecule real-time sequencing and other physiological measurements.

Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be. Within philosophy of science, it is often framed as an answer to the question \.

Like the Buddhist concept of Emptiness sunyata.

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The purpose of this lecture is to defend a reading of Nietzsche that attributes to him an ontology that reduces everything to relations of force against the charge that such an ontology is wildly implausible. Rather than rehearsing the textual evidence supporting such a view, the tactic employed in this chapter is to show that Nietzsche’s relational ontology of force can be understood as a proto-form of a view currently being given serious consideration in contemporary philosophy of science: Ontic Structural Realism. Ontic structural realism is a form of structural realism that eliminates things-in-themselves and inflates the ontological significance of relations vis-à-vis relata. Because Nietzsche appeals to the natural sciences to justify his rejection of things-in-themselves in favour of a relational ontology of force, it is argued that Nietzsche should be understood as offering a proto-version of ontic structural realism.

Informational Structural Realism (ISR) has been presented by Luciano Floridi and others as an alternative form of structural realism that can overcome many of structural realism’s shortcomings. The essential idea behind ISR is that nature is ultimately informational in nature and scientific theories present data structures that represent this information. In this talk I assess whether ISR is able to reconcile the two most important arguments in the realism-antirealism debate: the \.

Initial participants may spend 28 days in these ‘sentinels’—but the firm envisions much, much longer stays.