AI advances, but watch out: laws, limits, and alerts abound.

OpenAI blocked Russian propagandists</b></b></b> from using ChatGPT to OpenAI blocked Russian propagandists</b></b></b> from using ChatGPT to create PSYOP plans</b></b></b> and social media content, according to Mezha. *** Andrej Karpathy notes that AI has dramatically changed Andrej Karpathy notes that AI has dramatically changed programming in the last two months, stating that coding agents which "basically didn’t work before December" now "basically work" and can manage large</b></b></b> and long tasks, significantly disrupting the default programming workflow. *** California’s Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, effective California’s Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, effective January 1, 2026</b></b></b>, aims to manage “catastrophic risks” from advanced AI models, imposing obligations such as developing a Frontier AI Framework, reporting risk assessments to the California Office of Emergency Services (OES) every three months, publishing transparency reports, reporting safety incidents to the OES within 15 days (or 24 hours for incidents involving death or serious bodily injury), developing internal whistleblower reporting mechanisms, and providing notice to covered employees of their rights and responsibilities. The Act applies to “Frontier Developers” and “Large Frontier Developers,” defining a “Frontier Model” as one trained using over 10^26 FLOPs and specifying that Large Frontier Developers, with annual gross revenues exceeding $500,000,000, must publish a framework detailing their protocols for managing catastrophic risks, and are subject to civil penalties up to $1,000,000 per violation for noncompliance. The Act also offers whistleblower protections with a private right of action for Covered Employees who report safety or risk concerns. *** The Vera C The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's new alert system sent out 800,000 alerts to astronomers</b></b></b> after its first night staring at the cosmos. The Alert Production Pipeline, developed at the University of Washington, is designed to eventually produce up to 7 million alerts per night</b></b></b>, documenting celestial events and notifying astronomers of interesting occurrences within two minutes of their discovery, using the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy and an ultra-sensitive 28-foot primary mirror; the first batch included detections of supernovae, variable stars, active galactic nuclei, and newly spotted asteroids. The telescope, located in the Chilean Andes, is expected to observe more objects than all other optical observatories combined during its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).