Atlanta
How an Atlanta Suburb Ended Up Sharing Flock Data With More Than 2,000 Organizations
Alpharetta, Georgia, cops share data with thousands of Flock users, ranging from federal agencies to a fish and wildlife commission. The reasons why show how vast--and invasive--the network has become. Alpharetta, a prosperous suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, is home to about 67,000 people, served by about 120 local police officers. It also hosts several dozen cameras sold by Flock Safety, the increasingly controversial surveillance company that collects license plate data and other information and makes it searchable by police. WIRED has made this article free for all to read because it is primarily based on reporting from public records requests. Please consider subscribing to support our journalism.
Laptop catches fire on US flight, with passenger treated at airport
One person has received medical treatment after a passenger's laptop caught fire on an American Airlines flight. The pilot had reported a cabin fire in the back of the airplane to air traffic control, saying the flight attendants are trying to put it out now, according to audio obtained by the BBC's US reporting partner CBS News. I think we have about four to five passengers that were burned by the laptop. The laptop is contained about mid-aircraft. One passenger received medical attention on site and was released after American Airlines Flight 2398 - coming from Atlanta, Georgia - landed at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in Texas on Friday.
Charles Barkley was disgusted by Magic's highly questionable pregame handshake
ChatGPT predicted the first round of the NFL Draft and here's what it said Curt Cignetti was so focused this offseason, he turned down all external requests: 'I'm 95% football' Former MLB owner claims'despicable' San Francisco Giants are the reason the A's left Oakland Longtime NASCAR crew chief tells wild story about one of the sport's biggest characters WNBA finally embraces Caitlin Clark's stardom with unprecedented national TV schedule Why are the Mets so bad? Flyers mascot Gritty pens letter to fans ahead of first playoff game... eight years after he debuted NFL Draft prospect Rueben Bain Jr. mum about 2024 crash when publicly asked about it for first time Troy Aikman is selling'fire suites,' which are exactly what they sound like Trump says there's'no time frame' to secure Iran deal Iranian activist praises Trump's intervention after female protesters saved from execution Steve Hilton praised for'offering solutions' in CA gubernatorial debate Middle East tensions escalate over US blockade, Iran's actions Michael Easter and Gary Brecka discuss the'choice' to live to be 100 Sen Ted Cruz calls new deadline with Iran'really consequential' OutKick Charles Barkley was disgusted by Magic's highly questionable pregame handshake After Stephen A. Smith's controversial comments about Memphis sparked backlash, Barkley stepped in and delivered a blunt response. The debate quickly turned into a heated clash over media responsibility, perception, and what crosses the line. The Orlando Magic dropped Game 2 of their first-round playoff series to the Detroit Pistons on Wednesday, and it's safe to assume Charles Barkley was mighty confident that the L was coming before the game even tipped off. In the lead-up to the matchup in Detroit, the ESPN broadcast shared a live shot of members of the Magic partaking in some pre-game antics.
Local Linearity of LLMs Enables Activation Steering via Model-Based Linear Optimal Control
Skifstad, Julian, Yang, Xinyue Annie, Chou, Glen
Inference-time LLM alignment methods, particularly activation steering, offer an alternative to fine-tuning by directly modifying activations during generation. Existing methods, however, often rely on non-anticipative interventions that ignore how perturbations propagate through transformer layers and lack online error feedback, resulting in suboptimal, open-loop control. To address this, we show empirically that, despite the nonlinear structure of transformer blocks, layer-wise dynamics across multiple LLM architectures and scales are well-approximated by locally-linear models. Exploiting this property, we model LLM inference as a linear time-varying dynamical system and adapt the classical linear quadratic regulator to compute feedback controllers using layer-wise Jacobians, steering activations toward desired semantic setpoints in closed-loop with minimal computational overhead and no offline training. We also derive theoretical bounds on setpoint tracking error, enabling formal guarantees on steering performance. Using a novel adaptive semantic feature setpoint signal, our method yields robust, fine-grained behavior control across models, scales, and tasks, including state-of-the-art modulation of toxicity, truthfulness, refusal, and arbitrary concepts, surpassing baseline steering methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/trustworthyrobotics/lqr-activation-steering
Subcritical Signal Propagation at Initialization in Normalization-Free Transformers
We study signal propagation at initialization in transformers through the averaged partial Jacobian norm (APJN), a measure of gradient amplification across layers. We extend APJN analysis to transformers with bidirectional attention and permutation-symmetric input token configurations by deriving recurrence relations for activation statistics and APJNs across layers. Our theory predicts how attention modifies the asymptotic behavior of the APJN at large depth and matches APJNs measured in deep vision transformers. The criticality picture known from residual networks carries over to transformers: the pre-LayerNorm architecture exhibits power-law APJN growth, whereas transformers with LayerNorm replaced by elementwise $\tanh$-like nonlinearities have stretched-exponential APJN growth, indicating that the latter are subcritical. Applied to Dynamic Tanh (DyT) and Dynamic erf (Derf) transformers, the theory explains why these architectures can be more sensitive to initialization and optimization choices and require careful tuning for stable training.
Classical and Quantum Speedups for Non-Convex Optimization via Energy Conserving Descent
Sun, Yihang, Wang, Huaijin, Hayden, Patrick, Blanchet, Jose
The Energy Conserving Descent (ECD) algorithm was recently proposed (De Luca & Silverstein, 2022) as a global non-convex optimization method. Unlike gradient descent, appropriately configured ECD dynamics escape strict local minima and converge to a global minimum, making it appealing for machine learning optimization. We present the first analytical study of ECD, focusing on the one-dimensional setting for this first installment. We formalize a stochastic ECD dynamics (sECD) with energy-preserving noise, as well as a quantum analog of the ECD Hamiltonian (qECD), providing the foundation for a quantum algorithm through Hamiltonian simulation. For positive double-well objectives, we compute the expected hitting time from a local to the global minimum. We prove that both sECD and qECD yield exponential speedup over respective gradient descent baselines--stochastic gradient descent and its quantization. For objectives with tall barriers, qECD achieves a further speedup over sECD.
Deep Learning for Sequential Decision Making under Uncertainty: Foundations, Frameworks, and Frontiers
Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving increasingly beyond prediction to support decisions in complex, uncertain, and dynamic environments. This shift creates a natural intersection with operations research and management sciences (OR/MS), which have long offered conceptual and methodological foundations for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. At the same time, recent advances in deep learning, including feedforward neural networks, LSTMs, transformers, and deep reinforcement learning, have expanded the scope of data-driven modeling and opened new possibilities for large-scale decision systems. This tutorial presents an OR/MS-centered perspective on deep learning for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Its central premise is that deep learning is valuable not as a replacement for optimization, but as a complement to it. Deep learning brings adaptability and scalable approximation, whereas OR/MS provides the structural rigor needed to represent constraints, recourse, and uncertainty. The tutorial reviews key decision-making foundations, connects them to the major neural architectures in modern AI, and discusses leading approaches to integrating learning and optimization. It also highlights emerging impact in domains such as supply chains, healthcare and epidemic response, agriculture, energy, and autonomous operations. More broadly, it frames these developments as part of a wider transition from predictive AI toward decision-capable AI and highlights the role of OR/MS in shaping the next generation of integrated learning--optimization systems.
Cross-Spectral Witness for Hidden Nonequilibrium Beyond the Scalar Ceiling
Partial observation is a pervasive obstacle in nonequilibrium physics: coarse graining may absorb hidden forcing into an apparently equilibrium-like reduced description, so a driven system can look reversible through the only variables one can measure. For scalar Gaussian observables of linear stochastic systems, no time-irreversibility statistic can detect the underlying drive. The Lucente--Crisanti ceiling constrains what one channel carries; what two channels carry is a different question, with a sharp closed-form answer. Two simultaneously observed channels retain an off-diagonal cross-spectral sector inaccessible to any scalar reduction; under channel-separable multiplicative structure the observed-channel response factors cancel identically, leaving a closed-form cross-spectral witness controlled only by the hidden spectrum, the loadings, and the innovation scales, strictly positive at every nonzero cross-coupling including at exact timescale coalescence where every scalar reduction is blind. Within general CSM this certifies shared hidden-sector drive; under the additional one-way coupling assumption the witness identifies the total entropy production rate at leading order with a square-root scaling.