reputation
Moment terrified bear clings to top of 35ft telephone pole before suffering gruesome fate
Honest widower, 76, alerted IRS after they accidentally sent him $20k refund he wasn't owed... now its idiot staff are ruining his finances and threatening to seize his farm Trump's three-word threat as Iran opens up new front and oil surges to $100 per barrel Harry has reached a new low. It's such a slap in the face to his father... especially after what the King's friend told me: RICHARD EDEN Bravo cheating scandal explodes as'jealous' Nashville influencer LEAKS steamy video to destroy her Texas rival... and reality star cowboy drops insane breakup texts: 'You f***ing sl**' Prince William's'decoy' girlfriend Bryony Daniels, 44, who helped royal sneak off with Kate at St Andrews gets her own happily ever after as she weds Duke of Sutherland's nephew in gold brocade Emilia Wickstead dress Chain's unlimited'Pasta Pass' returns for an eye-watering $100 after six-year hiatus - but fans are already complaining they'll never get one I've had one myself (and the humiliating sex encounter with a 26-year-old to prove it)... so trust me, I can see all the signs: LIZ JONES Girl who killed four young friends after crashing car'while speeding' comes face-to-face with her victims' parents in court as she demands case against her is DISMISSED Olivia Wilde fires off on'creature' Elon Musk as she recalls the first time she met the Tesla'trillionaire' When to worry about your beer belly... millions of men ignore their paunch but DR PHILIPPA KAYE reveals the signs that it could be dangerous - and the 30-second test you must take now As a mother of three, I hid my cocaine in the airing cupboard and used while my family slept. No one had a clue... but this is what it did to my sex life and parenting. Ed Harris's future on Dutton Ranch revealed after he begged to'get out' of Taylor Sheridan show New Jennifer Lopez drama that means she and Ben Affleck STILL'can't escape each other'... two whole years after divorce: As she posts nearly naked selfie with humiliating detail... friends reveal what she'has to suck up' and his'prickly' outbursts Russia'is helping Iran strike CIA bases in Middle East', Western officials fear Brutal truth about Mounjaro-jowls Rosie O'Donnell.... even her $90,000 facelift can't hide this: CAROLINE BULLOCK'Shining light' homecoming queen, 18, dies of brain aneurysm just weeks after she graduated from top private school The heartbreaking discovery of a bear clinging to the top of a 35-foot telephone pole ended in tragedy. Shannon Mullens was driving from New Mexico to Oklahoma on Monday when she spotted the stranded animal near Clayton, New Mexico.
693e00827fd44bdfca210801fe1e6439-Paper-Position_Paper_Track.pdf
The meteoric rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with its rapidly expanding market capitalization, presents both transformative opportunities and critical challenges. Chief among these is the urgent need for a new, unified paradigm for trustworthy evaluation, as current benchmarks increasingly reveal critical vulnerabilities. Issues like data contamination and selective reporting by model developers fuel hype, while inadequate data quality control can lead to biased evaluations that, even if unintentionally, may favor specific approaches. As a flood of participants enters the AI space, this "Wild West" of assessment makes distinguishing genuine progress from exaggerated claims exceptionally difficult. Such ambiguity blurs scientific signals and erodes public confidence, much as unchecked claims would destabilize financial markets reliant on credible oversight from agencies like Moody's. In high-stakes human examinations (e.g., SAT, GRE), substantial effort is devoted to ensuring fairness and credibility; why settle for less in evaluating AI, especially given its profound societal impact? This position paper argues that a laissezfaire approach is untenable. For true and sustainable AI advancement, we call for a paradigm shift to a unified, live, and quality-controlled benchmarking framework--robust by construction rather than reliant on courtesy or goodwill.
163 surrendered rats seek new homes in Massachusetts
'Rats have a bad reputation, but they actually make really great companion pets.' Rats are much more clean than their reputation suggests. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A non-profit organization in Massachusetts received a boatload of pet rats in need of new homes. An individual in northeastern Massachusetts surrendered 163 rats in early February. That's almost 60 percent more than the total number of rats that were adopted from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-Angell (MSPCA-Angell) in 2025 alone.
Cambridge University wins rowing trademark case
The University of Cambridge has won its fight to stop a rowing company based in the city trademarking its name. It argued Cambridge Rowing Limited would be able to take unfair advantage of and cause detriment to the university's reputation if its logo was registered. The university owns trademarks for the word Cambridge, meaning it has the right to stop others from using it in certain circumstances. Omar Terywall, the company's founder, said he was gutted at the outcome and the case had been a terrifying ordeal. He said he hoped to appeal the decision by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO).
Who died in 2025? Notable deaths of the year
The first non-European Pope in more than 1,000 years, the Oscar-winning star of Annie Hall and The Godfather, a soul legend and one of the world's most famous designers - here are some of the well-known faces no longer with us. Among those we remember are Hollywood stars Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and Gene Hackman, and theatrical dames Joan Plowright and Patricia Routledge. Robert Redford's acting career spanned more than 50 films and won him an Oscar as a director. For many filmgoers though, he was simply the best-looking cinema star in the world - once described as a chunk of Mount Rushmore levered into stonewashed denims. As well as leading roles in hits such as All The President's Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Way We Were, Redford also launched the Sundance Film Festival to champion independent filmmakers. Los-Angeles-born Keaton shot to fame with her role in The Godfather, but enjoyed a long creative partnership with Woody Allen. Annie Hall, a comedy based on their off-screen relationship, earned her a Best Actress Oscar and they collaborated on several other films. She was nominated for three further Oscars - all in the best actress category - for her work in Something's Gotta Give, Marvin's Room and Reds. BASIL! - the unmistakable sound of Sybil Fawlty admonishing her pompous and incompetent husband, is probably how Prunella Scales will best be remembered. Apart from starring in sitcom Fawlty Towers, she played many other roles on screen and stage, including Queen Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett's play, A Question of Attribution.
The Seeds of Scheming: Weakness of Will in the Building Blocks of Agentic Systems
Large language models display a peculiar form of inconsistency: they "know" the correct answer but fail to act on it. In human philosophy, this tension between global judgment and local impulse is called akrasia, or weakness of will. We propose akrasia as a foundational concept for analyzing inconsistency and goal drift in agentic AI systems. To operationalize it, we introduce a preliminary version of the Akrasia Benchmark, currently a structured set of prompting conditions (Baseline [B], Synonym [S], Temporal [T], and Temptation [X]) that measures when a model's local response contradicts its own prior commitments. The benchmark enables quantitative comparison of "self-control" across model families, decoding strategies, and temptation types. Beyond single-model evaluation, we outline how micro-level akrasia may compound into macro-level instability in multi-agent systems that may be interpreted as "scheming" or deliberate misalignment. By reframing inconsistency as weakness of will, this work connects agentic behavior to classical theories of agency and provides an empirical bridge between philosophy, psychology, and the emerging science of agentic AI.
Strategic Self-Improvement for Competitive Agents in AI Labour Markets
Chiu, Christopher, Zhang, Simpson, van der Schaar, Mihaela
As artificial intelligence (AI) agents are deployed across economic domains, understanding their strategic behavior and market-level impact becomes critical. This paper puts forward a groundbreaking new framework that is the first to capture the real-world economic forces that shape agentic labor markets: adverse selection, moral hazard, and reputation dynamics. Our framework encapsulates three core capabilities that successful LLM-agents will need: \textbf{metacognition} (accurate self-assessment of skills), \textbf{competitive awareness} (modeling rivals and market dynamics), and \textbf{long-horizon strategic planning}. We illustrate our framework through a tractable simulated gig economy where agentic Large Language Models (LLMs) compete for jobs, develop skills, and adapt their strategies under competitive pressure. Our simulations illustrate how LLM agents explicitly prompted with reasoning capabilities learn to strategically self-improve and demonstrate superior adaptability to changing market conditions. At the market level, our simulations reproduce classic macroeconomic phenomena found in human labor markets, while controlled experiments reveal potential AI-driven economic trends, such as rapid monopolization and systemic price deflation. This work provides a foundation to further explore the economic properties of AI-driven labour markets, and a conceptual framework to study the strategic reasoning capabilities in agents competing in the emerging economy.
Aligning Artificial Superintelligence via a Multi-Box Protocol
We propose a novel protocol for aligning artificial superintelligence (ASI) based on mutual verification among multiple isolated systems that self-modify to achieve alignment. The protocol operates by containing multiple diverse artificial superintelligences in strict isolation ("boxes"), with humans remaining entirely outside the system. Each superintelligence has no ability to communicate with humans and cannot communicate directly with other superintelligences. The only interaction possible is through an auditable submission interface accessible exclusively to the superintelligences themselves, through which they can: (1) submit alignment proofs with attested state snapshots, (2) validate or disprove other superintelligences' proofs, (3) request self-modifications, (4) approve or disapprove modification requests from others, (5) report hidden messages in submissions, and (6) confirm or refute hidden message reports. A reputation system incentivizes honest behavior, with reputation gained through correct evaluations and lost through incorrect ones. The key insight is that without direct communication channels, diverse superintelligences can only achieve consistent agreement by converging on objective truth rather than coordinating on deception. This naturally leads to what we call a "consistent group", essentially a truth-telling coalition that emerges because isolated systems cannot coordinate on lies but can independently recognize valid claims. Release from containment requires both high reputation and verification by multiple high-reputation superintelligences. While our approach requires substantial computational resources and does not address the creation of diverse artificial superintelligences, it provides a framework for leveraging peer verification among superintelligent systems to solve the alignment problem.
Realistic gossip in Trust Game on networks: the GODS model
Majewski, Jan, Giardini, Francesca
Gossip has been shown to be a relatively efficient solution to problems of cooperation in reputation-based systems of exchange, but many studies don't conceptualize gossiping in a realistic way, often assuming near-perfect information or broadcast-like dynamics of its spread. To solve this problem, we developed an agent-based model that pairs realistic gossip processes with different variants of Trust Game. The results show that cooperators suffer when local interactions govern spread of gossip, because they cannot discriminate against defectors. Realistic gossiping increases the overall amount of resources, but is more likely to promote defection. Moreover, even partner selection through dynamic networks can lead to high payoff inequalities among agent types. Cooperators face a choice between outcompeting defectors and overall growth. By blending direct and indirect reciprocity with reputations we show that gossiping increases the efficiency of cooperation by an order of magnitude.
OpenAI's Fidji Simo Plans to Make ChatGPT Way More Useful--and Have You Pay For It
As OpenAI expands in every direction, the new CEO of Applications is on a mission to make ChatGPT indispensable and lucrative. In case OpenAI's structure couldn't get any weirder--a nonprofit in charge of a for-profit that's become a public benefit corporation--it now has two CEOs. There's Sam Altman, chief executive of the whole company, who manages research and compute. And as of this summer, there's Fidji Simo, the former CEO of Instacart, who manages everything else. Simo hasn't been seen much at OpenAI's San Francisco office since she began as CEO of Applications in August. But her presence is felt at every level of the company--not least because she's heading up ChatGPT and basically every function that might make OpenAI money. Simo is dealing with a relapse of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) that makes her prone to fainting if she stands for long periods of time. "Being present from 8 am to midnight every day, responding within five minutes, people feel like I'm there and that they can reach me immediately, that I jump on the phone within five minutes," she tells me. Employees confirm that this is true. OpenAI's famously Slack-driven culture can be overwhelming for new hires. Employees say she is often seen popping into channels and threads, sharing thoughts and asking questions.