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This con­tent is gen­er­ated by Google AI. Generative AI is ex­per­i­men­tal

Gemini 3 Pro rep­re­sents a gen­er­a­tional leap from sim­ple recog­ni­tion to true vi­sual and spa­tial rea­son­ing. It is our most ca­pa­ble mul­ti­modal model ever, de­liv­er­ing state-of-the-art per­for­mance across doc­u­ment, spa­tial, screen and video un­der­stand­ing. This model sets new highs on vi­sion bench­marks such as MMMU Pro and Video MMMU for com­plex vi­sual rea­son­ing, as well as use-case-spe­cific bench­marks across doc­u­ment, spa­tial, screen and long video un­der­stand­ing.

Real-world doc­u­ments are messy, un­struc­tured, and dif­fi­cult to parse — of­ten filled with in­ter­leaved im­ages, il­leg­i­ble hand­writ­ten text, nested ta­bles, com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal no­ta­tion and non-lin­ear lay­outs. Gemini 3 Pro rep­re­sents a ma­jor leap for­ward in this do­main, ex­celling across the en­tire doc­u­ment pro­cess­ing pipeline — from highly ac­cu­rate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to com­plex vi­sual rea­son­ing.To truly un­der­stand a doc­u­ment, a model must ac­cu­rately de­tect and rec­og­nize text, ta­bles, math for­mu­las, fig­ures and charts re­gard­less of noise or for­mat.A fun­da­men­tal ca­pa­bil­ity is “derendering” — the abil­ity to re­verse-en­gi­neer a vi­sual doc­u­ment back into struc­tured code (HTML, LaTeX, Markdown) that would recre­ate it. As il­lus­trated be­low, Gemini 3 demon­strates ac­cu­rate per­cep­tion across di­verse modal­i­ties in­clud­ing con­vert­ing an 18th-century mer­chant log into a com­plex table, or trans­form­ing a raw im­age with math­e­mat­i­cal an­no­ta­tion into pre­cise LaTeX code.

Example 2: Reconstructing equa­tions from an im­age

Example 3: Reconstructing Florence Nightingale’s orig­i­nal Polar Area Diagram into an in­ter­ac­tive chart (with a tog­gle!)

Users can rely on Gemini 3 to per­form com­plex, multi-step rea­son­ing across ta­bles and charts — even in long re­ports. In fact, the model no­tably out­per­forms the hu­man base­line on the CharXiv Reasoning bench­mark (80.5%).To il­lus­trate this, imag­ine a user an­a­lyz­ing the 62-page U.S. Census Bureau “Income in the United States: 2022” re­port with the fol­low­ing prompt: “Compare the 2021–2022 per­cent change in the Gini in­dex for “Money Income” ver­sus “Post-Tax Income”, and what caused the di­ver­gence in the post-tax mea­sure, and in terms of “Money Income”, does it show the low­est quin­tile’s share ris­ing or falling?”Swipe through the im­ages be­low to see the mod­el’s step-by-step rea­son­ing.

Visual Extraction: To an­swer the Gini Index Comparison ques­tion, Gemini lo­cated and cross-ref­er­enced this info in Figure 3 about “Money Income de­creased by 1.2 per­cent” and in Table B-3 about “Post-Tax Income in­creased by 3.2 per­cent”

Causal Logic: Crucially, Gemini 3 does not stop at the num­bers; it cor­re­lates this gap with the tex­t’s pol­icy analy­sis, cor­rectly iden­ti­fy­ing Lapse of ARPA Policies and the end of Stimulus Payments are the main causes.

Numerical Comparison: To com­pare the low­est quan­tile’s share ris­ing or falling, Gemini3 looked at table A-3, and com­pared the num­ber of 2.9 and 3.0, and con­cluded that “the share of ag­gre­gate house­hold in­come held by the low­est quin­tile was ris­ing.”

Gemini 3 Pro is our strongest spa­tial un­der­stand­ing model so far. Combined with its strong rea­son­ing, this en­ables the model to make sense of the phys­i­cal world.Point­ing ca­pa­bil­ity: Gemini 3 has the abil­ity to point at spe­cific lo­ca­tions in im­ages by out­putting pixel-pre­cise co­or­di­nates. Sequences of 2D points can be strung to­gether to per­form com­plex tasks, such as es­ti­mat­ing hu­man poses or re­flect­ing tra­jec­to­ries over time.Open vo­cab­u­lary ref­er­ences: Gemini 3 iden­ti­fies ob­jects and their in­tent us­ing an open vo­cab­u­lary. The most di­rect ap­pli­ca­tion is ro­bot­ics: the user can ask a ro­bot to gen­er­ate spa­tially grounded plans like, “Given this messy table, come up with a plan on how to sort the trash.” This also ex­tends to AR/XR de­vices, where the user can re­quest an AI as­sis­tant to “Point to the screw ac­cord­ing to the user man­ual.”

Gemini 3.0 Pro’s spa­tial un­der­stand­ing re­ally shines through its screen un­der­stand­ing of desk­top and mo­bile OS screens. This re­li­a­bil­ity helps make com­puter use agents ro­bust enough to au­to­mate repet­i­tive tasks. UI un­der­stand­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties can also en­able tasks like QA test­ing, user on­board­ing and UX an­a­lyt­ics. The fol­low­ing com­puter use demo shows the model per­ceiv­ing and click­ing with high pre­ci­sion.

Gemini 3 Pro takes a mas­sive leap for­ward in how AI un­der­stands video, the most com­plex data for­mat we in­ter­act with. It is dense, dy­namic, mul­ti­modal and rich with con­text.High frame rate un­der­stand­ing: We have op­ti­mized the model to be much stronger at un­der­stand­ing fast-paced ac­tions when sam­pling at >1 frames-per-sec­ond. Gemini 3 Pro can cap­ture rapid de­tails — vi­tal for tasks like an­a­lyz­ing golf swing me­chan­ics.

By pro­cess­ing video at 10 FPS—10x the de­fault speed—Gem­ini 3 Pro catches every swing and shift in weight, un­lock­ing deep in­sights into player me­chan­ics.

2. Video rea­son­ing with “thinking” mode: We up­graded “thinking” mode to go be­yond ob­ject recog­ni­tion to­ward true video rea­son­ing. The model can now bet­ter trace com­plex cause-and-ef­fect re­la­tion­ships over time. Instead of just iden­ti­fy­ing what is hap­pen­ing, it un­der­stands why it is hap­pen­ing.3. Turning long videos into ac­tion: Gemini 3 Pro bridges the gap be­tween video and code. It can ex­tract knowl­edge from long-form con­tent and im­me­di­ately trans­late it into func­tion­ing apps or struc­tured code.

Here are a few ways we think var­i­ous fields will ben­e­fit from Gemini 3’s ca­pa­bil­i­ties.Gem­ini 3.0 Pro’s en­hanced vi­sion ca­pa­bil­i­ties drive sig­nif­i­cant gains in the ed­u­ca­tion field, par­tic­u­larly for di­a­gram-heavy ques­tions cen­tral to math and sci­ence. It suc­cess­fully tack­les the full spec­trum of mul­ti­modal rea­son­ing prob­lems found from mid­dle school through post-sec­ondary cur­ricu­lums. This in­cludes vi­sual rea­son­ing puz­zles (like Math Kangaroo) and com­plex chem­istry and physics di­a­grams.Gem­ini 3’s vi­sual in­tel­li­gence also pow­ers the gen­er­a­tive ca­pa­bil­i­ties of Nano Banana Pro. By com­bin­ing ad­vanced rea­son­ing with pre­cise gen­er­a­tion, the model, for ex­am­ple, can help users iden­tify ex­actly where they went wrong in a home­work prob­lem.

Prompt: “Here is a photo of my home­work at­tempt. Please check my steps and tell me where I went wrong. Instead of ex­plain­ing in text, show me vi­su­ally on my im­age.” (Note: Student work is shown in blue; model cor­rec­tions are shown in red). [See prompt in Google AI Studio]

Gemini 3 Pro

stands as our most ca­pa­ble gen­eral model for med­ical and bio­med­ical im­agery un­der­stand­ing, achiev­ing state-of-the-art per­for­mance across ma­jor pub­lic bench­marks in MedXpertQA-MM (a dif­fi­cult ex­pert-level med­ical rea­son­ing exam), VQA-RAD (radiology im­agery Q&A) and MicroVQA (multimodal rea­son­ing bench­marks for mi­croscopy based bi­o­log­i­cal re­search).

Gemini 3 Pro’s en­hanced doc­u­ment un­der­stand­ing helps pro­fes­sion­als in fi­nance and law tackle highly com­plex work­flows. Finance plat­forms can seam­lessly an­a­lyze dense re­ports filled with charts and ta­bles, while le­gal plat­forms ben­e­fit from the mod­el’s so­phis­ti­cated doc­u­ment rea­son­ing.

Gemini 3 Pro im­proves the way it processes vi­sual in­puts by pre­serv­ing the na­tive as­pect ra­tio of im­ages. This dri­ves sig­nif­i­cant qual­ity im­prove­ments across the board.

Additionally, de­vel­op­ers gain gran­u­lar con­trol over per­for­mance and cost via the new me­di­a_res­o­lu­tion pa­ra­me­ter. This al­lows you to tune vi­sual to­ken us­age to bal­ance fi­delity against con­sump­tion:High res­o­lu­tion: Maximizes fi­delity for tasks re­quir­ing fine de­tail, such as dense OCR or com­plex doc­u­ment un­der­stand­ing.Low res­o­lu­tion: Optimizes for cost and la­tency on sim­pler tasks, such as gen­eral scene recog­ni­tion or long-con­text tasks.For spe­cific rec­om­men­da­tions, re­fer to our Gemini 3.0 Documentation Guide.We are ex­cited to see what you build with these new ca­pa­bil­i­ties. To get started, check out our de­vel­oper doc­u­men­ta­tion or play with the model in Google AI Studio to­day.

The UniFi 5G Max lineup was cre­ated with a clear goal in mind: de­liver a sleek, ver­sa­tile, and ex­cep­tion­ally pow­er­ful 5G in­ter­net ex­pe­ri­ence that works ef­fort­lessly in any en­vi­ron­ment.

The UniFi 5G Max makes de­ploy­ment easy, whether in­stalled lo­cally or at a re­mote site. Plug it into any PoE port and it in­stantly ap­pears as a ready to use WAN in­ter­face, no mat­ter whether plugged di­rectly into your UniFi gate­way or into your of­fice switch. No new ca­ble runs needed! It sits neatly on a desk, but you can repo­si­tion it for the best pos­si­ble sig­nal us­ing the in­cluded wall or win­dow mount.

Automatic adop­tion as a UniFi WAN in­ter­face on any PoE port.

Optimize sig­nal re­cep­tion by repo­si­tion­ing any­where on the net­work.

Ideal for home, of­fice, or re­mote site use.

A com­pact form fac­tor de­signed for fast in­stal­la­tion and flex­i­ble place­ment at the core or edge.

The 5G Max de­liv­ers down­link speeds up to 2 Gbps with ul­tra low la­tency that makes it re­li­able as a pri­mary con­nec­tion and seam­less as a backup WAN. UniFi rout­ing poli­cies and SLAs let you choose ex­actly how and when 5G is used, and for which clients and VLANs. Easily set per-SIM us­age lim­its to avoid over­age costs with just a few clicks.

High speed 5G that adapts to your net­work’s rules, not the other way around.

For tougher en­vi­ron­ments or de­ploy­ments with poor in­door cel­lu­lar cov­er­age, the out­door model main­tains the same high per­for­mance cel­lu­lar con­nec­tiv­ity with im­proved an­tenna per­for­mance in a durable IP67 rated en­clo­sure. It is built for rooftop in­stalls, off site lo­ca­tions, and mo­bile de­ploy­ments where re­li­a­bil­ity is crit­i­cal. Just like its in­door coun­ter­part, you can also con­nect it via any PoE port, any­where on your net­work, greatly sim­pli­fy­ing ca­bling re­quire­ments.

A weath­er­proof 5G de­vice built for re­li­a­bil­ity wher­ever you place it.

If you want every­thing UniFi in one de­vice, the DreamRouter 5G Max com­bines 5G con­nec­tiv­ity with WiFi 7, lo­cal stor­age, and full UniFi OS ap­pli­ca­tion sup­port. Deploy it any­where 5G is avail­able and run an en­tire high-per­for­mance and scal­able net­work stack in­stantly.

Complete rout­ing and man­age­ment in one de­vice

A com­plete UniFi sys­tem pow­ered by the reach and speed of 5G.

Every de­vice in the UniFi 5G lineup sup­ports both phys­i­cal SIMs and eSIM, giv­ing you the free­dom to choose your car­rier and switch when­ever needed with zero fric­tion. All are equipped with dual SIM slots, with one SIM re­place­able by eSIM, and are fully un­locked: any ma­jor car­rier, any type of de­ploy­ment, with one piece of hard­ware.

Carrier free­dom built di­rectly into the hard­ware from day 1. The UniFi 5G lineup brings sleek de­sign, pow­er­ful per­for­mance, easy in­stal­la­tion, and gen­uine WAN flex­i­bil­ity to every de­ploy­ment.

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I once worked at a com­pany which had an enor­mous amount of tech­ni­cal debt - mil­lions of lines of code, no unit tests, based on frame­works that were well over a decade out of date.  On one spe­cific pro­ject, we had a mar­ket need to get some Windows-only mod­ules run­ning on Linux, and rather than cross-com­pil­ing, an­other team had sim­ply copied & pasted a few hun­dred thou­sand lines of code, swap­ping Windows-specific com­po­nents for Linux-specific. For the non-tech­ni­cal reader, this is an enor­mous prob­lem be­cause now two ver­sions of the code ex­ist.  So, all fea­tures & bug fixes must be solved in two sep­a­rate code­bases that will grow apart over time.  When I heard about this, a young & naive ver­sion of me set out to fix the sit­u­a­tion….Tech debt pro­jects are al­ways a hard sell to man­age­ment, be­cause even if every­thing goes flaw­lessly, the code just does roughly what it did be­fore.  This pro­ject was no ex­cep­tion, and the op­tics weren’t great.  I did as many en­gi­neers do and “ignored the pol­i­tics”, put my head down, and got it done.  But, the pro­ject went long, and I lost man­age­men­t’s trust in the process.I re­al­ized I was es­sen­tially try­ing to solve a peo­ple prob­lem with a tech­ni­cal so­lu­tion.  Most of the de­vel­op­ers at this com­pany were happy do­ing the same thing to­day that they did yes­ter­day…and five years ago.  As Andrew Harmel-Law points out, code tends to fol­low the per­son­al­i­ties of the peo­ple that wrote it.  Personality types who in­tensely dis­like change tend not to de­sign their code with fu­ture change in mind.Most tech­ni­cal prob­lems are re­ally peo­ple prob­lems.  Think about it.  Why does tech­ni­cal debt ex­ist?  Because re­quire­ments weren’t prop­erly clar­i­fied be­fore work be­gan.  Because a sales­per­son promised an un­re­al­is­tic dead­line to a cus­tomer.  Because a de­vel­oper chose an out­dated tech­nol­ogy be­cause it was com­fort­able.  Because man­age­ment was too re­ac­tive and can­celled a pro­ject mid-flight.  Because some­one’s ego would­n’t let them see a bet­ter way of do­ing things.The core is­sue with the pro­ject was that ad­mit­ting the need for refac­tor­ing was also to ad­mit that the way the com­pany was build­ing soft­ware was bro­ken and that in­di­vid­ual skillsets were sorely out of date.  My small team was try­ing to fix one mod­ule of many, while other de­vel­op­ers were writ­ing code as they had been for decades.  I had one de­vel­oper openly tell me, “I don’t want to learn any­thing new.”  I re­al­ized that you’ll never clean up tech debt faster than oth­ers cre­ate it.  It is like triage in an emer­gency room, you must stop the bleed­ing first, then you can fix what­ever is bro­ken.The pro­ject also dis­abused me of the en­gi­neer’s ideal of a world in which en­gi­neer­ing prob­lems can be solved in a vac­uum - stay­ing out of “politics” and let­ting the work speak for it­self - a world where dead­lines don’t ex­ist…and let’s be hon­est, nei­ther do cus­tomers.  This ideal world rarely ex­ists.  The vast ma­jor­ity of pro­jects have non-tech­ni­cal stake­hold­ers, and telling them “just trust me; we’re work­ing on it” does­n’t cut it.  I re­al­ized that the per­cep­tion that your team is get­ting a lot done is just as im­por­tant as get­ting a lot done.Non-tech­ni­cal peo­ple do not in­tu­itively un­der­stand the level of ef­fort re­quired or the need for tech debt cleanup; it must be com­mu­ni­cated ef­fec­tively by en­gi­neer­ing - in both ini­tial es­ti­mates & pro­ject up­dates.  Unless lead­er­ship has an en­gi­neer­ing back­ground, the value of the tech­ni­cal debt work likely needs to be quan­ti­fied and shown as busi­ness value.Per­haps these are the lessons that prep one for more se­nior po­si­tions.  In my opin­ion, any­one above se­nior en­gi­neer level needs to know how to col­lab­o­rate cross-func­tion­ally, re­gard­less of whether they choose a tech­ni­cal or man­age­ment track.  Schools teach Computer Science, not nav­i­gat­ing per­son­al­i­ties, egos, and per­sonal blindspots.  I have worked with some in­cred­i­ble en­gi­neers, bet­ter than my­self - the type that have deep tech­ni­cal knowl­edge on just about any tech­nol­ogy you bring up.  When I was younger, I wanted to be that en­gi­neer - the “engineer’s en­gi­neer”.  But I re­al­ize now, that is not my per­son­al­ity.  I’m too ADD to be com­pletely heads down. :)For all of their (considerable) strengths, more of­ten than not, those en­gi­neers shy away from the in­ter­per­sonal.  They can be in­cred­i­bly pro­duc­tive ICs, but may fail with big­ger ini­tia­tives be­cause they are only one per­son - a sin­gle proces­sor core can only go so fast.  Per­haps equally valu­able is the “heads up coder” - the per­son who is deeply tech­ni­cal, but also able to pick their head up & see pro­ject risks com­ing (technical & oth­er­wise) and steer the team around them.

You start out your day with a nice cup of cof­fee, and think, “Ah, green­field pro­ject day…smooth sail­ing”.  You fire up Visual Studio and cre­ate a new C# pro­ject.  “First things first, I need li­brary X.” you say.  “Wait, what the?”   The full er­ror:  Package ‘MyPackage 1.0.0.0’ was re­stored us­ing ‘.NETFramework,Version=v4.6.1, .NETFramework,Version=v4.6.2, .NETFramework,Version=v4.7, .NETFramework,Version=v4.7.1, .NETFramework,Version=v4.7.2, .NETFramework,Version=v4.8, .NETFramework,Version=v4.8.1’ in­stead of the pro­ject tar­get frame­work ‘net6.0’. This pack­age may not be fully com­pat­i­ble with your pro­ject.   “Ok” you think, “That li­brary is a bit older.  I’ll go up­date the li­brary pro­ject to .NET 6 to match my pro­ject.  But, where is .NET 6?     “Ok, what about my new pro­ject?  Just as a test, does the warn­ing go away if I set it to an older .NET Framework?  Wait, where are the .NET Framework ver­sions?…

Pointers are funny things.  They are one of the make or break con­cepts for be­gin­ners, and even years later, they can cause grief to ex­pe­ri­enced de­vel­op­ers.  I am no ex­cep­tion.  Here is one such story: I was faced with a class which I wanted to refac­tor.  It can be sim­pli­fied as fol­lows: In the in­ter­est of break­ing up the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, I added a cou­ple of in­ter­faces. The idea is that I can pass around smart point­ers to these in­ter­faces and be­gin to de­cou­ple por­tions of the code.  For ex­am­ple, I can in­ject them into classes that need them: However, I made a mis­take.  I blame it on years of us­ing boost::in­trustive_ptr in­stead of std::shared_ptr, but enough ex­cuses.  Let’s see if you can spot it. Do you see it?  If so, give your­self 5 points.  If not, maybe af­ter see­ing the out­put: ‘second’ go­ing out of scope… Destructor ‘first’ go­ing out of scope… ‘root’ go­ing out of scope… All done… Both shared point­ers ( first & sec­ond…

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KISUMU, Kenya (AP) — A high court in Kenya on Thursday de­clared un­con­sti­tu­tional sec­tions of a seed law that pre­vented farm­ers from shar­ing and sell­ing in­dige­nous seeds in what food cam­paign­ers have called a land­mark win for food se­cu­rity.

Farmers in Kenya could face up to two years’ im­pris­on­ment and a fine of 1 mil­lion Kenya shillings ($7,700) for shar­ing seeds through their com­mu­nity seed banks, ac­cord­ing to a seed law signed in 2012.

Justice Rhoda Rutto on Thursday said sec­tions of the seed law that gave gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials pow­ers to raid seed banks and seize seeds were also un­con­sti­tu­tional.

The law was in­tro­duced as a mea­sure to curb grow­ing sale of coun­ter­feit seeds that were caus­ing loses in the agri­cul­tural sec­tor and gave sole seed trad­ing rights to li­censed com­pa­nies.

The case had been filed by 15 small­holder farm­ers, who are mem­bers of com­mu­nity seed banks that have been in op­er­a­tion for years, pre­serv­ing and shar­ing seeds among col­leagues.

A farmer, Samuel Wathome, who was among the 15, said the old farm­ing prac­tices had been vin­di­cated.

“My grand­mother saved seeds, and to­day the court has said I can do the same for my grand­chil­dren with­out fear of the po­lice or of prison,” he said.

Elizabeth Atieno, a food cam­paigner at Greenpeace Africa, called the win a “victory for our cul­ture, our re­silience, and our fu­ture.”

“By val­i­dat­ing in­dige­nous seeds, the court has struck a blow against the cor­po­rate cap­ture of our food sys­tem. We can fi­nally say that in Kenya, feed­ing your com­mu­nity with cli­mate-re­silient, lo­cally adapted seeds is no longer a crime,” she said.

Food cam­paign­ers have in the past en­cour­aged gov­ern­ments to work with farm­ers to pre­serve in­dige­nous seeds as a way of en­sur­ing food se­cu­rity by of­fer­ing farm­ers more plant va­ri­eties.

Indigenous seeds are be­lieved to be drought re­sis­tant and adapt­able to the cli­mate con­di­tions of their na­tive ar­eas, and hence of­ten out­per­form hy­brid seeds.

Kenya has a na­tional seed bank based near the cap­i­tal Nairobi where in­dige­nous seeds are stored in cold rooms, but farm­ers say com­mu­nity seed banks are equally im­por­tant for va­ri­ety and prox­im­ity to the farmer.

The coun­try has faced chal­lenges in the seed sec­tor where coun­ter­feit seeds were sold to farm­ers, lead­ing to losses amount­ing to mil­lions of shillings in a coun­try that re­lies on rain-fed agri­cul­ture.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite have proven that ARM proces­sors have earned a place in the lap­top mar­ket, as de­vices like the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 stand out with their long bat­tery life and an af­ford­able price point.

MetaComputing is now of­fer­ing an al­ter­na­tive to Intel, AMD and the Snapdragon X se­ries. Specifically, the com­pany has in­tro­duced a main­board that can be in­stalle in the Framework Laptop 13 or in a mini PC case. This main­board is equipped with a CIX CP8180 ARM chipset, which is also found in­side the Minisforum MS-R1. This proces­sor has a to­tal of eight ARM Cortex-A720 per­for­mance cores, the two fastest can hit boost clock speeds of up to 2.6 GHz. Moreover, there are four Cortex-A520 ef­fi­ciency cores.

A quar­ter-cen­tury af­ter its pub­li­ca­tion, one of the most in­flu­en­tial re­search ar­ti­cles on the po­ten­tial car­cino­genic­ity of glyphosate has been re­tracted for “several crit­i­cal is­sues that are con­sid­ered to un­der­mine the aca­d­e­mic in­tegrity of this ar­ti­cle and its con­clu­sions.” In a re­trac­tion no­tice dated Friday, November 28, the jour­nal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology an­nounced that the study, pub­lished in April 2000 and con­clud­ing the her­bi­cide was safe, has been re­moved from its archives. The dis­avowal comes 25 years af­ter pub­li­ca­tion and eight years af­ter thou­sands of in­ter­nal Monsanto doc­u­ments were made pub­lic dur­ing US court pro­ceed­ings (the “Monsanto Papers”), re­veal­ing that the ac­tual au­thors of the ar­ti­cle were not the listed sci­en­tists — Gary M. Williams (New York Medical College), Robert Kroes (Ritox, Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ian C. Munro (Intertek Cantox, Canada) — but rather Monsanto em­ploy­ees.

Known as “ghostwriting,” this prac­tice is con­sid­ered a form of sci­en­tific fraud. It in­volves com­pa­nies pay­ing re­searchers to sign their names to re­search ar­ti­cles they did not write. The mo­ti­va­tion is clear: When a study sup­ports the safety of a pes­ti­cide or drug, it ap­pears far more cred­i­ble if not au­thored by sci­en­tists em­ployed by the com­pany mar­ket­ing the prod­uct.

You have 73.89% of this ar­ti­cle left to read. The rest is for sub­scribers only.

The State Department is in­struct­ing its staff to re­ject visa ap­pli­ca­tions from peo­ple who worked on fact-check­ing, con­tent mod­er­a­tion or other ac­tiv­i­ties the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion con­sid­ers “censorship” of Americans’ speech.

The di­rec­tive, sent in an in­ter­nal memo on Tuesday, is fo­cused on ap­pli­cants for H-1B visas for highly skilled work­ers, which are fre­quently used by tech com­pa­nies, among other sec­tors. The memo was first re­ported by Reuters; NPR also ob­tained a copy.

“If you un­cover ev­i­dence an ap­pli­cant was re­spon­si­ble for, or com­plicit in, cen­sor­ship or at­tempted cen­sor­ship of pro­tected ex­pres­sion in the United States, you should pur­sue a find­ing that the ap­pli­cant is in­el­i­gi­ble” for a visa, the memo says. It refers to a pol­icy an­nounced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in May re­strict­ing visas from be­ing is­sued to “foreign of­fi­cials and per­sons who are com­plicit in cen­sor­ing Americans.”

The Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion has been highly crit­i­cal of tech com­pa­nies’ ef­forts to po­lice what peo­ple are al­lowed to post on their plat­forms and of the broader field of trust and safety, the tech in­dus­try’s term for teams that fo­cus on pre­vent­ing abuse, fraud, il­le­gal con­tent, and other harm­ful be­hav­ior on­line.

President Trump was banned from mul­ti­ple so­cial me­dia plat­forms in the af­ter­math of his sup­port­ers’ at­tack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While those bans have since been lifted, the pres­i­dent and mem­bers of his ad­min­is­tra­tion fre­quently cite that ex­pe­ri­ence as ev­i­dence for their claims that tech com­pa­nies un­fairly tar­get con­ser­v­a­tives — even as many tech lead­ers have eased their poli­cies in the face of that back­lash.

Tuesday’s memo calls out H-1B visa ap­pli­cants in par­tic­u­lar “as many work in or have worked in the tech sec­tor, in­clud­ing in so­cial me­dia or fi­nan­cial ser­vices com­pa­nies in­volved in the sup­pres­sion of pro­tected ex­pres­sion.”

It di­rects con­sular of­fi­cers to “thoroughly ex­plore” the work his­to­ries of ap­pli­cants, both new and re­turn­ing, by re­view­ing their re­sumes, LinkedIn pro­files, and ap­pear­ances in me­dia ar­ti­cles for ac­tiv­i­ties in­clud­ing com­bat­ting mis­in­for­ma­tion, dis­in­for­ma­tion or false nar­ra­tives, fact-check­ing, con­tent mod­er­a­tion, com­pli­ance, and trust and safety.

“I’m alarmed that trust and safety work is be­ing con­flated with ‘censorship’,” said Alice Goguen Hunsberger, who has worked in trust and safety at tech com­pa­nies in­clud­ing OpenAI and Grindr.

“Trust and safety is a broad prac­tice which in­cludes crit­i­cal and life-sav­ing work to pro­tect chil­dren and stop CSAM [child sex­ual abuse ma­te­r­ial], as well as pre­vent­ing fraud, scams, and sex­tor­tion. T&S work­ers are fo­cused on mak­ing the in­ter­net a safer and bet­ter place, not cen­sor­ing just for the sake of it,” she said. “Bad ac­tors that tar­get Americans come from all over the world and it’s so im­por­tant to have peo­ple who un­der­stand dif­fer­ent lan­guages and cul­tures on trust and safety teams — hav­ing global work­ers at tech com­pa­nies in [trust and safety] ab­solutely keeps Americans safer.”

In a state­ment, a State Department spokesper­son who de­clined to give their name said the de­part­ment does not com­ment on “allegedly leaked doc­u­ments,” but added: “the Administration has made clear that it de­fends Americans’ free­dom of ex­pres­sion against for­eign­ers who wish to cen­sor them. We do not sup­port aliens com­ing to the United States to work as cen­sors muz­zling Americans.”

The state­ment con­tin­ued: “In the past, the President him­self was the vic­tim of this kind of abuse when so­cial me­dia com­pa­nies locked his ac­counts. He does not want other Americans to suf­fer this way. Allowing for­eign­ers to lead this type of cen­sor­ship would both in­sult and in­jure the American peo­ple.”

First Amendment ex­perts crit­i­cized the mem­o’s guid­ance as it­self a po­ten­tial vi­o­la­tion of free speech rights.

“People who study mis­in­for­ma­tion and work on con­tent-mod­er­a­tion teams aren’t en­gaged in ‘censorship’— they’re en­gaged in ac­tiv­i­ties that the First Amendment was de­signed to pro­tect. This pol­icy is in­co­her­ent and un­con­sti­tu­tional,” said Carrie DeCell, se­nior staff at­tor­ney and leg­isla­tive ad­vi­sor at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in a state­ment.

Even as the ad­min­is­tra­tion has tar­geted those it claims are en­gaged in cen­sor­ing Americans, it has also tight­ened its own scrutiny of visa ap­pli­cants’ on­line speech.

On Wednesday, the State Department an­nounced it would re­quire H-1B visa ap­pli­cants and their de­pen­dents to set their so­cial me­dia pro­files to “public” so they can be re­viewed by U. S. of­fi­cials.

I was 25 years old when I started writ­ing the blog ver­sion of Res Obscura, which ran from 2010 to 2023 (and still ex­ists here). This was the early sum­mer of 2010. I was a sec­ond-year PhD stu­dent in his­tory, liv­ing with two room­mates in a 1920s bun­ga­low on the east side of Austin.

And I was very ded­i­cated to the idea that you should aim to write a new blog post every day:

This is a con­cept that the 40-year-old ver­sion of me, with two young kids and zero free time, can­not even be­gin to fathom.

It’s also a prac­tice of the old in­ter­net that sim­ply does­n’t ex­ist any­more — one of many dig­i­tal be­hav­iors that was swal­lowed up by so­cial me­dia. That whole world of blog­ging (exploratory, low-stakes, con­ver­sa­tional, and as­sum­ing a read­er­ship of peo­ple who had book­marked your URL and who read it on a desk­top or lap­top com­puter) is al­most en­tirely gone now.

My first two years writ­ing Res Obscura in its blog for­mat were great fun. I be­gan to de­velop an in­tel­lec­tual com­mu­nity, form­ing con­tacts with, for in­stance, the won­der­ful Public Domain Review (founded 2011 and still go­ing strong). I linked to and was linked to by a range of other his­tory blog­gers who I saw as kin­dred spir­its, some of whom seem to have dis­ap­peared (BibliOdyssey) oth­ers of whom have be­come well-known writ­ers (Lindsey Fitzharris).

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It was pretty ad­dic­tive when a post went vi­ral. In those hal­cyon days when writ­ten blog posts about ob­scure his­tor­i­cal sub­jects were vi­able sources of vi­ral con­tent, you could end up get­ting cov­ered in in­ter­na­tional me­dia for, say, dis­cov­er­ing a cat’s paw prints on a 15th cen­tury Croatian man­u­script.

That spike in read­er­ship around 2018 was par­tially from a post about 17th cen­tury food that, un­ex­pect­edly, led to me speak­ing about snail wa­ter on New Zealand pub­lic ra­dio.

But by then, I was start­ing to move on. I was hard at work on my first book — the book I needed to write for tenure — and was be­com­ing a bit dispir­ited by the in­creas­ingly click-bait na­ture of blog­ging, not to men­tion the ten­dency of so­cial me­dia to el­e­vate toxic be­hav­ior and con­tro­versy over lovely and fas­ci­nat­ing but to­tally un­con­tro­ver­sial things like the Croatian cat paw prints.

I also (then and now) have no ap­petite for short-form video con­tent, and still less for the type of his­tory ex­plainer videos — “here’s a two hour deep dive into why this movie is his­tor­i­cally in­ac­cu­rate” or “everything you need to know about such-and-such fa­mous per­son” — that seem to do well on YouTube.

Switching over to a Substack newslet­ter, in the sum­mer of 2023, re­vived my in­ter­est in writ­ing on­line. It felt like re­join­ing an in­tel­lec­tual com­mu­nity — not quite the same as the golden age of blog­ging in the 2000s, but some­thing equally as lively, in a way that I don’t think quite gets enough credit in the 2020s.

From Weird Medieval Guys to ’s Noted to ’s Fernando Pessoa-esque The Hinternet and the newslet­ters of well-known his­to­ri­ans like David Bell (French Reflections), as well as the more gen­eral au­di­ence or po­lit­i­cally ori­ented newslet­ters that still dig deep into his­tor­i­cal top­ics (like ’s Unpopular Front and ’s newslet­ter), I would say that Substack is now the most in­ter­est­ing place on­line for dis­cus­sions not just of his­tory, but of hu­man­is­tic top­ics as a whole.

Needless to say, there’s also a ton of peo­ple writ­ing about the in­ter­sec­tion of AI, tech­nol­ogy and con­tem­po­rary so­ci­ety (of which I would sin­gle out AI Log, Ethan Mollick’s One Useful Thing, , and ).

So why have I kept writ­ing Res Obscura through all the changes of the world — and of my own life and in­ter­ests — since the sum­mer of 2010? Simple: I love shar­ing things I find in­ter­est­ing, es­pe­cially things which are not avail­able else­where on­line. Most of my posts are writ­ten be­cause I search for in­for­ma­tion on some­thing and don’t find it.

The niche na­ture of Res Obscura (from 17th cen­tury co­caine to Kinetoscopes to Henry James: the RPG) is pre­cisely why I en­joy writ­ing it.

I am deeply grate­ful that 15 years and 8,300 sub­scribers later, I have a place on­line where I can share idio­syn­cratic knowl­edge and writ­ing with an equally idio­syn­cratic group of read­ers.

Now here’s the in­evitable part where I ask if you would be will­ing to sup­port my con­tin­ued work. To that end, I have set up a spe­cial hol­i­day dis­count valid un­til the end of December. Thank you for read­ing!

A de­tail of a trompe-l’œil “dome” by the Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna, Camera degli Sposi, Ducal Palace, Mantua, Italy. Featured in a 2011 Res Obscura post called “The Art of Fooling the Eye.”

Whenever I see the com­ment // this should never hap­pen in code, I try to find out the ex­act con­di­tions un­der which it could hap­pen. And in 90% of cases, I find a way to do just that. More of­ten than not, the de­vel­oper just has­n’t con­sid­ered all edge cases or fu­ture code changes.

In fact, the rea­son why I like this com­ment so much is that it of­ten marks the ex­act spot where strong guar­an­tees fall apart. Often, vi­o­lat­ing im­plicit in­vari­ants that aren’t en­forced by the com­piler are the root cause.

Yes, the com­piler pre­vents mem­ory safety is­sues, and the stan­dard li­brary is best-in-class. But even the stan­dard li­brary has its warts and bugs in busi­ness logic can still hap­pen.

All we can work with are hard-learned pat­terns to write more de­fen­sive Rust code, learned through­out years of ship­ping Rust code to pro­duc­tion. I’m not talk­ing about de­sign pat­terns here, but rather small id­ioms, which are rarely doc­u­mented, but make a big dif­fer­ence in the over­all code qual­ity.

if !matching_users.is_empty() {

let ex­ist­ing_user = &matching_users[0];

What if you refac­tor it and for­get to keep the is_empty() check? The prob­lem is that the vec­tor in­dex­ing is de­cou­pled from check­ing the length. So match­ing_users[0] can panic at run­time if the vec­tor is empty.

Checking the length and in­dex­ing are two sep­a­rate op­er­a­tions, which can be changed in­de­pen­dently. That’s our first im­plicit in­vari­ant that’s not en­forced by the com­piler.

If we use slice pat­tern match­ing in­stead, we’ll only get ac­cess to the el­e­ment if the cor­rect match arm is ex­e­cuted.

match match­ing_users.as_s­lice() {

[] => todo!(“What to do if no users found!?“),

[existing_user] => { // Safe! Compiler guar­an­tees ex­actly one el­e­ment

// No need to in­dex into the vec­tor,

// we can di­rectly use `existing_user` here

_ => Err(RepositoryError::DuplicateUsers)

Note how this au­to­mat­i­cally un­cov­ered one more edge case: what if the list is empty? We had­n’t ex­plic­itly con­sid­ered this case be­fore. The com­piler-en­forced pat­tern match­ing re­quires us to think about all pos­si­ble states! This is a com­mon pat­tern in all ro­bust Rust code: putting the com­piler in charge of en­forc­ing in­vari­ants.

When ini­tial­iz­ing an ob­ject with many fields, it’s tempt­ing to use ..Default::default() to fill in the rest. In prac­tice, this is a com­mon source of bugs. You might for­get to ex­plic­itly set a new field later when you add it to the struct (thus us­ing the de­fault value in­stead, which might not be what you want), or you might not be aware of all the fields that are be­ing set to de­fault val­ues.

Instead of this:

let foo = Foo {

field1: val­ue1,

field2: val­ue2,

..Default::default() // Implicitly sets all other fields

let foo = Foo {

field1: val­ue1,

field2: val­ue2,

field3: val­ue3, // Explicitly set all fields

field4: val­ue4,

Yes, it’s slightly more ver­bose, but what you gain is that the com­piler will force you to han­dle all fields ex­plic­itly. Now when you add a new field to Foo, the com­piler will re­mind you to set it here as well and re­flect on which value makes sense.

If you still pre­fer to use Default but don’t want to lose com­piler checks, you can also de­struc­ture the de­fault in­stance:

let Foo { field1, field2, field3, field4 } = Foo::default();

This way, you get all the de­fault val­ues as­signed to lo­cal vari­ables and you can still over­ride what you need:

let foo = Foo {

field1: val­ue1, // Override what you need

field2: val­ue2, // Override what you need

field3, // Use de­fault value

field4, // Use de­fault value

This pat­tern gives you the best of both worlds:

You get de­fault val­ues with­out du­pli­cat­ing de­fault logic

The com­piler will com­plain when new fields are added to the struct

It’s clear which fields use de­faults and which have cus­tom val­ues

Completely de­struc­tur­ing a struct into its com­po­nents can also be a de­fen­sive strat­egy for API ad­her­ence. For ex­am­ple, let’s say you’re build­ing a pizza or­der­ing sys­tem and have an or­der type like this:

struct PizzaOrder {

size: PizzaSize,

top­pings: Vec

For your or­der track­ing sys­tem, you want to com­pare or­ders based on what’s ac­tu­ally on the pizza - the size, top­pings, and crust_­type. The or­dered_at time­stamp should­n’t af­fect whether two or­ders are con­sid­ered the same.

Here’s the prob­lem with the ob­vi­ous ap­proach:

impl PartialEq for PizzaOrder {

fn eq(&self, other: &Self) -> bool {

self.size == other.size

&& self.top­pings == other.top­pings

&& self.crust_­type == other.crust_­type

// Oops! What hap­pens when we add ex­tra_cheese or de­liv­ery_ad­dress later?

Now imag­ine your team adds a field for cus­tomiza­tion op­tions:

struct PizzaOrder {

size: PizzaSize,

top­pings: Vec

Your PartialEq im­ple­men­ta­tion still com­piles, but is it cor­rect? Should ex­tra_cheese be part of the equal­ity check? Probably yes - a pizza with ex­tra cheese is a dif­fer­ent or­der! But you’ll never know be­cause the com­piler won’t re­mind you to think about it.

impl PartialEq for PizzaOrder {

fn eq(&self, other: &Self) -> bool {

let Self {

size,

top­pings,

crust_­type,

or­dered_at: _,

} = self;

let Self {

size: oth­er_­size,

top­pings: oth­er_­top­pings,

crust_­type: oth­er_crust,

or­dered_at: _,

} = other;

size == oth­er_­size && top­pings == oth­er_­top­pings && crust_­type == oth­er_crust

Now when some­one adds the ex­tra_cheese field, this code won’t com­pile any­more. The com­piler forces you to de­cide: should ex­tra_cheese be in­cluded in the com­par­i­son or ex­plic­itly ig­nored with ex­tra_cheese: _?

This pat­tern works for any trait im­ple­men­ta­tion where you need to han­dle struct fields: Hash, Debug, Clone, etc. It’s es­pe­cially valu­able in code­bases where structs evolve fre­quently as re­quire­ments change.

Code Smell: From Impls That Are Really TryFrom

Sometimes there’s no con­ver­sion that will work 100% of the time. That’s fine. When that’s the case, re­sist the temp­ta­tion to of­fer a From im­ple­men­ta­tion out of habit; use TryFrom in­stead.

Here’s an ex­am­ple of TryFrom in dis­guise:

impl From for DetectorStartupErrorSubject {

fn from(re­port: &DetectorStartupErrorReport) -> Self {

let post­fix = re­port

.get_identifier()

.or_else(get_binary_name)

.unwrap_or_else(|| UNKNOWN_DETECTOR_SUBJECT.to_string());

Self(StreamSubject::from(

for­mat!(“apps.er­rors.de­tec­tors.startup.{post­fix}“).as_str(),

The un­wrap_or_else is a hint that this con­ver­sion can fail in some way. We set a de­fault value in­stead, but is it re­ally the right thing to do for all callers? This should be a TryFrom im­ple­men­ta­tion in­stead, mak­ing the fal­li­ble na­ture ex­plicit. We fail fast in­stead of con­tin­u­ing with a po­ten­tially flawed busi­ness logic.

It’s tempt­ing to use match in com­bi­na­tion with a catch-all pat­tern like _ => {}, but this can haunt you later. The prob­lem is that you might for­get to han­dle a new case that was added later.

match self {

Self::Variant1 => { /* … */ }

Self::Variant2 => { /* … */ }

_ => { /* catch-all */ }

match self {

Self::Variant1 => { /* … */ }

Self::Variant2 => { /* … */ }

Self::Variant3 => { /* … */ }

Self::Variant4 => { /* … */ }

By spelling out all vari­ants ex­plic­itly, the com­piler will warn you when a new vari­ant is added, forc­ing you to han­dle it. Another case of putting the com­piler to work.

If the code for two vari­ants is the same, you can group them:

match self {

Self::Variant1 => { /* … */ }

Skip to prod­uct in­for­ma­tion

The in­de­pen­dent European Do It Together (DIT) Linux phone, shaped by the peo­ple who use it.

Your 99 € is fully re­fund­able and de­ducted from the full price later.

This prod­uct will only be pro­duced if at least 2000 units are sup­ported by January 04, 2026 23:55 (Helsinki)

By re­serv­ing a de­vice, you di­rectly con­tribute bring the new Jolla Phone into re­al­ity. The prod­uct will be made once we reach 2,000 pre-or­ders. This pro­ject goes ahead when we reach 2,000 pre-or­ders. If we don’t hit the goal, your pay­ment is re­funded.

This item is a re­cur­ring or de­ferred pur­chase. By con­tin­u­ing, I agree to the and au­tho­rize you to charge my pay­ment method at the prices, fre­quency and dates listed on this page un­til my or­der is ful­filled or I can­cel, if per­mit­ted.

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12GB RAM and 256GB stor­age ex­pand­able up to 2TB

No track­ing, no call­ing home, no hid­den an­a­lyt­ic­sUser con­fig­urable phys­i­cal Privacy Switch - turn off you mi­cro­phone, blue­tooth, Android apps, or what­ever you wish

Available in three dis­tinct colours in­spired by Nordic na­ture

Defined to­gether with the Community

Over the past months, Sailfish OS com­mu­nity mem­bers voted on what the next Jolla de­vice should be. The key char­ac­ter­is­tics, spec­i­fi­ca­tions and fea­tures of the de­vice. Based on com­mu­nity vot­ing and real user needs, this de­vice has only one mis­sion:

Community Voice, Real Device: The ques­tion­naire re­ceived over­whelm­ing flow of in­put and this pro­ject cap­tures that­Now it is time to act! Your pre-or­der de­ter­mines whether the pro­ject be­comes re­al­ity

No track­ing, no call­ing home, no hid­den an­a­lyt­ics.

Your phone, your apps, your con­trol

Run na­tive Sailfish apps, Android apps with AppSupport, or go fully de-Googled when­ever you wish — sim­ply by shut­ting down the Android apps.

Unlike main­stream phones, Sailfish OS is de­signed not to har­vest your data. No track­ers. No pro­fil­ing. No data mon­eti­sa­tion. Your phone should work for you, not ex­ploit you.

Sailfish OS is proven to out­live main­stream sup­port cy­cles. Long-term OS sup­port, guar­an­teed for min­i­mum 5 years. Incremental up­dates, and no forced ob­so­les­cence.

Your Phone Shouldn’t Spy on YouMainstream phones send vast amounts of back­ground data. A com­mon Android phone sends megabytes of data per day to Google even if the de­vice is not used at all. Sailfish OS stays silent un­less you ex­plic­itly al­low con­nec­tions.

DIT: DO IT TOGETHER

You voted on the de­viceYou guided its specs and de­f­i­n­i­tio­nAnd now you help bring it to life

Our Community

Because this is a com­mu­nity-funded de­vice and we need com­mit­ted pre-or­ders to turn the de­signs into a full prod­uct pro­gram and com­mit to or­der the first pro­duc­tion batch. If we reach 2,000 units we start the full prod­uct pro­gram. If not, you get a full re­fund.

What is the nor­mal price of the prod­uct, do I get dis­count par­tic­i­pat­ing to the pre-or­der?

The fi­nal price of the prod­uct is not set yet but we es­ti­mate it to set­tle be­tween 599€ - 699€ (incl. your lo­cal VAT). The fi­nal price de­pends on the con­fir­ma­tion of the fi­nal spec­i­fi­ca­tion and the Bill-of-Materials, which hap­pens on due course dur­ing the prod­uct pro­gram. Notably in par­tic­u­lar mem­ory com­po­nent prices have had ex­cep­tion­ally high volatil­ity dur­ing this year. By pre-or­der­ing you con­firm your spe­cial price of to­tal 499€.

Is this phone real or just a con­cept?

It is real. Definition and real elec­tro-me­chan­i­cal de­sign is un­der­way, based on the com­mu­nity vot­ing. To turn the de­signs into a full prod­uct pro­gram and com­mit to or­der the first batch, we need in min­i­mum 2,000 com­mit­ted pre-or­ders.

When will full specs be avail­able?

Once the man­u­fac­tur­ing path­way is con­firmed at 2,000 pre-or­ders.

Will there be ac­ces­sories, like a spare bat­tery and pro­tec­tive case?

Yes, there will be. We’ll make those avail­able on due course the pro­ject.

When will the phone ship?

Will the Jolla Phone work out­side Europe, can I use it e.g. in the U. S.?

Yes, we will de­sign the cel­lu­lar band con­fig­u­ra­tion to en­able global trav­el­ling as much as pos­si­ble, in­clud­ing e.g. roam­ing in the U.S. car­rier net­works.

Can I buy the Jolla Phone if I’m out­side Europe, can I use it e.g. in the U.S.?

The ini­tial sales mar­kets are EU, UK, Switzerland and Norway. Entering other mar­kets, such as the U.S. and Canada are to be de­cided due course based on po­ten­tial in­ter­est from the ar­eas.  We will de­sign the cel­lu­lar band con­fig­u­ra­tion to en­able po­ten­tial fu­ture mar­kets, in­clud­ing ma­jor U.S. car­rier net­works.