On behalf of all the NaNo 2.0 volunteers, I’m so happy to welcome you to the start of the 28th-annual novel writing season. Let the countdown to NaNoWriMo commence!

I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce. This may seem unintuitive at first, since the set of possible problems one could ask is infinite. Perhaps the following analogy can help: a country or region can suffer a critical shortage of drinking water while simultaneously being surrounded by a massive ocean. One can easily generate any number of open problems in mathematics at will, such as working out the 10^10^10th digit of pi. But the vast majority of such problems are not worth focusing attention on: they show no particular propensity to reveal any further insights or connections to other questions, or may either be too easy or too impossible relative to known techniques to learn anything from the exercise. (1/4)

This is the in-game recording of the Astra run with pause (thinking) removed. It does not represent how it plays in real time. The model controls Portal through mcp + a modified SourcePauseTool. The game stays paused while the model thinks; once the model sends an input sequence, SPT unpauses and executes it. 00:00 Chambers 00–01 05:04 Chambers 02–03 07:22 Chambers 04–05 09:40 Chambers 06–07 12:34 Chamber 08 14:34 Chamber 09 15:17 Chamber 10 17:37 Chambers 11–12 22:38 Chamber 13 25:10 Chamber 14 31:38 Chamber 15 42:32 Chamber 16 49:54 Chamber 17 1:02:59 Chamber 18 1:14:51 Chamber 19 & Escape — Part 1 1:26:05 Escape — Part 2 1:32:40 Escape — Part 3 1:44:21 Escape — Part 4 / GLaDOS GitHub repo for setup details, run logs, & config: https://github.com/cozyblaze/portal-agent Changelog: - Big refactor for SPT. Agent segments now run through native TAS playback. - Added position observation to IPC. tas_run and observe can report player facing (incl. roll) and position. - Screenshots now defaults to 360p (full 720p still available) & they can be saved. - Trimmed result fields. - Moved SKILL.md to AGENTS.md & shortened the prompt. - Moved API reference to portal_documentation mcp tool. - Added demo recording feature. - Changed Portal version to build 5135 (Source Unpack). --- X updates: https://x.com/cozyblazex

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is launching a review to potentially take back state funding from Dallas and Houston airports due to amenities that were created for Muslim travelers. He is also calling on ...