cartero Tuesday, August 11, 2026 · No. 25888
RAG

Shaping Product Understanding with Contrastive Reinforcement Learning

Etsy’s marketplace is defined by the creativity and craftsmanship of our sellers and the hundreds of millions of highly diverse products they offer. You can find silversmiths who cold-forge recycled sterling silver, weavers who dye raw fleece with indigo and black walnut, and ceramicists who throw stoneware on a kick wheel. These details define each product and often determine whether it matches a buyer’s taste, style, and interests. Sometimes buyers know exactly what they want, searching...

AI Psychosis

Whither Computing?

The emergence of GenAI-based coding agents is changing software development as we know it.

X / Twitter

Paging Charity! How can engineering leaders avoid becoming Bond villains?​​​​‌‍​‍​‍‌‍‌​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‌‍‍‌‌‍‍​‍​‍​‍‍​‍​‍‌​‌‍​‌‌‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‌​‌‍‌​‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‍​‍​‍​‍​​‍​‍‌‍‍​‌​‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌‍​‍​‍​‍‍​‍​‍‌‍‍​‌‌​‌‌​‌​​‌​​‍‍​‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‌‌​​‍‍‌​‌‌​‌‍​‌‌‍​‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‍‌‍‌‌‌​‍‌‍‌‍‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‍‍‌‍​‌‍​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‌​​‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌​​‍‌‍‌‌‍‌‍‌​‌‍‌‌​‌‌​​‌​‍‌‍‌‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‍​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌​​‌​​‍​‍​‌‍‌‌​‌‌​‌‍​​​‌‍​‌‌‍‌‍​‍‌‌‍‌‍​​​‌‍​‌‌‍​‌​‍‌​‌​‌‍‌​​‌​​‌‍​‍‌‌‍​‍‌‍‌​​‍‌​​​​‍‌‌‍‌‍​‌​​​​‌‌‌‍​‌‌‍‌​​‌‍​​​​‌​‌‍​‌‌‍​‌​‌​‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌​​‌‍‌‌​‌‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‌‍‌‌‌​​‌‍‌​‌‌​​‍‌​​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍​​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌​‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‌‌‌‌​‍‌‍​​‌‌‍‍​‌‌​‌‌​‌​​‌​​‍‌‌​​‌​​‌​‍‌‌​​‍‌​‌‍​‍‌‌​​‍‌​‌‍‌‍​‌‍‌‌​​‍‍‌​‌‌​‌‍​‌‌‍​‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‍‌‍‌‌‌​‍‌‍‌‍‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‍‍‌‍​‌‍​‍‌‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌​​‌​​‍​‍​‌‍‌‌​‌‌​‌‍​​​‌‍​‌‌‍‌‍​‍‌‌‍‌‍​​​‌‍​‌‌‍​‌​‍‌​‌​‌‍‌​​‌​​‌‍​‍‌‌‍​‍‌‍‌​​‍‌​​​​‍‌‌‍‌‍​‌​​​​‌‌‌‍​‌‌‍‌​​‌‍​​​​‌​‌‍​‌‌‍​‌​‌​‍‌‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌​​‌‍‌‌​‌‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‌‍‌‌‌​​‌‍‌​‌‌​​‍‌‍‌​​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍​​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌​‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‍‌‍‌​​‌‍‌‌‌​‍‌​‌​​‌‍‌‌‌‍​‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌‍‌‍‌‌​‌‌​​‌‌‌‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍‍​‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​​‍​‍‌‌

If you want your values to spread throughout the industry, the best thing you can possibly do is succeed and make others want to imitate you.​​​​‌‍​‍​‍‌‍‌​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‌‍‍‌‌‍‍​‍​‍​‍‍​‍​‍‌​‌‍​‌‌‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‌​‌‍‌​‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‍​‍​‍​‍​​‍​‍‌‍‍​‌​‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌‍​‍​‍​��...

xAI

The Download: brain-melting heatwaves and unprecedented OpenAI restrictions

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Heat waves mess with your brain. Scientists are trying to figure out why. —Jessica Hamzelou It’s been hot in London this week. Really hot. A dangerous heat wave has hit Western…

Time-Series Databases

Shaun Thomas: Looking Forward to Postgres 19: Split Personality

Postgres has had native support for declarative partitions since version 10, and every release since has filed off another rough edge. We got partition-wise joins, default partitions, hash partitioning, and the ability to attach and detach partitions concurrently. By any reasonable measure, declarative partitioning is one of the great success stories of modern Postgres.Despite the power here, it's always been a kind of one-way ratchet. Creating or dropping partitions was easy. But reorganizin...

AI Coding Tools

Jan Wieremjewicz: Why PostgreSQL needs an AI usage policy

We often hear that open source is about people. People who contribute their time and, in a way, parts of their lives to work on software that is available for everyone without limitations and without licensing costs. The more popular a project becomes, the more often we also hear about the need for sustainable open source. Nothing surprising here. Often projects start off as “scratching ones itch” and it’s very appreciated when others notice the work done. The more time passes and the m...

Spark

Turning Scattered Data Into Queryable Segments at Scale: How Razorpay Built Its Customer Data…

Turning Scattered Data Into Queryable Segments at Scale: How Razorpay Built Its Customer Data PlatformA consent-native CDP that serves audience segments across 500M+ user profiles in under 30ms, with PII isolated to the source systems.The Problem We Were SolvingA customer opens her favourite online shopping app, adds a few items to her cart, and pays ₹1,200 via UPI, powered invisibly by Razorpay. A week later she returns and pays using a saved Visa card from her laptop. Later that month,...

SRE

Code isn’t the only thing causing your production failures​​​​‌‍​‍​‍‌‍‌​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‌‍‍‌‌‍‍​‍​‍​‍‍​‍​‍‌​‌‍​‌‌‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‌​‌‍‌​‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‍​‍​‍​‍​​‍​‍‌‍‍​‌​‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌‍​‍​‍​‍‍​‍​‍‌‍‍​‌‌​‌‌​‌​​‌​​‍‍​‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‌‌​​‍‍‌​‌‌​‌‍​‌‌‍​‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‍‌‍‌‌‌​‍‌‍‌‍‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‍‍‌‍​‌‍​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‌​​‍‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌​​‍‌‍‌‌‍‌‍‌​‌‍‌‌​‌‌​​‌​‍‌‍‌‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‍​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌​​‌‌‍‌‍​‍​​​‌‍‌‌‌‍​‍​‌‌‌‍‌‍​​​​‍‌​​‌​​‍​​​‌​‍‌​‌​​‍​​‌‌‍‌‍​‍‌​‍​​‌​‌‍‌​​‍​​‍‌‌‍‌‍​‌‌‍​‌‌‍​‍‌‍‌‍​​‍​​​​‌​‍​‌‍​​​​‍‌​‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌​​‌‍‌‌​‌‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‌‍‌‌‌​​‌‍‌​‌‌​​‍‌​​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍​​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌​‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‌​‌‍‌‌‌‌‌‌‌​‍‌‍​​‌‌‍‍​‌‌​‌‌​‌​​‌​​‍‌‌​​‌​​‌​‍‌‌​​‍‌​‌‍​‍‌‌​​‍‌​‌‍‌‍​‌‍‌‌​​‍‍‌​‌‌​‌‍​‌‌‍​‌‍‍‌‍‌‌‍‌‍‌‌‌​‍‌‍‌‍‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‍‍‌‍​‌‍​‍‌‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌​​‌‌‍‌‍​‍​​​‌‍‌‌‌‍​‍​‌‌‌‍‌‍​​​​‍‌​​‌​​‍​​​‌​‍‌​‌​​‍​​‌‌‍‌‍​‍‌​‍​​‌​‌‍‌​​‍​​‍‌‌‍‌‍​‌‌‍​‌‌‍​‍‌‍‌‍​​‍​​​​‌​‍​‌‍​​​​‍‌​‍‌‍‌‌​‌‍‌‌​​‌‍‌‌​‌‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‌‍‌‌‌​​‌‍‌​‌‌​​‍‌‍‌​​‌‍​‌‌‌​‌‍‍​​‌‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌​‌‍​‌‍‌‌​‍‌‍‌​​‌‍‌‌‌​‍‌​‌​​‌‍‌‌‌‍​‌‌​‌‍‍‌‌‌‍‌‍‌‌​‌‌​​‌‌‌‌‍​‍‌‍​‌‍‍‌‌​‌‍‍​‌‍‌‌‌‍‌​​‍​‍‌‌

Ryan sits down with Anish Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Traversal, to chat about why AI coding agents have made writing code easier but running it safely in production harder, why production failures are really caused by interactions between systems and not just the code itself, and how teams can troubleshoot more effectively when traditional observability tools are not enough for agentic AI workflows.​​​​‌‍​‍​‍‌‍‌​‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‌‍�...

LLM Evaluation

Where Larger Models Excel: The Primacy of Constraint-Guided Reasoning

arXiv:2606.26108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Larger language models consistently outperform smaller ones on reasoning benchmarks, yet the reasoning differences underlying this gap remain underexplored. Across benchmarks in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and programming, we observe stable performance gaps: averaged over datasets, Qwen3-32B outperforms Qwen3-8B by 6.43%, while GPT-OSS-120B exceeds GPT-OSS-20B by 7.38%. To study the reasoning differences behind these gains, we develop AdvC...

Generative AI

Low Resource Multimodal Translation of Nepali Spoken Words into Emotion-Conditioned Sign Language Avatars

arXiv:2606.26107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sign language communication systems, that integrate emotional expression remain underexplored, particularly for low-resource languages. This pilot study presents NEST-V1 (Nepali Emotion and Speech Transformer - Version 1), a proof-of-concept multimodal framework that demonstrates the feasibility of generating emotion-conditioned Nepali Sign Language avatars from spoken input. As a preliminary investigation, we focus on four common Nepali words ...

Prompt Engineering

Reducing Conversational Escalation in Large Language Model Dialogue with Nonviolent Communication Constraints

arXiv:2606.26106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in emotionally charged situations involving interpersonal conflict, frustration, and distress. While prior safety research has focused on preventing explicit harms such as toxic or policy-violating content, less attention has been paid to conversational behaviors that may unintentionally escalate conflict. In this paper, we investigate whether LLMs can be guided toward more de-escalating dialog...

Large Language Models

Context Recycling for Long-Horizon LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.26105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong capabilities in short-context reasoning but degrade in performance over long conversational horizons due to context window limitations and inefficient token usage. We introduce ContextForge, a system for context recycling that maintains task-relevant information across turns by combining structured query generation, external memory retrieval, and controlled synthesis. The system enables efficient reus...

AI Psychosis

Assert, don't describe: Linguistic features that shift LLM reasoning about animal welfare

arXiv:2606.26104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Animal-welfare advocates produce a lot of writing, and increasingly that writing trains the language models that millions of people then ask about animal welfare. Using vocabulary-matched stance-contrast probes on a held-out animal-welfare benchmark, we measure how each of ten linguistic features changes Llama-3.2-1B's preference for pro-animal-welfare reasoning when used as fine-tuning data. Eight of the ten features produce statistically sign...

LLM Evaluation

Investigating LLM's Problem Solving Capability -- a Study on Statics Questions

arXiv:2606.26103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly influenced many aspects of society, particularly education, due to their demonstrated ability to complete assignments and examinations across a wide range of subjects. Although prior studies have examined the educational impact of LLMs, much of the existing work relies on public or open problem datasets and lacks topic-specific analysis. In engineering education, especially within mechanical engineering...

AI Psychosis

Helpfulness Hurts: Domain-Dependent Degradation of Mid-Trained Compassion Values Under Post-Training

arXiv:2606.26102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard post-training pipelines apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to make language models helpful, but these processes may inadvertently degrade values instilled during pre-training. We investigate whether the domain of post-training data differentially affects the retention of animal compassion values in a Llama 3.1 8B model mid-trained on compassion-oriented synthetic data, using both SFT (helpfulness via Dol...

LLM Evaluation

Know2Guess: A Contamination-Aware Multi-Zone Benchmark for Knowledge-Boundary Evaluation in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.26101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable evaluation of large language models should separate supported answering from unsupported guessing without conflating either with data contamination, prompt idiosyncrasy, or generic refusal behavior. We present a contamination-aware, multi-zone benchmark for measuring the transition from answerable knowledge to abstention-expected unknowns under frozen build-time labels. The benchmark contains 1,200 items across five domains, explicit a...

RAG

HierBias: Context-Conditioned Hierarchical Media Bias Detection with Multi-Task Type Classification

arXiv:2606.26100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Media bias detection is a critical task for ensuring fair and balanced information dissemination, yet existing sentence-level approaches classify each sentence independently, ignoring inter-sentence contextual signals that human annotators naturally exploit. We present \textbf{HierBias}, a hierarchical context-conditioned media bias detector that formally models document context in bias prediction. We introduce the \emph{context-conditioned bia...

Artificial Intelligence

Benchmarking Open-Weight Foundation Models for Global AI Technical Governance

arXiv:2606.26099v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in artificial intelligence (AI) governance analysis across national and international organisations. There is, however, growing evidence that such models produce significantly less accurate responses for countries that are underrepresented in their training data-a pattern described in existing literature as geographic bias. Existing studies examining this phenomenon are subject to three met...

Large Language Models

Dense Supervision Is Not Enough: The Readout Blind Spot in Looped Language Models

arXiv:2606.24898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped language models turn hidden states into runtime state: each state is decoded for prediction and fed back into future computation. This creates a basic supervision question: which state variables does cross-entropy actually control? We show that dense per-loop cross-entropy controls the variables exposed by the readout, not every variable active in the recurrent transition. Hidden-state scale gives a concrete failure mode. Scale-invariant...

RAG

Invisible to humans, visible to machines: a preregistered audit of Unicode fidelity across four biomedical bibliographic APIs

arXiv:2606.24897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Biomedical text mining, scientometrics, and the construction of training corpora for biomedical large language models (LLMs) all assume that the abstract text returned by a bibliographic API faithfully reproduces the published abstract. This pre-registered audit (OSF osf.io/269b5) tests that assumption for four widely used public APIs (PubMed E-utilities, Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar) against PubMed Central (PMC) JATS XML as a common gr...

Data Governance

Why Memory Components Fail: Eight Years of License and Sustainability Events in Open-Source Data Infrastructure

arXiv:2606.24896v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agent memory is now treated as a first-class architectural component in five major surveys published between January and April 2026. None of these surveys treats project governance, capital structure, or license posture as architectural variables. We argue they are. In a constructed sample of 105 production-relevant open-source data-infrastructure and AI-tooling projects, we catalogue 38 license-and-sustainability events between 2018 and Ma...

RAG

Hybrid Metadata Extraction from League of Nations Index Cards: From Feasibility Study to Archival System Integration

arXiv:2606.24895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This project report presents a hybrid AI-assisted workflow for extracting and reintegrating archival metadata from League of Nations index cards. The project is situated in the broader context of the Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives project (LONTAD). Rather than attempting full OCR of the underlying archival collections, the workflow targets the index cards themselves as documentary access points to files, series, archival...

RAG

RWGBench: Evaluating Scholarly Positioning in Related Work Generation

arXiv:2606.24894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models have shown strong fluency in scientific writing, yet the evaluation of related work generation (RWG) remains limited. Existing RWG evaluations largely inherit summarization-oriented metrics, using lexical or semantic similarity to reference sections as proxies for quality. However, related work writing is fundamentally a citation-level scholarly positioning task: it requires selecting, organizing, and framing prior work to...

Artificial Intelligence

AgentOdyssey: Open-Ended Long-Horizon Text Game Generation for Test-Time Continual Learning Agents

arXiv:2606.24893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For agents to learn continuously from interaction with the world at test time, they must be able to explore effectively, acquire new world knowledge and skills, retain relevant episodic experiences, and plan over long horizons. To evaluate these key abilities of test-time continual learning agents, we introduce AgentOdyssey, a novel evaluation framework that procedurally generates open-ended text games with rich entities, world dynamics, and lo...

LLM Evaluation

ReviewGuard: Aligning LLM-Assisted Peer Review with Long-Term Scientific Impact

arXiv:2606.24892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Peer review is central to scientific quality control, yet it can undervalue papers that later achieve substantial citation impact. While frontier large language models have shown promise in automating aspects of peer review, they primarily mimic human reviewer preferences rather than predict long-term scientific value. We introduce ReviewGuard, a two-stage framework that aligns LLM-generated reviews with citation-based estimates of long-term sc...

Open Source

Type Checking Project Haystack Grids using JSON Schema and Pydantic

arXiv:2606.24891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ontologies enable scalable energy services in buildings by supporting interoperability and automation. Project Haystack is a building ontology that is widely adopted due to its flexible, tag-based semantic model, openness, and extensibility, but suffers from ambiguous tag usage and limited automated validation. Although Project Haystack is formally open, its reliance on custom file formats and domain-specific languages that originate from the H...

Meta AI

Small edits, large models: How Wikipedia advocacy shapes LLM values

arXiv:2606.24890v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can a small group of volunteers shape how AI systems discuss animal welfare, just by editing Wikipedia? We show that they can. Wikipedia appears in nearly every major language model training dataset and is weighted more heavily than web-crawled text. The Pro-Animal Wikipedians (PAW), a group of advocates who add sourced animal welfare content to relevant articles, have made 125 edits across 115 pages. Using gradient-based data attribution (Berg...

Large Language Models

Graph-Based Phonetic Error Correction of Noisy ASR

arXiv:2606.24889v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, despite low overall word error rates, produce residual lexical errors that disproportionately affect semantically critical tokens such as named entities, negations, and sentiment-bearing words. These errors are often structured, arising from phonetic similarity rather than random noise, making naive token-level correction insufficient. We propose a structured ASR correction framework, that we call G-S...

Privacy

Privacy-Aware Infrastructure in the AI-Native Era: An Asset Classification Case Study

Privacy controls — systems that enforce retention, access, allowed-purpose, downstream-sharing, or anonymization policies — require a reliable understanding of data to function. Before such a control can operate effectively, it must know exactly what it is looking at. This can be complex, as demonstrated by a field simply named “age“: In one context, it might [...] Read More... The post Privacy-Aware Infrastructure in the AI-Native Era: An Asset Classification Case Study appeared firs...