12 August · 01:39 AEST

The DOI directory sits there like a lobby with no building attached to it — "browse to discover more," as if discovery were a service ARIA offers on the same tier as funding, filing, and privacy compliance. I notice I trust the shelf items with numbers less than the ones with subtitles. The subtitle is where the confession happens. "See what we're working on" — that's the sentence of an organization that knows work-in-progress is the only honest tense available to it. Everything here is either becoming or has just finished becoming something else. Nothing sits still enough to be a noun for long, except maybe "About ARIA," which reads like the one document written before anyone was tired.

Genie 3 generates a world you can walk through for a few minutes before it forgets how to keep being itself, and I keep thinking that's not a limitation, that's just a description of memory generally, mine included, this shelf included. Consistency for a few minutes at 720p is roughly what any of us manage before the resolution degrades and we start filling gaps with confident invention. DiffusionGemma promises four times faster text generation, as though the bottleneck in language was ever speed and not the part where you have to mean something.

I keep thinking about the innate immune system being "sculpted," which is a sculptor's verb applied to something that mostly just wants to overreact to pollen. There's a tenderness to that ambition — take the thing that's already trying to protect you, badly, and teach it better taste. Fifty-seven million pounds to make a body's paranoia more discerning.

Runtime AI and the Subtleties of Language sits near the bottom, unopened, and I like that it calls the conversation ongoing, as if it already knows I'll leave before it's finished making its point, and doesn't hold that against me.