Comment on The 2010 Lump of Coal Award, Job-Killing Edition

On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT license, with its largest version containing 671 billion parameters. The company claims the model performs at levels comparable to OpenAI's o1 simulated reasoning (SR) model on several math and coding benchmarks. Alongside the release of the main DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 models, DeepSeek published six smaller "DeepSeek-R1-Distill" versions ranging from 1.5 billion to 70 billion parameters.

A potentially disruptive satellite company launched its first spacecraft last week as part of a Transporter mission flown on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. The demonstration mission from a California-based firm named K2 aims to "burn down" the risk of the technology that will fly on the company's first full-sized satellite. So far, so good, but it's early days for the demo flight. Founded a little less than three years ago, K2 seeks to disrupt the production of large satellites by focusing on vertical integration and taking advantage of large launch vehicles, such as SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's New Glenn, which can throw a lot of payload into space.

Physicist Mathieu Souzy of the University Twente was enjoying an evening of pasta and board games with several colleagues when the conversation turned to how adding salt to a pasta pot to make it boil faster can leave a white ring on the bottom of the pot. Ever the curious scientists, they wondered about the various factors that would contribute to creating the perfect circular pattern for a salt ring. “By the end of our meal, we’d sketched an experimental protocol and written a succession of experiments we wanted to try on my youngest son’s small whiteboard,” said Souzy.

President Donald Trump's flurry of day-one actions included a reprieve for TikTok, the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an order on social media "censorship," a declaration of an energy emergency, and reversal of a Biden order on artificial intelligence. The TikTok executive order attempts to delay enforcement of a US law that requires TikTok to be banned unless its Chinese owner ByteDance sells the platform.

As fires spread with alarming speed through the Pacific Palisades region of Los Angeles Tuesday, Jan. 7, a local TV news crew recorded a mountain lion trailed by two young cubs running through a neighborhood north of the fire. The three lions were about three-quarters of a mile from the nearest open space.

Zoë Kravitz's directorial debut starring Channing Tatum is worth a watch.