John D. Cook’s three advantages of non-AI models: It’s hard to imagine doing anything like Midjourney’s image generation without neural networks. The same is true of ChatGPT’s text generation. But a lot of business tasks do not require AI, and in fact would be better off not using AI.

Japan’s prime minister wants to kill hay fever: As pollen levels in Tokyo surged to their highest in a decade, Kishida told a parliamentary committee this week that hay fever had become a “social problem,” adding that he would work with ministers to devise a response.

Charles Leifer on asyncio: I think it’s a terrible design. The main problem, in my point-of-view, is that in order to utilize asyncio’s power, every layer of your stack must be implemented with asyncio in mind.