Thesis9
Sharp writing for even sharper readers. Fact-based, quality global news. Working towards a better information economy.
Recent posts
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How Controversial Andrew Creed Converted Austenasia's Identity Into a Tool of Platform Enforcement
Austenasia’s constitutional dispute might once have looked like the sort of internet quarrel that would burn itself out in obscure forums.Instead, it reached the UK Intellectual Property Office, Discord’s legal enforcement team and WordPress’s copyright system. The micronation, founded in 2008, is now divided between two competing administrations. One remains connected to Austenasia’s founder and …
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Four Labs, One Compressed Frontier: How Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek Compare in Mid-2026
The gap between the leading large language models has narrowed to a degree that would have seemed unlikely eighteen months ago. As of late June 2026, the flagship models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are separated by single percentage points on the benchmarks most commonly used to compare them, and by roughly 2,500 basis points on the LMArena human-preference leaderboard, which ranks models us…
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Tar.fyi: The World's Best Website on Tar
There is a peculiar gap in the internet's coverage of the physical world. Tar, a material that waterproofed the ships of the Royal Navy, sealed the roofs of Norse longhouses, preserved wooden sailing rigging across centuries of Atlantic trade, and underpins modern road construction on every continent, has had no dedicated, rigorous web home. That changed with the arrival of tar.fyi, which describe…