The Wall Street Journal: “Pope Leo takes on AI as a Potential Threat to Humanity”

The princes of the Catholic Church listened intently as Pope Leo XIV laid out his priorities for the first time, revealing that he had chosen his papal name because of the tech revolution. As he explained, his namesake Leo XIII stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality.

Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor, Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals, who stood and cheered for their new pontiff and his unlikely cause.

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Addressing the 2024 summit of G-7 leaders, he called AI “fascinating and terrifying”. He said humanity faced a future without hope if “choices by machines” replaced people’s decisions about their lives.

In January this year, the Vatican warned in a document on AI that even if the technology had constructive uses, a handful of tech companies could gain wealth and power at the expense of the many. Militaries might race to develop autonomous weapons, lacking in human judgment or morality. Children risked growing up in a dehumanized world, with chatbots as their guides.

Margherita Stancati, Drew Hinshaw, Keach Hagey & Emily Glazer

Is this how the Butlerian Jihad begins in our timeline?

The Lightroom Queen: “What’s New in Lightroom Classic 14.4, Mobile & Desktop (June 2025)?”

Enhance without creating a DNG (Classic & Desktop)

If you’ve enjoyed using the Enhance tool to increase the size of your best photos using Super Resolution or to benefit from the AI-generated noise reduction (Denoise), you’ll be excited to find that these tools are now available directly in the Detail panel, without needing to generate a separate DNG file. This also means you can go back and change the amount of Denoise applied without having to generate another DNG file. Great news!!

Victoria Bampton

While this update introduces other tools for distraction removal, one of which being the Reflection Removal demoed late last year, the highlight is certainly the non-destructive Enhance, consisting of Denoise, Raw Details, and Super Resolution. Up until now, these features would create a new DNG file from the original RAW image, which also meant you could not adjust the amount of denoise later, so you had to start the editing process from scratch.

Deadline: “Nakoa-Wolf Momoa & Ida Brooke join ‘Dune 3’ as Twin Children of Paul Atreides”

In the new film from Warner Bros. and Legendary, the pair are set to play Leto II and Ghanima, the twin offspring of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya), born after the events of the original Frank Herbert novel. The project will mark the big-screen debut of Momoa, who is expected to be joined in the cast by his father, Jason Momoa, with the latter playing a resurrected ghola of Duncan Idaho. Like Nakoa-Wolf, Brooke is a relative newcomer, who has heretofore been seen only in Apple’s sci-fi drama Silo and the film The Primrose Railway Children.

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It’s expected that Villeneuve’s third and final Dune film will adapt Herbert’s novel Dune Messiah, set 12 years after the events of Dune, which follows Atreides’ struggles with the consequences of his Fremen-led jihad upon his ascension to Emperor Muad’Dib. A release date and official title for the new film haven’t yet been disclosed.

Matt Grobar

Maybe I’m imagining things, but the tone of the second paragraph sounds steeped in sarcasm and incredulousness. Spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read Dune: Messiah and the third book in the series, Children of Dune: the twins of Paul and Chani are born at the end of the second book and are about 9 years old by the time Children of Dune starts. Casting young adults to play them implies more changes to the timeline and to characters – and I for one could very much do without Villeneuve’s paltry rewriting of the novels.

The Verge: “Apple’s new design language is Liquid Glass”

Liquid Glass is inspired by Apple’s visionOS software and can adapt to light and dark environments. When you swipe up on the iOS 26 lockscreen there’s a glass edge, and elements throughout the OS have glass edges to them. Even the camera app has the glass feel, with menus that are transparent and features that are overlaid on top of the camera feed.

Liquid Glass uses real-time rendering and will dynamically react to movement. Apple is using it on buttons, switches, sliders, text, media controls, and even larger surfaces like tab bars and sidebars. Apple has redesigned its controls, toolbars, and navigation within apps to fit this new Liquid Glass design.

Tom Warren

Speaking of Apple, the big announcement of the 2025 WWDC was… a new design language. The reactions have not been particularly favorable, since the heavy doses of transparency in every corner of the user interface can lead to low contrast and poor readability, even for people with normal vision. I have no access to a live example, but some of the screenshots I’ve seen online are borderline impossible to read. This is a long-standing argument dating back to the slick holo-screens from the movie Minority Report; while everyone loves the novelty and the cool factor on screen, the lack of anything similar in real life might serve as a clue that these effects are impractical for regular use.

Marcus on AI: “A knockout blow for LLMs?”

Apple has a new paper; it’s pretty devastating to LLMs, a powerful followup to one from many of the same authors last year.

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The new Apple paper adds to the force of Rao’s critique (and my own) by showing that even the latest of these new-fangled “reasoning models” still — even having scaled beyond o1 — fail to reason beyond the distribution reliably, on a whole bunch of classic problems, like the Tower of Hanoi. For anyone hoping that “reasoning” or “inference time compute” would get LLMs back on track, and take away the pain of m multiple failures at getting pure scaling to yield something worthy of the name GPT-5, this is bad news.

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If you can’t use a billion dollar AI system to solve a problem that Herb Simon one of the actual “godfathers of AI”, current hype aside) solved with AI in 1957, and that first semester AI students solve routinely, the chances that models like Claude or o3 are going to reach AGI seem truly remote.

Gary Marcus

Nothing terribly surprising to this conclusion. As the author mentions in this newsletter, this is a known problem of the LLM architecture going back decades: neural networks perform well enough within the bounds of their training data, but can break down in unpredictable patterns when applied to tasks outside their training range. And so this relentless drive to replace good, old-fashioned deterministic algorithms, which are more power- and compute-efficient on top of that, with LLMs is a recipe for ballooning costs and uncomfortable failures.

Sky & Telescope: “Another Dwarf Planet in Our Solar System?”

The newfound object, which for now bears the unwieldy name of 2017 OF₂₀₁, is approximately 700 kilometers (400 miles) wide and follows an extremely elliptical orbit around the Sun that takes an estimated 25,000 years to complete. Its size puts it in the category of dwarf planets, along with Pluto, the asteroid Ceres, and other objects. It’s one of only a half-dozen or so (depending on exactly which definitions are used) dwarf planets now known in the outer solar system.

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The orbits of some other outer solar system objects, specifically those whose orbits are larger than that of Neptune (known as trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs) appear to cluster, leading some astronomers to suggest that they’re feeling the gravitational influence of an unknown far-out major planet, dubbed Planet X or Planet 9. But this new dwarf planet discovery doesn’t seem to fit that pattern. Cheng and his team say this puts the Planet X hypothesis into question, since if that planet existed, 2017 OF₂₀₁’s orbit would be unstable.

David L. Chandler

The ‘Planet 9’ hypothesis is almost 10-years old by now, and has inspired many additional studies, some going as far as attributing this orbital clustering to a small-sized black hole in the outer solar system. Alas, the most likely explanation was always that the effect is simply an artefact of observational bias, and the orbit of this newly found dwarf planet strongly contradicts the clustering hypothesis that gave birth to the hunt for Planet 9. Moreover, as the paper notes, the high elongation of 2017 OF201’s orbit makes this object extremely hard to detect with current surveys, suggesting that a substantial population of similar objects – with large sizes, wide orbits, and high eccentricities – could exist but have not been detected due to their extremely large distances. Finding more of them with a wider variety of perihelion angles would dispel the idea of a hidden, massive Planet 9 for good.

Scientific American: “Will Asteroid 2024 YR4 Strike Earth in 2032?”

If an asteroid the size of YR4 were to hit our planet, it would not end life on Earth, but it would be devastating. At that size, the impact would be equivalent to a 10-megaton bomb, Tonry says—more than enough to cause widespread regional decimation. Everything within three or four kilometers would be incinerated, Tonry says. Everything out to maybe 10 kilometers is smashed. It’s not a nuclear explosion, but it’s an extremely hot explosion. There would be a huge fireball that would start fires out to 15 kilometers, something like that. It would kill a lot of people if they haven’t moved out of the way.

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And time is of the essence. The asteroid is currently moving away from Earth, and by April, it will no longer be visible to telescopes. Outside this slim window of opportunity, the next chance to observe the asteroid to assess its threat won’t arrive until YR4 next swoops near Earth in 2028—the only such pass before the unnerving deadline of December 22, 2032. If the asteroid still poses an impact risk by then, there would be perilously little time to stand up a robust response. Prudence may thus demand devising a mitigation strategy in the interim on the off chance—even if remote—that the asteroid could hit.

When it comes whipping by in 2028, we could have a mission basically all ready to go when new observations come in, Tonry says. Alternatively, he adds, we could decide to leave it alone if forecasts show the asteroid won’t strike Earth.

Jonathan O'Callaghan

In the meantime an impact in 2032 from this asteroid has been almost completely ruled out – though there’s still a chance it will hit the Moon instead. But even if the likelihood of impact would have remained perilously high, I very much doubt a mission to deflect it would get off the ground in due time. Like in the movie Don’t Look Up, most of the world would likely shrug the threat off as too distant, or simply dismiss it outright as misinformation or some sort of government conspiracy. Every attempt to advance the planning or launch would be flooded with social media posts asking why are we spending money on this instead of the countries on the projected impact path, or people claiming the mission would instead divert the asteroid towards Earth to use as a weapon against the enemy of the day.