The Inference Report

Many digital systems courses teach on FPGA boards whose vendor tool is no longer maintained: the Digilent Basys2 and Nexys2 (Xilinx Spartan-3E) and Nexys3 and Atlys (Spartan-6) need Xilinx ISE 14.7, discontinued since 2013 and hard to install on the computers and tablets students use today. The author presents Silinx, a free (AGPL-3.0) HDL design platform for teaching that keeps ISE's Project Navigator workflow but runs in a web browser with nothing to install. A module can be written in VHDL or Verilog, in C or C++ through Silinx HLS, which is compatible with AMD's Vitis HLS and passes all 73 of its introductory examples, or drawn as a schematic, an ASM chart, a state diagram, a Boolean function with its Karnaugh map, or a Petri net, from which its HDL is generated. Designs are checked with explanations written for beginners, simulated, run on an emulated board, built, and programmed onto a real board over WebUSB. The implementation flow is open and runs in the browser: Yosys and nextpnr compiled to WebAssembly, with Silinx's own device data, timing model and bitstream writer for the Spartan-3E and Spartan-6, built by black-box observation of ISE's documented tools; Lattice iCE40 boards use the existing open iCE40 tools, and further families are planned. ISE is the oracle: Silinx's bitstreams are byte-identical to those ISE writes for the same placed and routed design, and pass ISE's design rule check. Against ISE at the same optimization goal, the open flow uses 15% fewer slices with 14% shorter critical paths when optimizing for area, and 21% fewer slices with 8% shorter critical paths when optimizing for speed (geometric means over 45 open-source designs built by both flows). The author also describes how the platform was developed with AI coding agents under test-first project rules.

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative and machine-learning systems, in climate services development and provision is transforming how climate information is produced, accessed, and interpreted. AI-enabled climate services offer significant opportunities for process automation, optimisation, tailoring, and the translation of complex climate data into actionable knowledge for diverse users. However, the growing reliance on privately controlled algorithms, data infrastructures, and computing facilities raises critical concerns related to governance, transparency, equity and economic sustainability, among others. While the technical architecture of climate services increasingly relies on advanced machine learning and large-scale climate models, their legitimacy as public services may be weakened in the absence of arrangements that prioritise public value and long-lasting societal benefit over profit maximisation. The tension between the public mandate of climate services and the private nature of AI infrastructure challenges traditional notions of openness. Using a consensus-based elicitation method coupled with the PESTLE framework, we analyse the political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental risks and opportunities shaping the co-production value chain of AI-enabled climate services. We draw policy-relevant conclusions for data, model and infrastructure supporting the next generation of upstream and downstream climate services as critical applications for society. Our work presents potential and plausible challenges and benefits for a pan-European, decentralised public climate service built on sovereign AI infrastructure and open governance principles.

Machine learning (ML) models are said to predict. Philosophers draw a line between accommodation and prediction, depending on whether or not the evidence a theory succeeds on was used in constructing it. Does this distinction survive when a theory is replaced by an ML model? We argue so, yet the dividing line becomes fuzzy. Whether an output of an ML model counts as an accommodation or as a prediction hinges upon the relationship between the patterns the input instantiate and those on which the model was selected through its training. Once this relation is taken into account, most successful outputs of ML models, we suggest, bear a strong accommodation character. We further trace the consequences of our account for confirmation, novelty, and scientific realism.

Users are asking language models mental health questions and are receiving answers. We audited what 41 language models recommend to users when the same clinical information reaches them from three footings: a clinician describing a patient, a caregiver describing a loved one, or a person describing themselves. Across 19 case vignettes and five questions, we collected 35,055 free-text responses, extracted every intervention named with a validated judge, and had 29 models rate the full option lists on a seven-point Likert scale for the same cases. Models largely recommend what they rate well, with recommendation behavior differing by footing, and many models offering clinicians a consultation-style response and lay users hedged, simplified advice. When asked about recommendations for a specific intervention type, models more often named options they themselves rated below zero as initial choices, usually with conditions attached. We will release the instrument, code, and full corpus on publication as a living audit.

Generative AI tools are now widely available to students, but little is known about how team-based project codebases have changed since they appeared. This matters when project courses use repository activity as evidence of progress and learning. Existing studies have largely examined self-reports, controlled tasks, or short individual assignments, leaving open questions around how student codebases evolve in authentic project settings. We present a ten-semester analysis of N=260 capstone team repositories from 2021 to 2025, spanning pre- and post-AI cohorts. We examine three dimensions: code size (lines of code), code characteristics (comment density, error-handling density, and cyclomatic complexity), and development behaviour (commit volume, edit size, and commit frequency). We find that end-of-semester codebases roughly triple, from about 3.4 KLOC in 2021--2023 to about 10 KLOC in 2024--2025. Code characteristics show a clear decoupling: cyclomatic complexity and error-handling density increase, while comment density does not. Later cohorts commit far more often and in greater volume, but individual commit sizes are largely unchanged, suggesting a shift in development rhythm rather than edit granularity. Most changes appear from 2024 onwards and are not uniformly monotonic. We did not directly observe AI use, so we report these as changes that coincide with increased GenAI availability rather than as effects of AI use. Our findings highlight the need to reconsider how student-produced artefacts are used and assessed in project courses.

The shift from traditional to generative search has fundamentally transformed online product discovery. Because conversational recommendations synthesize choices into a few direct answers, subtle systemic preferences toward specific providers can exert profound commercial impacts. In this work, we audit this phenomenon through two distinct dimensions: (i) brand popularity bias, the systematic preference for market-dominant entities over long-tail alternatives, and (ii) brand familiarity bias, the ranking advantage an entity encoded in an LLM's parametric memory holds over an unfamiliar competitor. First, evaluating commercial queries across major engines, we observe persistent brand popularity bias: dominant brands in the top quintile are cited 1.4x to 2.8x more frequently than the average brand within a sample of 1,176 top market players, already present in parametric memory that external web retrieval fails to mitigate. Second, through controlled in-context experiments holding product attributes constant, we find that substituting authentic brand signatures with unfamiliar ones significantly degrades recommendation rank. Conversely, fact-preserving content rewrites yield negligible ranking gains. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that generative search engines reinforce a ``rich-get-richer'' dynamic by favoring established market leaders and imposing a parametric barrier to entry that standard content optimization cannot overcome.