Author: robert.adlington
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What ’67’ Reveals About Childhood Creativity – Atlas Obscura
Language is still new to them, and they find difficulty in expressing themselves. When on their own they burst into rhyme, of no recognizable relevancy, as a cover in unexpected situations, to pass off an awkward meeting, to fill a silence, to hide a deeply felt emotion, or in a gasp of excitement.” This is…
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Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document
Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/2/claude-soul-document/
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Global Child Mortality Declined from 50% in 1800 to 4.3% Today
For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway. This dramatic decline has resulted from better nutrition, clean water, sanitation, neonatal healthcare, vaccinations, medicines, and reductions in poverty, conflicts, and famine.…
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Write to escape your default setting – kupajo
Writing expands your working memory, lets you be more brilliant on paper than you can be in person. While some of this brilliance comes from enabling us to connect larger and larger ideas, much of it comes from stopping, uh… non-brilliance. Writing reveals what you don’t know, what you can’t see when an idea is…
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Why Is Everyone Running In Rom-Coms?
In the modern day, we live in a world without a cosmic moral order, a framework of meaning to which everyone automatically subscribes. We had one for a while. But round about the year 1700, give or take a century, that framework started cracking, fragmenting, losing its authority, and the burden of finding meaning shifted…
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Meet the Aphantasics, Those Who Can’t See Mental Images
because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds. Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books — since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull — or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. When…
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The space of intelligences is large
LLMs are shaped a lot less by biological evolution and a lot more by commercial evolution. It’s a lot less survival of tribe in the jungle and a lot more solve the problem / get the upvote. LLMs are humanity’s “first contact” with non-animal intelligence. Except it’s muddled and confusing because they are still rooted…
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American democracy is very much alive, though not in all regards well – Marginal REVOLUTION
The Senate also sided with the House on the Epstein files. Nate Silver and many others write about how Trump is now quite possibly a lame duck President. I do not doubt that there are many bad policies, and also much more corruption, and a more transparent form of corruption, which is corrosive in its…
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Confidently Wrong – Marginal REVOLUTION
The authors then correlate respondents’ scores on the objective (uncontroversial) knowledge with their opposition to the scientific consensus on topics like vaccination, nuclear power, and homeopathy. The result is striking: people who are most opposed to the consensus (7, the far right of the horizontal axis in the figure below) score lower on objective knowledge…
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Generating an Infographic with Nano Banana Pro aka gemini-3-pro-image-preview
I’m starting a detailed infographic about the Datasette project. I plan to use Google Search to gather specific information about its core processes, which I will then visualize in a multi-panel diagram. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/20/nano-banana-pro/