Author: robert.adlington
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The Genetic Evolution of the Human Race and Its Consequences for the Industrial Revolution
We do not claim that the Black Death instantly made Europeans smarter. Instead, we suggest that the post-plague economy may have amplified long-running selection on traits linked to educational attainment: learning ability, self-control, and long-term planning. In that sense, the Black Death looks less like a one-off catastrophe and more like a hinge in the…
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Chatbot as Digital Coworker
The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker. To be very clear, Gemini 3 isn’t perfect, and it still needs a manager who can guide and check it. But it suggests that “human in the loop” is evolving from “human who fixes AI mistakes” to “human who directs AI…
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Edward O. Wilson: The Real Problem of Humanity
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. — Read on www.harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/james-watson-edward-o-wilson-intellectual-entente
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En abandonnant l’écriture à l’IA, nous risquons de nous empêcher de réfléchir
si écrire, c’est penser, un texte écrit avec l’assistance de ChatGPT ne matérialise-t-il pas les pensées du générateur de texte, plutôt que les nôtres ? Du contenu soi-disant neuf Et à quoi pense donc ChatGPT ? Heureusement, à rien : on l’a dit, le programme se contente de régurgiter les textes figurant dans son corpus d’entraînement, en en…
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Scaling Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) Vector in Redis
if you have different vectors about the same use case split in different instances / keys, you can ask VSIM for the same query vector into all the instances, and add the WITHSCORES option (that returns the cosine distance) and merge the results client-side, and you have magically scaled your hundred of millions of vectors…
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Notes on American Fascism | The Point Magazine
“What is happening today worldwide,” he writes in “Notes on American Fascism,” “is a reorganization of ancient or new or newish social classes into two social classes: the economically and technologically sophisticated and the failed and unrooted and not sophisticated.” In the essay on Winchell he puts the point more bluntly: “When I was young,…
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Who is ‘fedora man’? Dapper French teenager in viral Louvre heist photo unmasked | France | The Guardian
“Fedora man”, as users dubbed him, was cast as an old-school detective, an inside man, a Netflix pitch – or not human at all. Many were convinced he was AI-generated. Pedro understood why. “In the photo, I’m dressed more in the 1940s, and we are in 2025,” he said. “There is a contrast.” — Read…
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Game design is simple, actually – Raph Koster
Some of this is down to personality types, some of it is down to social dynamics, how they were raised, what their local culture is like, what trauma they have had, and countless other psychological things. That’s why one fancy term for this is psychographics. The big thing is, it’s not enough that the problems…
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ChatGPT Does Not Have Opinions
ChatGPT is not a human, and, unlike teachers & librarians & scholars, ChatGPT does not have a consistent, legible worldview. In my experience, it readily agrees with any premise you hand it — and brings citations. It may have read every article that can be read, but it has no real opinion — so it is not a credible…
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Aiming for Fullness: The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind.
The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a…