Author: robert.adlington

When I was an unreflecting boy, I assumed that memory operated like a left-luggage office. An event in our lives happens, we make some swift, subconscious judgment on the importance of that event, and if it is important enough, we store it in our memory. Later, when we need to recall it, we take the…

Girsu, one of the world’s oldest cities, was revered in the 3rd millennium BC as the sanctuary of the Sumerian heroic god Ningirsu. Covering hundreds of hectares at its peak, it was among independent Sumerian cities conquered around 2300BC by the Mesopotamian king Sargon. He originally came from the city of Akkad, whose location is still…

Just as we can use a pacemaker to stabilise abnormal electrical rhythms in a person’s heart, we believe we can use a brain implant to act like a pacemaker and normalise deviant electrical brain rhythms that are linked to addiction. This trial will show if this is a practical idea.” The use of brain implants…

children who have genes that correlate to more success in school evoke more intellectual engagement from their parents than kids in the same family who don’t share these genes. This feedback loop starts as early as 18 months old, long before any formal assessment of academic ability. Babies with a PGI that is associated with…

Recent progress in genetics has developed polygenic predictors of complex human traits, including risk for many important complex diseases[10][11] that are typically affected by many genetic variants, each of which confers a small effect on overall risk.[12][13] In a polygenic risk predictor the lifetime (or age-range) risk for the disease is a numerical function captured…

This is the first time I’ve seen prompts arranged in a “playbooks” pattern like this. What a weird and interesting way to write software! — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/13/xata-agent/

America has been berserk for as long as—Philip Roth: “the indigenous American berserk.” Now we have social media, and it’s more visible than it was before. Not only is it surfaced but it’s encouraged because it’s the business model, right? Extremism, outrage, performance—all of this is now how you make money, not just how you…

I’ve been getting great results out of LLMs for code for over two years now. Here’s my attempt at transferring some of that experience and intution to you. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

Lyme disease, like any other medical condition, has a large subjective element and diagnosis is as much an art as a science. Physicians have been cognisant of this paradox since the time of Hippocrates – indeed, the history of medicine can be seen as an effort to put diagnosis on a sounder scientific footing by…

the brothers were descended from the Broccolis of Carrera, who first crossed two Italian vegetables, cauliflower and rabe, to produce the dark green, thick-stalked vegetable that took their name and eventually supported them in the United States. — Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/08/broccoli-the-man-and-vegetable-behind-the-bond-franchise