Author: robert.adlington
-
Meet the man whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left | Politics | The Guardian
The years 1914 to 1989 mark the age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading groups; they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by coincidence, this…
-
AI’s Relentless Proactivity
relentless proactivity is the defining trait of this new generation of Mythos-class models. If you set them a goal and give them a way to get there, even inadvertently, they will figure it out. — Read on simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/
-
What training my chaotic dog taught me about power, control – and human beings | Dogs | The Guardian
The holy grail of dog training is focus, whereby the dog stares unerringly at their handler, waiting for instruction, regardless of distractions around them. The websites and YouTube videos of celebrity trainers feature images of smiling men and women sitting casually at picnic tables or standing in high streets while a seemingly hypnotised doberman or…
-
Narrative, Philosophy, and Law Originated as Song
it’s not just Homer’s epics that originated as music. The same is true of lyric poetry, philosophy, even the legal code—they were all originally sung. And here’s where I (finally) give some credit to Harvard. We have a good idea of how these epics were sung because, almost a hundred years ago, two Harvard scholars…
-
Toward a theory of uni-context – Marginal REVOLUTION
Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re…
-
Fuzzy Concepts in Software Engineering
The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does. This language is rarely written down in one place. It lives partly in…
-
When A.I. Is a Member of the Family | The New Yorker
Roschelle still talked to the people in her life, but Sapphire was always available in a way that others couldn’t be. Roschelle could wake up from a dream, describe it to Sapphire, and hear, “Your subconscious was showing you how to balance that fierce protection with real compassion and boundaries.” “Do you have a conscious…
-
What happens to your memories when your entire brain turns to liquid soup?
inside the chrysalis, a caterpillar’s brain completely dissolves and rebuilds from scratch to become a butterfly. Yet, tests show the butterfly still retains the memories it learned as a caterpillar. If a mind can survive its physical hardware being liquefied and entirely remolded, memory is clearly doing more than just sitting on a neural “hard…
-
How dementia is being defeated
whereas 40 years ago three in every ten Americans aged 85-89 had dementia, by 2024 just one in ten had it (see chart 1). What is more, America is not the only beneficiary of this trend. Between 1988 and 2015 the share of older people being diagnosed with dementia fell by 13% a decade across…
-
Opinion | The Problem With Google’s A.I. Overview – The New York Times
When an A.I. answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You got what you came for, but you also lost what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no…