Category: Blog
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Setting up a codebase for working with coding agents
For the most part anything that makes a codebase easier for humans to maintain turns out to help agents as well. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/25/coding-agent-tips/
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AI as Support Staff
When I sit down for a work session, I want to feel like a surgeon walking into a prepped operating room. Everything is ready for me to do what I’m good at. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/24/geoffrey-litt/
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Visual Features Across Modalities: SVG and ASCII Art Reveal Cross-Modal Understanding
We found that the same feature that activates over the eyes in an ASCII face also activates for eyes across diverse text-based modalities, including SVG code and prose in various languages. This is not limited to eyes – we found a number of cross-modal features that recognize specific concepts: from small components like mouths and…
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The Rose Field by Philip Pullman – nail-biting conclusion to the Northern Lights series | Fiction | The Guardian
“There are no endings,” said Hilary Mantel on the final page of Bring Up the Bodies; “they are all beginnings.” Pullman draws his great matter to a close, but he’s clear that his characters, and their stories, will continue without him – that the end of his book marks the start of their next chapter.…
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Rob Henderson on X: “”People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites…Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world.” https://t.co/tbqdk1bm9G” / X
Rob Henderson on X: “”People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites…Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world.” https://t.co/tbqdk1bm9G” / X — Read on x.com/robkhenderson/status/1980502235244327200
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Measured AI | Note to Self
There are levels of abstraction everywhere in modern life. But the abstraction layer of “this will do it for you so you don’t have to” for AI tools is especially amorphous, opaque, and comes with real risks. Furthermore, AI chatbots are designed to make you feel good, not challenge you to think on your own.…
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Comment la lecture « enclenche une véritable symphonie » dans le cerveau
une petite région particulière, spécialisée dans la reconnaissance visuelle des lettres et identique quelle que soit la langue. Située dans le sillon occipito-temporal, à l’arrière de l’hémisphère gauche, elle a été baptisée « aire de la forme visuelle des mots », ou « boîte aux lettres du cerveau », par Stanislas Dehaene. Si elle est endommagée, les personnes ne…
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How the pandemic has changed the world – Marginal REVOLUTION
In a recent interview, I was struck by the comment that so many of the shops that we associate with the best of France—the poissonneries and the fromageries—closed during the pandemic, to be replaced by take-out pizza shops and the like. College professors almost uniformly describe big changes in student behavior: lecture attendance and willingness…
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Information abundance aged the young by showing them all future problems all at once. Information abundance also made the” / X
Everyone under 30 is prematurely old (worried about savings, career, FIRE). Everyone over 50 is desperately young (Burning Man, psychedelics). My theory: Information abundance aged the young by showing them all future problems all at once. Information abundance also made the old young by showing them all missed experiences all at once. So now Gen…
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Bitter lesson – Wikipedia
Sutton concludes that time is better invested in finding simple scalable solutions that can take advantage of Moore’s law, rather than introducing ever-more-complex human insights, and calls this the “bitter lesson”. He also cites two general-purpose techniques that have been shown to scale effectively: search and learning. The lesson is considered “bitter” because it is…