Category: Blog

A counter-intuitive way to gain information about a system’s hidden behavior or model of the world is to inject noise. The system, wanting to make sense of the perturbation, reveals its biases. — Read on x.com/TheAnnaGat/status/1913310624043471049

Assuming progress in industrial automation, humanoid robotics, artificial intelligence, and space technology continues as currently envisioned by these industries, we will in just a few short decades be able to deliver payloads of a self-assembling farm of robots to mine the Moon, create chip fabs, build, and ultimately tile the Moon with GPUs. The Moon…

We found much higher levels of regret for the dominant social media platforms: Instagram (34%), Facebook (37%), Snapchat (43%), and the most regretted platforms of all: TikTok (47%) and X/Twitter (50%). — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/17/jon-haidt-and-zach-rausch/

a fringe in its most literal sense: the fraying edge of a piece of fabric. Remove one thread at the edge, and the fringe gets slightly longer; remove more threads, and the fabric’s surface starts to shrink. Pick at it for 10 years, pulling threads from wherever — at the edge, in the middle, maybe…

concentrations of DMS, DMDS or both (their signatures overlap) thousands of times stronger than the levels on Earth. The results are reported with a “three-sigma” level of statistical significance (a 0.3% probability that they occurred by chance) although this falls short of the gold standard for discoveries in physics. “There may be processes that we…

the dystopian settings of so much cyberpunk fiction are seen by today’s tech leaders as prophetic visions of a world they need to try to escape – whether by colonising Mars, building metaverses or, in the case of Vance’s billionaire patron Peter Thiel, backing efforts to create new city states by buying land in developing…

They reflect Western notions of rationality, discourse, and objectivity—even if they sometimes fall short in achieving those ends. Their understanding of “what counts as winning an argument” or “what counts as a tough question to answer” stems from the long Western traditions, starting with ancient Greece and the Judeo-Christian heritage. They will put on a…

Nobel laureate, a star of the international boom in Latin American literature, also once ran for president in Peru — Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/14/mario-vargas-llosa-dies-aged-89-cause-of-death

The design is refreshingly simple considering how much it can do. Everything works around a single memories table. A memory has text, tags, creation metadata and an optional date for things like calendar entries and weather reports. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/13/stevens/

I find that “inquiring together” works best when you are traveling together, and confronted with new questions.  They can be as mundane as “do you think the two people at that restaurant table are on a first date or not?”  From the point of view of the observers, the inquiry is de novo.  And the…