Category: Blog

I think there should be a little bit of uneasiness in everything, because I do think we’re all really in a sense living on the edge. So much of life is inexplicable. Inexplicable things happen to me; things that are so inexplicable that I’m not even sure that something happened. And you suddenly think, ‘Well,…

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. — Read on en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)

Build a semantic index (SI), and allow apps to access it via permissions given similar to what we do for Address Book or Photos. Maybe even make the permissions to the SI a bit more fine-grained than you normally would for other personal databases. Historical GPS locations? Scraping contents of the screen over time? Indexed…

GTFS is a popular CSV-based format for sharing transit schedules – here’s an official list of available feed directories. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/17/opentimes/

I define trait curiosity as the general tendency to seek out new information and experiences, drawing from the state-trait curiosity inventory which includes markers such as “new situations capture my attention,” “I enjoy exploring new places,” and “I like to experience new sensations.” What I call hypercuriosity manifests as an intensified, impulsive desire to know…

Claim: Mindspace is vast, so it’s likely that AIs will be completely alien to us, and therefore dangerous! Truth: Mindspace is vast, but we picked LLMs as the first viable AI paradigm because the abundance of human-generated data made LLMs the easiest choice. LLMs are models of human language, so they are actually not that…

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…