Category: Blog

An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust. – astral-sh/uv — Read on github.com/astral-sh/uv

AI changes what books are even worth writing. “Predictive books and books about the near future. They don’t make sense to write anymore.” — Read on x.com/david_perell/status/1897387371244478668

The ideology behind AI may be best thought of as careless anti-humanism. From the AI industry’s behavior — sucking up every work of writing and art on the internet to provide training data — it is possible to infer its attitude toward humanist work: it is trivial, unworthy of respect, and easily replaced by machine…

with data from the UK and the US showing that, compared with previous generations, young people are spending less time out in the world and experiencing more anxiety, the report also questions the impact on those who “shun the messy unpredictability of in-person interaction and try to meet all their human needs through a screen”.…

Fast food containers dominate ocean plastic, but aluminium drinks cans will also be part of our legacy. Pure metals are exceptionally rare in the geological record, as they readily react to form new minerals, but the cans will leave a distinct impression. Another fast food staple, chicken, is also destined for immortality. Bones are well…

the very stability and comfort of the post–World War II liberal order has permitted the seeds of its own destruction to flourish. A society with firm scientific and political guardrails that protect health and freedom, can sustain “an underbelly of madmen and extremists—medical sceptics, conspiracy types and anti-democratic fantasists.” “Our society has been peaceful and…

What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself. — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/baudrillard-on-ai.html

“Gaba is the off switch of the brain,” says the neuropsychopharmacologist Prof David Nutt, of Imperial College London, who is also one of the creators of Sentia. At the most basic level, brain activity consists of billions of neurons turning on and off, he says. “The turning on is glutamate; the turning off is Gaba.”…

I love that Christian has a driver’s license, and I feel like I’ve been really consistent about that since the beginning of this conversation. — Read on wesleyanargus.com/2025/02/14/office-hours-after-hours-professors-merve-emre-and-christian-nakarado/

The ability to be funny is not an advanced cognitive function that sits on top of the capacity for logic and reason. Humor is more primitive, more fundamental. It is accidental unearthing of buried possibility. If cheaper AIs can crack better jokes than the expensive ones, that suggests that humor is more of an instinct…