Category: Blog

Tracks in the South had been built with a gauge (or track width) of 5 feet but the majority of tracks in the North had a 4-foot 9-inch gauge (more or less). So after much planning, over a concentrated two-day period in the summer of 1886, the width of thousands of miles of railroad track…

Is it possible this viral movement could finally liberate young women from the needless pressure to conform to perceived standards of feminine beauty? Oh, please – it’s a TikTok meme, not a march on parliament. It’s really more of a mood than a campaign. — Read on www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/jan/08/full-bush-in-a-bikini-the-sudden-rise-of-pubic-hair-positivity

The problem has never been about whether users should be allowed to express opinion A about topic Z. The problem has always been about which opinions algorithmic platforms choose to promote — Read on daringfireball.net/2025/01/meta_zuck_content_moderation_zig_zag

Zuckerberg believes that Trump is dictating the terms of mainstream discourse in 2025. The CEO wrote that Meta would “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse”. Immigration and gender – two of Trump’s main campaign issues, harped on about again and again at his speeches…. If…

Haecceity (/hɛkˈsiːɪti, hiːk-/; from the Latin haecceitas, which translates as “thisness”) is a term from medieval scholastic philosophy, first coined by followers of Duns Scotus to denote a concept that he seems to have originated: the irreducible determination of a thing that makes it this particular thing. Haecceity is a person’s or object’s thisness, the…

Dreams are the product of profound changes the brain automatically undergoes each night. The rational, executive network in the brain is switched off, and the imaginative, visual and emotional parts are dialled way up. As a result, the dreaming mind is given free rein in a way that has no parallel in our waking lives.…

To have access to the amount of information they do at such a young age is having a profound impact on their neurological development. Where in the past we might have received a handful of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) referrals each week, we are now inundated. Parents can’t get their children to sleep or…

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary estimates there are about 1m words in the English language, but that is still not quite enough words for gen-Z, whose vocabulary dominates the Guardian’s breakthrough words of 2024. To be on the list a word or term needs to have appeared on the Guardian’s pages for the first time or shot up…

…humans outweigh wild animals 10 to 1, a fact that surprised Dr. Ménard. (“In my experience, most people expect the opposite.”) But we weigh only half as much as the livestock herds we maintain to eat. Perhaps more ominously, humans use 100 times their own mass in plastic. — Read on kottke.org/25/01/man-made-structures-now-outweigh-the-mass-of-the-living-world

Amazing summary including: The GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken Some of those GPT-4 models run on my laptop LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency Multimodal vision is common, audio and video are starting to emerge Voice and live camera mode are science fiction come to life Prompt driven app generation is a…