Category: Blog

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…

Daniel Stenberg maintains curl – a library that deals with the most hostile of environments, parsing content from the open internet – as 180,000 lines of C89 code. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/8/writing-c-for-curl/

Stop syncing everything — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/8/stop-syncing-everything/

The biggest thing I learned from Madsen is that behind each view is a human being who has counterarguments.  That may sound deeply stupid, but so many of our most important learnings take that form, namely emotionally internalizing something that ought to be obvious, and thus developing better habits of thought. — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/my-1979-trip-to-oxford-and-london.html

I’m not sure we have a consensus understanding of what “think” means in this context. Airplanes don’t fly in the same way that birds do. Automobiles don’t run in the same way that horses do. The important thing is that they accomplish many of the same tasks. OK, so AI doesn’t think the same way…