Category: Blog
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MTV Rewind
an interface through which you can watch music videos from the 70s to the 20s, organized by decade. There are also “channels” for 120 Minutes, MTV Unplugged, Yo! MTV Raps, Headbangers Ball, and the first full day of MTV programming. — Read on kottke.org/26/01/mtv-rewind
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These College Students Ditched Their Phones for a Week. Could You? – The New York Times
By midweek, students said they felt more immersed in the world around them. They met up to hand-write letters to family members and discuss “Self-Reliance,” the poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson. (“Oh what is Heaven but the fellowship / Of minds that each can stand against the world / By its own meek and incorruptible…
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How Did Cartographers Create World Maps before Airplanes and Satellites? An Introduction | Open Culture
Unlike innovations today, which we expect to solve problems near-immediately, the innovations in mapping technology took many centuries and required the work of thousands of travelers, geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, historians, and other scholars who built upon the work that came before. It started with speculation, myth, and pure fantasy, which is what we find in…
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Daring Fireball: The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible
Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing — like a paperclip, for example — everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen, etc) does, the…
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Ralph Wiggum Loops
This inverts the usual AI coding workflow. Instead of carefully reviewing each step, you define success criteria upfront and let the agent iterate toward them. Failures become data. Each iteration refines the approach based on what broke. The skill shifts from “directing Claude step by step” to “writing prompts that converge toward correct solutions.” https://paddo.dev/blog/ralph-wiggum-autonomous-loops
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AGI is here (and I feel fine)
The key word in Artificial General Intelligence is General. That’s the word that makes this AI unlike every other AI: because every other AI was trained for a particular purpose. Consider landmark models across the decades: the Mark I Perceptron, LeNet, AlexNet, AlphaGo, AlphaFold … these systems were all different, but all alike in this way. Language models were trained…
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The Score by C Thi Nguyen review – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life
For Nguyen, wonder, absorption and play are central to human flourishing. Metrics are a kind of invasive species threatening to replace our weird, delicate joys with the dumbed-down epistemic fundamentalism of league tables and graphs. — Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/06/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen-review-a-brilliant-warning-about-the-gamification-of-everyday-life
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Stories Beyond Demographics – seeing stories in ourselves
The archetypal model, however, shifts our way of thinking. Instead of needing to adapt the story of Little Red-Cap (Red Riding Hood) to my own social and cultural norms so that I can see myself in the story, I am tasked with seeing the story play out in myself. How am I Riding Hood? How…
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Programming With Claude – The First Week
I am not a programmer. I have made multiple attempts to learn programming, from Ruby on Rails back in the day to Python a year or two ago. While I understand the basic concepts – variables and types and loops and functions and classes, I find that the complexity mounts quickly and at a certain…