Category: Blog

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…

Corrélation n’est pas causalité, a-t-on appris en classe de terminale. Certes. Mais, tout de même, cette transformation du paysage politique occidental suit la courbe de l’ascension des réseaux sociaux dans la sphère médiatique. Comme si l’émergence protestataire épousait le remplacement progressif des médias traditionnels par les réseaux sociaux. Ceux-là se prêtent non seulement à toutes les…

The announcement follows Samsung recently announcing a wider variety of display choices on its home appliances, ranging from 4.3 inches all the way up to 32 inches. It’s all part of the company’s strategy to put “screens everywhere,” instead of easy-to-use buttons and dials that rarely fail and are cheap to replace. — Read on…

There have always been college-sports fans on the internet, consigned to some of the worst message boards you can possibly imagine, but it’s only in the past decade that the internet has become so ubiquitous and culturally hegemonic that it’s been able to sustain a large population of current and former fraternity members, degenerate gamblers,…

A shitcoin refers to a cryptocurrency with little to no value, authenticity, or utility. These tokens are created with minimal innovation or purpose but often as a joke or for a quick-profit scheme. Many of these tokens (popularly known as meme coins) are inspired by current world happenings, internet jokes or memes. Because most shitcoins…