Category: Blog
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Links Summary 2026:1
Links this week: 4 A thin batch over this holiday week, but quite representative of the topics I’m interested in:
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The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz
From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box,…
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SPACE TYPE GENERATOR
Had a lot of fun with this, inspired by Kottke.— Read on spacetypegenerator.com/
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The hard part: A quote from Jason Gorman
The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking — with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions — into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a…
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Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package. Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship. Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without…
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Consciousness May Require a New Kind of Computation – Neuroscience News
So, if we want something like synthetic consciousness, the problem may not be, “What algorithm should we run?” The problem may be, “What kind of physical system must exist for that algorithm to be inseparable from its own dynamics?” What are the necessary features—hybrid event–field interactions, multi-scale coupling without clean interfaces, energetic constraints that shape inference…
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The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore – The Atlantic
For one thing, the organization of living matter defies physicists’ usual expectations about the universe. Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year. That means you and every other living thing aren’t an inert object, like…
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The books I enjoyed most this year, 2025. – by Henry Oliver
In no special order and not necessarily published recently. — Read on www.commonreader.co.uk/p/the-books-i-enjoyed-most-this-year-4c3
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How LLMs give semantic meaning to a prompt| ngrok blog
In summary, embeddings are points in n-dimensional space that you can think of as the semantic meaning of the text they represent. During training, each token gets moved within this space to be close to other, similar tokens. The more dimensions, the more complex and nuanced the LLM’s representation of each token can be. —…
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How harmful is the decline in long-form reading? – Marginal REVOLUTION
A second and more pessimistic diagnosis is that print and reading culture has been hanging by a thread, and current and pending technological advances are about to give that thread its final cut. The intellectual and cultural apocalypse is near. Even if your family thinks of itself as well-educated, your kids will grow up unable…