Category: Blog
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The space of intelligences is large
LLMs are shaped a lot less by biological evolution and a lot more by commercial evolution. It’s a lot less survival of tribe in the jungle and a lot more solve the problem / get the upvote. LLMs are humanity’s “first contact” with non-animal intelligence. Except it’s muddled and confusing because they are still rooted…
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American democracy is very much alive, though not in all regards well – Marginal REVOLUTION
The Senate also sided with the House on the Epstein files. Nate Silver and many others write about how Trump is now quite possibly a lame duck President. I do not doubt that there are many bad policies, and also much more corruption, and a more transparent form of corruption, which is corrosive in its…
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Confidently Wrong – Marginal REVOLUTION
The authors then correlate respondents’ scores on the objective (uncontroversial) knowledge with their opposition to the scientific consensus on topics like vaccination, nuclear power, and homeopathy. The result is striking: people who are most opposed to the consensus (7, the far right of the horizontal axis in the figure below) score lower on objective knowledge…
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Generating an Infographic with Nano Banana Pro aka gemini-3-pro-image-preview
I’m starting a detailed infographic about the Datasette project. I plan to use Google Search to gather specific information about its core processes, which I will then visualize in a multi-panel diagram. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/20/nano-banana-pro/
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The Genetic Evolution of the Human Race and Its Consequences for the Industrial Revolution
We do not claim that the Black Death instantly made Europeans smarter. Instead, we suggest that the post-plague economy may have amplified long-running selection on traits linked to educational attainment: learning ability, self-control, and long-term planning. In that sense, the Black Death looks less like a one-off catastrophe and more like a hinge in the…
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Chatbot as Digital Coworker
The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker. To be very clear, Gemini 3 isn’t perfect, and it still needs a manager who can guide and check it. But it suggests that “human in the loop” is evolving from “human who fixes AI mistakes” to “human who directs AI…
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Edward O. Wilson: The Real Problem of Humanity
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. — Read on www.harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/james-watson-edward-o-wilson-intellectual-entente
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En abandonnant l’écriture à l’IA, nous risquons de nous empêcher de réfléchir
si écrire, c’est penser, un texte écrit avec l’assistance de ChatGPT ne matérialise-t-il pas les pensées du générateur de texte, plutôt que les nôtres ? Du contenu soi-disant neuf Et à quoi pense donc ChatGPT ? Heureusement, à rien : on l’a dit, le programme se contente de régurgiter les textes figurant dans son corpus d’entraînement, en en…
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Scaling Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) Vector in Redis
if you have different vectors about the same use case split in different instances / keys, you can ask VSIM for the same query vector into all the instances, and add the WITHSCORES option (that returns the cosine distance) and merge the results client-side, and you have magically scaled your hundred of millions of vectors…
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Notes on American Fascism | The Point Magazine
“What is happening today worldwide,” he writes in “Notes on American Fascism,” “is a reorganization of ancient or new or newish social classes into two social classes: the economically and technologically sophisticated and the failed and unrooted and not sophisticated.” In the essay on Winchell he puts the point more bluntly: “When I was young,…