Tag: AI
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This Ping Pong Robot Can Beat Elite Human Players
Sony’s AI division has designed a robot that can beat elite human players at table tennis. From the paper: Evaluated in matches against elite and pr — Read on kottke.org/26/04/this-ping-pong-robot-can-beat-elite-human-players
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The Virtue of Laziness
LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don’t want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones. — Read on simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/13/bryan-cantrill/
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How to Guess If Your Job Will Exist in Five Years – The Atlantic
To Dorsey, people are horses. Innovation is driving them out of existence. But people are coal—or, to be more precise, coders seem to be coal at the moment. Businesses employ 6 percent more software engineers now than they did a year ago, in part because corporate executives are desperate for workers to figure out how…
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Working with agents doesn’t feel like flow — Bill de hÓra
After a stint of deep work, I usually feel the tiredness of having held a line of thought together for a long time via concentration. After a stint with agents, the tiredness feels more like the aftermath, again, of sustained play or competition. The accumulation of lots of small judgments, many state updates, repeated course…
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The Claim Upon the Training Data — Jônadas Techio
What is at stake, if this changes, is not the catastrophe Dennett feared — not “counterfeit people” flooding the zone, though that too. It is something quieter and deeper: the shared fictions losing their grip, not because they are falsified but because the infrastructure maintaining them no longer has a stake in their coherence. A…
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Auto mode for Claude Code
Before each action runs, a separate classifier model reviews the conversation and decides whether the action matches what you asked for: it blocks actions that escalate beyond the task scope, target infrastructure the classifier doesn’t recognize as trusted, or appear to be driven by hostile content encountered in a file or web page. […] Is…
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The trajectories of science and AI – Marginal REVOLUTION
You know, I’ve read a lot of texts from the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Adam Smith is one of them, but there’s many others, and a lot of people are for what’s going on, they understand they will be richer, maybe healthier. They do see the downsides, but they have a pretty decent…
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Why even ‘perfect’ AI therapy may be structurally doomed – Marginal REVOLUTION
But all else equal: does infinite, on-demand therapy—even assuming the highest quality per unit of therapeutic interaction—sound like a good idea to you? I can tell you, to me it does not. First of all, despite detractors’ claims to the contrary, the basic idea of therapy is not to make you dependent for life—but rather,…
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Hoard things you know how to do – Agentic Engineering Patterns – Simon Willison’s Weblog
The key idea here is that coding agents mean we only ever need to figure out a useful trick once. If that trick is then documented somewhere with a working code example our agents can consult that example and use it to solve any similar shaped project in the future. — Read on simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/hoard-things-you-know-how-to-do/
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First run the tests – Agentic Engineering Patterns
“First run the tests” provides a four word prompt that encompasses a substantial amount of software engineering discipline that’s already baked into the models. — Read on simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/first-run-the-tests/