Tag: Knowledge
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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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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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40,000-year-old German artifacts may display written language precursor | Reuters
For example, crosses were found only on tools and animal figurines, but not on human figurines. The researchers analyzed more than 200 Stone Age artifacts that bore these signs, dating from about 43,000 to 34,000 years ago, from four cave sites in southwestern Germany associated with a culture called the Aurignacian. The Adorant figurine, for…
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The Discourse is Getting Both Smarter and Dumber
I think that when historians look back on the Trump era, they will be more likely to note the collapse in norms surrounding things like truth and corruption and the existence of a fair justice system than policy changes. Likewise, think about how in late 2025 the most popular podcasts in the country among right-wingers…
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AddyOsmani.com – 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google
Writing forces clarity. When I explain a concept to others – in a doc, a talk, a code review comment, even just chatting with AI – I discover the gaps in my own understanding. The act of making something legible to someone else makes it more legible to me. This doesn’t mean that you’re going…
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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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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…
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DOC • To grow, we must forget… but now AI remembers everything
What begins as personalization can quietly become entrapment, not through control, but through familiarity. And in that familiarity, we begin to lose something essential: not just variety, but the very conditions that make change possible. Research in cognitive and developmental psychology shows that stepping outside one’s comfort zone is essential for growth, resilience, and adaptation.…