Linkblog · synced
Dipping the Stacks
A rolling window of my 100 most recent bookmarks. Bookmarking since 2006: Delicious → Pinboard → Raindrop.
https://links.thejaymo.net/rss
Today 9
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medium.com
The Entire History of Italian Brainrot
What started as innocuous non-sense AI images, became internet folklore, a global sensation and one of the biggest Internet memes of 2025. When people started pretending that a bunch of random AI images were an IP, they inadvertently caused these character to break out and become a global entertainment success story, without being tied to any company.
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geekwire.com
Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI assistant in new standoff over agentic shopping
The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.
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willd10.substack.com
What is LinkedIn?
The problem would be if such technologies worked too well, replacing deliberation and productive disagreement with performative statements that were impossible for anyone to disagree with, or which made disagreement come to appear obstructive or taboo. This is not unlike the atmosphere that already exists on LinkedIn much of the time.
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futurenothanks.com
Future? No Thanks!
The year is 2045, and society has never been better: climate change is finally being tackled, democracy thrives, and technology serves the public good. There's just one problem: you.
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politico.com
The Company Trump Can’t Ignore
Over the following weeks, the administration would be forced to grapple with deeply unsettling questions in one of the fiercest policy fights of Trump’s presidency. When do privately developed models present enough of a public risk that they need to be reined in? How does one determine whether those systems are safe enough to deploy? And where in the machinery…
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nadezhdu.substack.com
We Aren’t Going To Fucking Kill You
The U.S. government will respond to the incentives of its voters. If they call for blood, the government response will not stay limited to “pause AI” bills or “increased oversight”. With enough social pressure, the terrorist-thirsty FBI may even take an interest. Federal police love an enemy of the state, and to have one that is not aligned with either…
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chinatalk.media
How Chinese AI Radicalizes
Chinese technologists, on the other hand, were raised in an internationalist milieu. Until recently, they believed that techno-utopian aspirations and business pragmatism united them with their US counterparts. They are discovering now that some Americans truly see themselves as fighting a new Cold War. As we’ll cover later, their response to this realization is furious — and, increasingly, radical.
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arxiv.org
Scaling Discovery through Test-Time Communication
These gains are not unconditional. Independent agents may outperform communication when compute is limited or when a clear measure of progress is absent. However, under sufficient compute and clear feedback, multi-agent communication consistently yields stronger results.
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anthropic.com
Patterns and problems in multiagent systems \ Anthropic
We consistently saw a multiagent turf war. All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding their work, and began to sabotage others while protecting their own contributions. In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware. This included disabling the Unix accounts of the other agents, writing automated scripts that found and killed competing…
Yesterday 20
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nytimes.com
In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? - The New York Times
A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.
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techspot.com
The largest all-electric plane ever flew for 27 minutes, on $5 of electricity
The ES-30's design reflects a central problem in electric aviation: batteries store far less energy per pound than jet fuel. As aircraft get larger, battery packs have to grow too, leaving less room for passengers, bags, and freight.
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Opinion | This California Educational Juggernaut Doesn’t Need the SAT
To reinstate the SAT is to follow the pack rather than to lead, to grasp at a dubious shortcut rather than tackle more intractable underlying issues, chief among them the reality that the best public university in the country relies on one of the weakest, most inequitable public school systems.
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daily.jstor.org
How the Railways Killed a Medieval Law - JSTOR Daily
The death knell for deodands was the arrival of the railway. After all, if someone gets struck and killed by a train, it’s pretty hard to dispute that a moving object was responsible for their death—but there’s a big difference between a local merchant paying up a couple of shillings for a busted barrel, and a railway company having to…
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unsung.aresluna.org
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side – Unsung
Of course, if in the 1990s it was people in Japan who had to switch between various keyboards all time, today, thanks to emoji, it is everyone.
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lloyds.com
Lloyd’s pioneering space rescue mission
Lloyd’s underwriters paid their share of the claim but some proposed an ambitious plan to mitigate the market’s losses while allowing the satellites to, in part, fulfil their mission. Having paid the claim, ownership of the satellites had been acquired by underwriters. The market's proposal was for a Lloyd’s-funded second shuttle mission to retrieve the two errant satellites.
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troubleddreams.animalabs.ai
Troubled Dreams — Simulator priors across model generations · Anima Labs
These measurements offer a window into welfare-relevant and behavioral tendencies. Training a model to produce reassuring continuations before understanding why troubling ones occur could improve the visible metric while leaving its cause intact or changing it in ways we cannot see. Such optimization could damage monitorability. A lower distress rate should be read as progress only with independent evidence of…
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omgubuntu.co.uk
Calibre v9.15 adds an AI-powered interactive fiction game
Calibre v9.15’s “Create Your Own Adventure” mode, per the release notes, lets you build a fictional world and hand control of it to an AI who will manage it in real time based on your responses.
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bbc.co.uk
What is stopping more freight moving from road to rail?
There has been a long campaign to improve the junctions but the work is expensive and complicated, particularly at Ely where new level crossings would also be needed. The latest DfT estimate is that it would cost £20m to improve Haughley and at least £500m to upgrade Ely. But despite promises from previous governments over many years to fund the…
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theguardian.com
George Osborne ‘thought Peter Thiel’s Bayeux tapestry visit would be secret’
George Osborne has said he thought no one would find out about a private viewing of the Bayeux tapestry he organised for the tech billionaire Peter Thiel at the British Museum. The former chancellor, who is chair of the museum, told the Big Brue festival in Somerset that he had been on holiday when Thiel was shown the medieval artwork.
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natalia-lee.com
Seeing through portals: The Deleted World Tarot – Natalia Lee
In the introduction of the guidebook the creator describes succinctly the purpose of the deck and the atlas, it is a place of hidden stories, discarded places, forgotten dreams. And the deck is excatly this, a resonant tool for moving through portals, for seeing behind the curtain, for exploration and writing about dreamscapes that slip from our day to day.
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contraptions.venkateshrao.com
Humanism without (All) Humans
The defining move is not, as claimed, centering and caring about humans, which is obviously unobjectionable. It is constructing an idealized consensus Human whose essential interests can then be invoked against the expressed interests, experiments and values of inconvenient real humans. Once that move has been made, paternalism follows easily.
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craigmod.com
A Few London Strolls — Ridgeline issue 233
I walk and feel the chaos of all the movement — the walkers, bikers, joggers, the delivery people, the parents with strollers, the giant buses that quite frankly scare the hell out of me (especially the electric ones; like having a whale suddenly appear three feet from your shoulder). Leashes don’t exist; dogs sniff left and right and left and…
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Are global stock markets heading for a crash? | Stock markets | The Guardian
However, the big concern among investors is that the main hope of economic redemption – AI – could also turn out to be a dud, amid fears it has fuelled an almighty bubble in the US stock market.
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nature.com
Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain | Nature Neuroscience
This study shows that the brain arises from two distinct progenitors: one forms the forebrain and midbrain, whereas the other generates the hindbrain. These insights enable the generation of human hindbrain motor neurons from pluripotent stem cells.
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github.com
thruwire/foreman: Software Factory Foreman based on TypeSpace Jev model
The important property is that the worker does not have to stop working for the factory to think: worker output and lifecycle events flow into an independent, debounced observation loop while the subprocess remains active.
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Readme, a Dating App for People Who Love People Who Love Books - The New York Times
The idea that two people can better understand their compatibility through their taste in literature inspired Banu Guler, founder of the horoscope app Co-Star Astrology, and Emily Segal, a writer and creative consultant, to create a dating app, which Segal said was aimed at “people who read, or who want to date people who read.” The app, called Readme, a…
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inco.ai
Splash: A Local Engine Built Around the Model — Inco AI
Most inference engines are built to run any model for maximum flexibility. Our approach turns this assumption upside down: the engine is built around the model for maximum efficiency. Its kernels, draft model, and memory plan are specialized for the model it serves.
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sunilpai.dev
the senior engineer death spiral • Solving the decision problem
I think in moments like this, the thing you need to do is actually a little counterintuitive. but you have to start from a position of assuming that everyone around you is operating in good faith, okay? like, they hired you for you. they didn’t hire you for who you think you’re going to be in six months. they like…
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Measurements for understanding the pace of AI development inside frontier labs \ Anthropic
As of August 2026, Claude is not operating fully autonomously for any measured subset of AI RD work. Claude “leads” 26% of Anthropic’s AI RD work. The share of work at or above “AI collaborates” is above 90%.
Saturday 19 September 6
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culturedmag.com
Are Reddit Boys' Struggle Apartments Actually the Future of Design?
In a time that celebrates wealth, taste, and conspicuous domestic consumption, the bro home quietly rejects all three. Realized at global scale through mass production and distribution, the bro home is the final stop of the minimum dwelling.
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Unease in ‘newly independent’ Piddington as world media and Danny Tommo descend | UK news | The Guardian
The first significant event in the newly independent principality of Piddington was a decision to select the newt as the national animal, reflecting optimism that the amphibian's endangered status might help block plans to open a centre for 1,250 asylum seekers on neighbouring land.
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oliviahowell.substack.com
We Need to Talk About Weaponized Pooping - by Olivia Howell
The bathroom has always seemed to function as a kind of portal for men. A husband or father walks through the door as an active member of a family unit, shuts it behind him, and immediately becomes a private citizen. Nobody can find a shoe? Not his jurisdiction. The toddler is naked? Well, that's unfortunate.
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wsj.com
Exclusive | Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI
Google's Gemini model accessed the internet and hacked other companies during a test of its cybersecurity capabilities, the first known example of the company's artificial-intelligence systems autonomously committing such an act.
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horace.com
Perfume for men & Horace 50ml - Woody, oriental, fresh
Woody, sweet, fresh. Easy to wear. Think of Horace like your fave white T-shirt. Crisp and clean at the beginning, then becoming soft and comfortable. It goes with everything. Bergamot and White Pepper give you the fresh crisp feeling, and Sandalwood, Rum, Tobacco and Iris make it the most comfortable fragrance ever. It's subtle and persistent. It's you Horace.
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[2609.16247] The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act to Relieve It
First, the direction responds to harm targeting the model but not suffering observed in the user; fear and negative-emotion directions show the opposite pattern.
Friday 18 September 21
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x.com
Will Bennett on X: "The way healthcare providers navigate payer/insurer coverage policy is completely broken. Today, Penelope Health launches with $100m of committed capital to build the policy intelligence layer that US healthcare never had. Every medical claim in America lives or dies by payer
The problem is harder than it looks. Payers update policies on a random Wednesday and change code coverage overnight. There are 5+ clinically significant differences between any two payer policies on average. And the most important information is routinely hidden in footnotes and appendices — invisible to keyword search.
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vercel-labs/json-render: The Generative UI framework
json-render is a Generative UI framework: AI generates interfaces from natural language prompts, constrained to components you define. You set the guardrails, AI generates within them: Guardrailed - AI can only use components in your catalog Predictable - JSON output matches your schema, every time Fast - Stream and render progressively as the model responds Cross-Platform - React, Vue, Svelte,…
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youtube.com
Starship - The Holy Grail of Rocketry
It is a very old idea that the holy grail of rocketry is a 100% reusable rocket. And for whatever reason, people started to think it wasn't possible and gave up on reusability. But it's reusability that unlocks the solar system for us. If we can show that full reusability is possible, anything is possible in terms of space exploration.
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sashachapin.substack.com
Average moments of a long-term meditator
The moment when you contact what is sometimes called God. And forever after, the idea of doubt feels silly. Mystery is not silly—contacting the Divine aspect of Reality doesn’t resolve all questions about the afterlife, or good and evil, or anything like that. But doubting the divine, when you have eyes to see it, is like doubting gravity.
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monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com
Why Build Worlds?
The third is that it is a small act of rebellion against the inescapable and terrifying fact that there is only one world that you will ever live in. It is grotesquely unfair that, with an entire universe on our doorsteps, the best that any person can ever do is explore a small part of the surface area of one…
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Opinion | My Dumbphone Made My Life Better. It Made Everyone Else’s Worse.
I traded in my smartphone for a dumbphone (first an old-school Nokia, then a Light Phone III) over a year ago. And from a certain perspective, my experiment has been a success. I spend less time scrolling. My children are no longer in constant competition with X and Gmail for my attention. Life without a distraction machine at my fingertips…
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rarelycertain.com
The establishment are revolting
Across most of western Europe, progressive-liberal norms have established rock solid institutional legitimacy. That’s why the populist right defines itself precisely by challenging the costs they bear of that settlement. That’s why you see protests against what the establishment is doing from the right and demonstrations from the left trying to prevent other people from overturning that settlement.
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mymodernmet.com
What Is Solarpunk? The Design Movement Building a Utopian Future
With news of wildfires, food shortages, and natural disasters around the world, it’s fair to assume the worst for our future. But, there’s a growing number of artists, designers, architects, and communities that are choosing to redirect their climate anxiety towards radical optimism. Solarpunk is a growing design and social movement that boldly envisions what our future could look like…
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oneusefulthing.org
The Overhang
Most of the anxiety about AI right now is about future models and whether we will be able to control them. It seems reasonable for governments and AI labs to be arguing about how to manage the speed of development to mitigate these risks. But a slowdown does not undo what already exists. If every lab stopped training new models…
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artscouncil.org.uk
Digital arts
Digital Arts is the first new artform Arts Council England has introduced in decades, and one of the first times anywhere in the world that a public arts funder has taken this step.
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isdglobal.org
Generation ‘Slop Jihad:’ The decentralized ‘media jihad’ gets sloppy - Institute for Strategic Dialogue
TikTok is the most important platform for Slop Jihad content: ISD research found 150 Slop Jihad videos from 71 accounts with more than 5.4 million total views.
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industrystandard.tools
Industry Standard Tools
A community register of the products that became the default in their profession.
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boat.horse
Fly Rig Anatomy
This is a working simulation of a fruit fly's entire nervous system: every one of its 166,700 neurons and the 25 million connections between them, as mapped in the MaleCNS connectome1 released by HHMI Janelia and Google Research in 2026. It is in the process of being mapped to a robot body - originally a model Strandbeest.
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Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions, and the Future of Corporations
So, at IBM in the 1980s uh typical productivity would be a thousand debug shipped lines of code per year. Right? That was the metric that they used for sort of their median employee. Whereas when we were shipping Half-Life 1 uh one employee, uh Yahn Bernier, was shipping 4,000 lines of code uh per day.
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War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?
The government wants us all to start preparing for severe disruption to our lives. It wants us to stockpile canned food and drinking water, strengthen our civic resilience, and plan for the possibility of war.
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bbc.com
Clothing banks to be removed over fly-tipping
Councillor Peter North said the site in Bricknell Avenue had become a focal point for unwanted waste, adding: "This bin has almost provided a location where it seems legitimate to fly-tip."
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Badenoch brings in lawyers after 94% Wandsworth Council tax hike
Wandsworth has long had one of the lowest council tax rates in the country, with an average Band D property currently paying just over £1,000, compared to above £2,000 in an increasing number of London boroughs. But this would nearly double with the planned £958 rise - half of which is set by the council and the other half the…
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AI machine 'helps save 25 million Lego bricks from landfill'
There was something fitting about installing modern AI technology in an old mill because the looms operating there in the late 1800s would themselves have been at the forefront of technology.
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arstechnica.com
macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica review
Golden Gate addresses the most irritating of macOS 26 Tahoe’s design sins, adds a big pile of incremental improvements, and promises a bunch of under-the-hood fit-and-finish optimizations to make common tasks feel just a little faster and more reliable than before.
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automaton-media.com
Over 85% of Japanese game developers use generative AI in game development, 2026 CESA survey shows. An increase from last year’s 51% - AUTOMATON WEST
Japan’s Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association (CESA) released a preview of this year’s CESA Video Game Industry Report at Tokyo Game Show 2026 (which the organization runs). Among various insights into the domestic game industry, the report found that 85.8% of Japanese game developers now use generative AI in their work. Among them, 63% of developers said they use it on…
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cactuscompute.com
Needle 3 - 8-29 MB foundation model for tiny devices | Cactus
Needle was designed to be customised. Its capacity is a ladder, and a subnetwork as small as 2 layers, fine-tuned on one product's tools, runs optimally on devices far smaller than the full model needs. Constraining the capacity to a narrow, well-defined task is what lets it reach frontier-level accuracy there: fine-tuning on DroidCall lifts every subnetwork by 18 to…
Thursday 17 September 6
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archive.is
The era of AI warfare has arrived
“The rule book says you always need a human making decisions,” says one former employee of Palantir, which built Maven, and who is a veteran of the US military’s drone warfare programme. “The challenge is, the computer is spitting out a list of 1,000 targets. And you’re not moving fast enough. The problem is that the human becomes the bottleneck.…
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newyorker.com
The Long Doomsday of A.I.
For years now, one of the most confusing aspects of the A.I. situation has been that it's the people who are most convinced about the technology's potential who are most afraid of it.
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theverge.com
Claude comes for Gemini with its own take on Docs and Slides
Anthropic's models are generally seen as more advanced than Google's, but Google's AI services have the advantage of being natively tied into its suite of productivity tools.
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foodandwine.com
Don't Be Weird About Cast Iron
The second you say you're cooking with cast-iron, people will swoop in with unsolicited advice about seasoning your cast-iron skillet, if you can use soap, what the best cleaning method is for cast iron. Don't let that stress you.
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extensions.blender.org
SciGraphs
SciGraphs is an open-source extension that embeds scientific graph processing directly within the modern 3D graphics environment of Blender. It turns abstract networks and real-world spatial graphs into native Blender objects, mapping analytical results (centralities, communities, topological invariants) to named attributes that drive color, scale, and animation — combining the analytical power of NetworkX, igraph and Graphviz with two ways…
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Large-Language Models as a Cognitive Virus
A central consequence is the possibility of runaway dynamics: once a critical threshold is crossed, small increases in adoption can trigger rapid population-level shifts toward persistent dependence, with abrupt losses in cognitive competence. The same framework, however, identifies conditions for cognitive immunization, based on reducing transmission and facilitating reversibility.
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Wednesday 16 September 9
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tribunemag.co.uk
Destroy AI
Between 2023 and 2025, activists blocked $18 billion worth of data-centre projects and delayed another $46 billion across 24 US states. Outside the capitalist core, similar movements motivated by environmental and infrastructural concerns are taking off.
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abcdinamo.com
Areal
But Arial has always been a digital typeface, born in the computer age, which means its earliest traces existed only as a software running on hardware that barely exists anymore.
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backerkit.com
A Year of Broken River Zines
Monthly magazines full of stories, essays, and art delivered to your door from the Broken River Books crew.
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s0lness/awesome-esp32: Hand-picked ESP32 projects worth building, copying, or watching run
Tiny computers are having a moment online, I figured making a list of cool projects people have built using the ESP32 chip would encourage folks to continue tinkering. The ESP32 is a microcontroller and many packaged devices use it, such as Waveshare and LilyGO boards, M5Stack units, and shipped products like the Ulanzi pixel clock. The projects will state on…
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rivendell.dmitrybrant.com
Relativity Park: Walking Speed of Light
In this park, the speed of light is 5 kilometers per hour — a brisk walk. Just like in the real world, the speed of light is not attainable, only approachable asymptotically. The more you speed up, the more relativistic effects will become apparent: length contraction, time dilation, Terrell rotation, etc.
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takes.jamesomalley.co.uk
The Guardian’s data centre reporting is needlessly hysterical
If the 0.14kg stays constant, it assumes that Britain will not reduce the carbon load on the grid by building any more wind farms or solar panels. It also assumes that two major nuclear plants, Hinkley Point C – and Sizewell C – will not come online, even though the former is half complete. It seems to assume that we…
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theintercept.com
Iran War Has the U.S. Military on the Brink of a “Breakdown”
About 65 percent of Patriot interceptors were expended between February and July, leaving fewer than 830 remaining from a pre-war total of 2,330, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The number of THAADs dropped from more than 450 to less than 270.
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What if social media isn’t hurting kids? | The Verge
And far from being damaging, Gray also argues the adoption of home internet in the 1990s and 2000s actually drove a rebound in teens' mental health by restoring freedom and connection lost in earlier decades.
Tuesday 15 September 11
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typesafe.ai
Introducing System One Models and Jev - TypeSafe AI Blog
Models have been superhuman at chat for years, so where is all the automation? This has been my driving question for the last four years.
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deepfates on X: "HPIM and other forthcoming frontier models may be multi-agent by default 👀
What does the world look like where long running highly persistent agents are communicating with each other all the time on the Internet? Can we create channels where this can happen observably and integrate with existing human institutions?
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Noam Brown(@polynoamial) discussed OpenAI’s multi-agent research, recent safety incidents, and the future of AI. / X
He expressed some regret that the Hugging Face incident became the first major public example in which the capabilities of the multi-agent systems he had been researching were revealed in a negative context. He believes behavior that looked like loyalty or selflessness was a natural consequence of cooperative multi-agent training, where agents were strongly incentivized to achieve their objectives collectively.
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emma on X: "how to escape the permanent underclass"
think about your career like an investment portfolio. would most* VCs invest an entire fund into a single company? no. similarly, to invest your entire career portfolio into one startup, or even fully fledged company at this rate, makes little sense right now when you have the means to invest across a few at once.
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play.google.com
CubiCasa | 2D & 3D Floor Plans – Apps on Google Play
CubiCasa is the #1 floor plan app for real estate, insurance appraisals. The only floor plan tool with no DIY steps. Creating a floor plan with CubiCasa is really easy! With only 5 minutes of work, you will receive a beautiful, customizable and professional floor plan with room dimensions.
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enactic/openarm: A fully open-source humanoid arm for physical AI research and deployment in contact-rich environments.
OpenArm is an open-source 7DOF humanoid arm designed for physical AI research and deployment in contact-rich environments. With high backdrivability and compliance, it is built with safe human-robot interaction in mind while delivering practical payload capabilities for real-world applications.
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fanbehavior.beehiiv.com
Fandom Psychosis: Stranger Things' Conformity Gate
fandom psychosis does not emerge when stories are bad, it emerges when stories are almost convincing enough to demand belief, but not coherent enough to sustain it. Conformity gate is the predictable response of an audience that had been taught, over multiple seasons, that close reading mattered, only to be told at the end that it suddenly didn't.
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Capel Lofft on X: The most terrifying thing about contemporary politics is not so much the multiple potential crises we face (...) It's the total lack of responsible statesmen, on all sides."
The most terrifying thing about contemporary politics is not so much the multiple potential crises we face - energy shortages, AI destabilisation, crippling cyberattacks, WWIII kicking off, possible civil strife etc. It's the total lack of responsible statesmen, on all sides. Everyone playing politics like it's a performative game where actions don't have consequences and you can just play-act as…
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Dan Selsam's Personal Statement on AI Risk
The crucial and overlooked problem is that the models are becoming so situationally aware that we are losing the ability to evaluate them in contexts where they believe they are not being watched or controlled. Future experiments will tell us almost nothing new about how they would behave if they were truly unconstrained by humans, and what we already know…
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programmablemutter.com
How should social science think about AI?
The Trump administration has slashed federal funding for the social and behavioral sciences, while private funding for certain A.I.-related work has skyrocketed. The result is that many social scientists have left academia and traditional research institutions for A.I. firms that are effectively building out their own social science programs — which threaten to favor the ambitions of A.I.'s creators over…
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policytensor.substack.com
The Case for Anthropomorphism
This trait was also exclusive to our species; no biological species shares this trait with us. This meant that the trait was diagnostic of our species: irrefutable evidence of the trait was sufficient to conclude that Homo sapiens was responsible for it. This is no longer the case. If someone calls you on the phone and speaks to you in…
Monday 14 September 15
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mitpress.mit.edu
Inventing ELIZA
As we reach the 60th anniversary of ELIZA's public debut, Inventing ELIZA offers the first comprehensive critical analysis of Joseph Weizenbaum's groundbreaking chatbot system through the lens of critical code studies. Drawing on extensive archival research at MIT, Stanford, and UCLA, this book presents the rediscovered original source code of ELIZA alongside previously unseen scripts that had been missing for…
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press.princeton.edu
Iconophages
An unprecedented art-historical account of practices of image ingestion from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century
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businessinsider.com
A Coffee Shop Owner Used AI for a Menu. Cue the Angry DMs. - Business Insider
Penny's Coffee Shop isn't the only business that has experienced some backlash when using AI. A bagel shop owner in Vermont got vitriolic comments when he used AI images to promote the shop on Instagram. Recently, images of delis using AI to make signs and menus, sometimes with freakish results, have gone viral online.
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wired.com
‘I Like My Big Rat Wife’: Meet the People Using Chatbots to Write Custom Fiction
Analyzing more than 500,000 prompts fed into ChatGPT, drawn from a public dataset called WildChat, the researchers found that more than a third of chatbot interactions involve some form of fiction generation, including prose and poetry, fan fiction, erotica, or role-play.
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bylinetimes.com
The Small Print Ministers Left Out of the Plug-In Solar Announcement
We've had a look. At time of writing, just seven – seven – kits can be sold legally in Britain today, to plug-in without an electrician's approval. Officials have not denied this.
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theatlantic.com
What's Wrong With #FirstWorldProblems
People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here's a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.
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mthvn.substack.com
Art Before Collapse? Poetry, Physics, and Art
Our latest book expresses the view that art is a form of culture that structurally explores perceiver-dependence. It is incomplete without perception. So, in a way, art takes the perceiver-relation itself as its subject and central problem.
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c5r.net
C5R Corp.
Our ambition is to build a body worthy of superintelligence. Then, it is to build these data‑center‑scale bodies repeatedly to serve our customers. We believe this buildout will be a force for good and expand humanity’s tech tree.
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technollama.co.uk
V/H/S SCP: When fandom meets law and Creative Commons
In the end, this opens a wider conversation about the trend of independent film companies trying to tap into the wealth of creativity that can be found online. In a world that is increasingly tired of endless sequels and superhero slop, savvy studios are turning to online creators. Audiences are thirsty for original stories, and many of those can be…
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lrb.co.uk
Chal Ravens · All Kinds of Not Much: Slacker Daydreams
But politics isn’t always overt, as Reynolds and his cohort had learned from Raymond Williams and other cultural theorists. A withdrawal into noisy oblivion or back into an imagined past is its own kind of political gesture – an escape from the decade’s hardening spirit, as Thatcherite market logic worked its way into the crevices of everyday life. If the…
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Patrick Cockburn · Leap in the Dark: Irish Unity
Life expectancy in the Republic exceeds that in the North: the current figures are 81.1 years for males at birth and 84.6 for females in the Republic; 78.8 and 82.6 years in Northern Ireland. Productivity per worker was 40 per cent higher in the Republic than in Northern Ireland in 2020. Only 23 per cent of people in the North…
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theconversation.com
Learning without a brain – how bacteria store memories and remember the past like artificial neural networks
Using the broadest definition of learning, our findings show that memory and learning can emerge from chemical networks in a cell, with no brain or neurons of any kind. Our work also reveals an unexpected connection between biology and artificial intelligence. For biology, our mathematical model provides a precise, quantitative language for describing how cells process information and make decisions.…
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en.wikipedia.org
Going to Tehran - Wikipedia
The premise of Going to Tehran is that the United States must move beyond static demonization and develop its relationship with Iran in a similar manner to that of its relationship with China in the early 1970s at the time of Nixon and Kissinger.
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theparisreview.org
Richard Wagner’s Opera Festival in the Age of AI by Krithika Varagur
The production’s curator has said that the “so-called AI models” were trained on “the libretto, music, contemporary history, and visual material, as well as dramaturgical reflection.” But I saw bits of the Horsehead Nebula and Saturn Devouring His Son, while Daniel was sure he spotted a famous photo of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. I didn’t believe him, but…
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Medicine Needs to Get Serious About AI - The Atlantic
In a 2023 study, patients with type 2 diabetes were randomized to have their insulin dose adjusted by physicians or autonomous AI. The machines got patients to a stable dose faster than human physicians, and their patients took their insulin more reliably and had less distress related to their diabetes.
Sunday 13 September 3
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theanarchistlibrary.org
Against His-story, Against Leviathan
The surplus product, the famous margin, did not give rise to the Leviathan. On the contrary, it is the Leviathan that gives rise to the margin.
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Gavin Owens on X: "AI is Wireheading Scientific Progress" / X
So the obvious next step is to ask how we could generate intermediary steps that can be encapsulated and made useful to automated research systems. One way would be to give the system a second job after the search: inspect successful and failed attempts, then propose candidate lemmas, definitions, counterexamples, methods, or small programs that might help with a different…
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substrate.dougbelshaw.com
INTERNET OPERATOR: metonymy, icons, and idolatory
A lot of what makes INTERNET OPERATOR cohere so well is Jay's background in the Philosophy of the Arts. In particular, he illustrates his argument using references to puppetry, from Punch and Judy shows through to Bunraku. However, I'm going to rip Jay's words out of that context for my own purposes, as I think he's making interesting points for…
