Escape the algorithm
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sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them.
We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels. Like in Slovenian, some vowels prefer particular tones. Like in human language, there’s a lot of coarticulation (a process when you say “tense” but the word sounds like “tents”).
More on the work learning whale speech here. Is this really happening?
About a political group underrepresented in the Trope Land of garbage that passes as major media discourse these days:
For a full decade now, American society has been discussing either the Ivy League elites who have lost touch with salt-of-the-earth Americans or the hoi polloi themselves; those denizens of Rust Belt towns slowly collapsing under the weight of globalization and shifting demographics…But we haven’t talked a lot about a very large, influential, and important segment of American society: the state school upper middle class.
And
In inflation-adjusted terms, this cohort earns slightly more on a per-household level than their socio-cultural ancestors. With that money, they can afford to live a life that’s similarly slightly better in relative terms. What I mean by that is that the level of expectations, in terms of the lifestyle you can afford on your income, have moved in parallel with the rising standard of living….
And
That sense of doing okay is an important component of analyzing this group of people because it informs their worldview. Their reality meets expectations; the life they expect to have is the life they do have.
And
They want stability, consistency, and competence. Moreover, the ideas that the state school upper middle class exhibit in their lived experience—marriage, children, stable employment, education—that used to be associated with red-leaning voters are now likely to be found among reluctant, unenthusiastic Kamala Harris voters.
And
the state school upper middle class may not be the elites who set trends and determine morals, they are the ones who make up a large share of home purchases across the country, they are the ones to whom corporations pander, they are the ones who can break the tie in an off-season election. In short, these people are important, and I get the sense that, due to their relatively silent existence, they are being underdiscussed in the intellectual space.
Interesting, and I agree we don’t hear much about this group. More here.
More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith offered a simple way to think about economic growth. He argued that prosperity depended less on grand strategy, and more on a small set of conditions that allowed ordinary economic activity to proceed with confidence. He summarized them as peace, light taxation, and a tolerable administration of justice.
— Read on www.thevccorner.com/p/the-great-divergence-us-vs-europe-growth
Nobody’s saying things have been going great in America over the past quarter century.
Instead, the right is obsessed with the idea that mysterious forces of fraud have run off with all the money, while the left has convinced itself that billionaires aren’t paying any taxes.
But it’s not some huge secret why it seems like the government keeps spending and spending without us getting any amazing new public services — it’s transfers to the elderly.
How do we get more skin in the game on policy? Common sense is that when voters get the benefits and penalties of their preferences, the voting improves. I think this requires: Public scorecards, replace gerrymandering with an automated system, make it easy to replace politicians who are poor managers.
More here.
Nietzsche believed that life denying philosophies were inferior. This included Platonism, with its rejection of Homeric morality. Christianity, as the dominant force thousands of years prior, got particular attention. Nietzsche believed the ideal was life-affirming: Accepting one’s fate, accepting reality as it is, and still finding joy in it.
And I think that according to Nietzsche, life denying philosophies appealed to people because they acted as a coping mechanism for the stress of life. But someone who followed a life denying philosophy paid a price: they devalued the only life they were going to get.
This is my conclusion after a discussion on Reddit. I don’t totally agree with Nietzsche’s assessment, because these philosophies offer other things of value, like faith – which is a good way to organize thoughts. Am I missing something?
Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library. The model has absolutely no training inputs from after 1899 — the vocabulary and ideas are formed exclusively from nineteenth-century literature.
— Read on simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/30/mr-chatterbox/
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes
— Read on jsomers.net/blog/the-paper-computer
Every public meeting, summarized in five minutes : AI to keep you up to date on your community. We’ll see more of this, and I predict government will get easier to understand with bill overviews and niche AI generated newsletters to keep people up to date in their communities.
How would you change your beliefs if we’re being watched by aliens?
What effects will exploitative price-gouging have in the long-term? We’ve all stopped going to places that “feel” greedy since COVID, like businesses that set base tips way upwards of 20%, or that try to add a 20% “tip” surcharge on a routine transaction. Will this have a long-term effect or are exploitative businesses making enough from the customers willing to pay?
Black holes are a logical place to look for advanced quantum computing by other civilizations, and we have the technology to spot if this is happening, according to a new paper. The paper argues that any sufficiently advanced civilization would use black holes for quantum computers.
Full paper here. And speaking of advanced civilizations, understanding this without Claude is beyond my ability, proving that we are already augmenting our intelligence to a superhuman level, a point I suspect will be no longer interesting in a few months.
The Church of Graphs is dedicated to the meta-belief that knowledge must be formalized and quantifiable to be worthy of consideration. It demands that its adherents reject the evidence of their own eyes in favor of official facts and figures stamped with the imprimatur of a priestly expert class.
And:
I’m here to argue that you don’t require them to make sense of the world, and to give you permission to trust your own eyes on matters that affect your life.
And:
let us consider how a person experiences crime even if they are not, personally, a legible “victim”….When I send my children to a local café to buy some pastry with cash, only for them to be sent home because the stores in my neighborhood no longer accept cash due to break-ins, my children are experiencing crime….the blast radius of the offense is wide and durable, affecting far more people than could ever be included in a victim survey, and for a much longer time than the offense itself.
Something to think about. More here. Related, a quote by Jeff Bezos: “When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.”
“No parents, no babysitter, no iPad to Facetime Mom. No Ring doorbell for check-ins. You’re just alone.”
Was this the first time in history this happened?
— Unexplained lights in the sky correspond to nuclear tests? If this author is hinting at UAPs, then what is the motivation for a UAP? Watching? Protecting? If so, look for the results of that activity.
— What to expect from quantum computing
— The “AI Doc”, a new documentary about AI, is a weird family movie
— “Quag Keep” is the first LitRPG novel based on Dungeons & Dragons
You are a skeptical media analyst with decades of experience spotting spin. Provide a critical daily news summary for [today’s date or past 24 hours].
First, list the 6–8 biggest stories dominating headlines. For each:
Highlight any clusters of similar stories that suggest coordinated messaging. Rate overall media hype level (low/medium/high) for the day and explain why.
E-PRIME, abolishing all forms of the verb “to be,” has its roots in the field of general semantics, as presented by Alfred Korzybski in his 1933 book, Science and Sanity.
And:
…one can indeed write and speak without using any form of “to be,” calling this subset of the English language “E-Prime.”
— Read on rebtinfo.com/toward-understanding-e-prime/
And:
The “B”-type statements (E-Prime) recast these sentences into a form isomorphic to modern science by first abolishing the “is” of Aristotelian essence and then reformulating each observation in terms of signals received and interpreted by a body (or instrument) moving in space-time.
I suppose the purpose of this language modification is to change the way we think, so that we can be more flexible?
Another woman who wants (say) a religiously serious family man with a good job might well find that men in her dating pool are indifferent to tattoos but care deeply about whether she likes reading science fiction and playing D&D. Presumably, she projects a shy, nerdy vibe—the kind of girl an Orson Scott Card fan wants to take home to Mom.
All this means that people’s advice and complaints primarily reflect, not great truths about love and dating and gender relations, but their own idiosyncratic way of moving through the world.
— Read on thingofthings.substack.com/p/why-all-dating-discourse-is-terrible
This dating article is really about how humans subconsciously create communities around them based on their preferences. Without thinking about it, we express our preferences by filtering out things we don’t like and signaling things we like.
This shapes the jobs we’re exposed to and the people that stay in our lives. What’s really fascinating about this article is that the author consciously tries to discover the signals that she’s sending by analyzing the subconscious patterns she engages in repeatedly.
Robert Anton Wilson calls the result of these patterns “reality tunnels,” because these subconscious preferences shape the way we view reality. He thinks that we can change our reality tunnels, but I’m not totally sure. Can we really change our reality tunnels? Has anyone been successful at this?
He was good because he was so different from what his opponents were used to
Most NBA players haven’t played against a 5’3″ dude since 8th grade, and here comes this little guy that can sprint for 48 minutes with the quickest hands and feet in the world? Your entire game is gonna be disrupted
— Read on www.reddit.com/r/NBATalk/comments/1lm4wsa/muggsy_bogues_is_now_67_how_good_would_he_be_in/
people will go against the evidence of their own eyes if contradicted by a unanimous group. Second, group pressure is much weaker if even a single person dares to disagree with the group. Third, and most remarkable: it does not matter if the dissenter is mistaken; dissent punctures group pressure either way. People are liberated to say what they believe, not because the dissenter speaks the truth but because the dissenter demonstrates that disagreement is possible.
— Read on timharford.com/2026/03/the-refreshing-power-of-disagreement/
a team from Google DeepMind has introduced a new cognitively inspired framework that deconstructs general intelligence into 10 key faculties. More importantly, they propose a way to evaluate AI systems across these key capabilities and compare their performance to humans.
— Read on singularityhub.com/2026/03/20/google-deepmind-plans-to-track-agi-progress-with-these-10-traits-of-general-intelligence/
I think Disney and Las Vegas are the closest the USA gets to the monumental architecture style seen throughout Rome. Monumentalism is architecture designed with massive scale, made to awe the viewer with symbolic power (usually as a symbol of the state). Monumentalism is everywhere in Rome. It’s in Catholic cathedrals. When confronted with monumental architecture, you feel humbled and human, overwhelmed by the style’s colossal proportions and power it projects.
There is some monumental architecture in the United States (Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore). But unlike Rome, there is no single city filled with monumental architecture, designed to make you gasp at every turn.
What do we have that does that? Disney World and Las Vegas. The buildings produce awe due to their audacity. Each corner, particularly in Disney, brings into view a new, curated vista to impress you.
But in the USA, this does not project state power, nor does it humble you. It does the reverse. It humbles itself, invites you. You’re welcome to spend more because of the spectacle, which is for you, and certainly not for itself.
I can’t think of any cities that consistently use monumental architecture to project state power. I think the USA uses monumentalism to project logos and invite the viewer into consumption. I don’t know if this is an evolution (the viewer is welcomed, invited, elevated) or a de-evolution (the viewer is a product, the state is degraded, the individual is elevated above the common good).
But I am pretty sure the USA does not use monumental architecture to serve state purposes the way imperial Rome did. If I’m missing something, let me know.
Roblox has something like 380 million monthly active users. Minecraft has something like 60 million. Fortnite has 650 million registered players. These…are all virtual three-dimensional spaces where you can run around in an avatar and interact with faraway persons over the Internet. The only thing that differentiates them from the Metaverse, as narrowly construed by Metaverse-tombstone-cartoon-posting halfwits, is that no goggles are involved.
— Read on nealstephenson.substack.com/p/my-prodigal-brainchild
Neal Stephenson wrote the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (which anticipated Google Maps, among other tech) and is connected to the idea of the Metaverse. In his reflections on Facebook’s $80B investment into VR, he notes that the Metaverse is an obvious concept, is continuing to happen (witness Fortnite, for example) and will continue to happen.
The question is whether goggles will be the mediating device. No one has figured out a device – other than a screen – with sticking power as a portal into these virtual worlds. And no one has figured out a way to make them work without an overarching narrative – a goal. But even without those two factors, they are happening and will continue to happen.
Basement Whatever 