Category: Post
-
…most people’s dreams are not gated by money. Sure you need some money, but you probably don’t need as much as you might imagine. You most likely don’t need multi-million dollars to start your dream. The bottleneck for most dreams is not financial. It’s a lack of confidence, willingness to take a risk, and face…
-
Like Hannibal, I wanted to rank powerful leaders in the history of warfare. Unlike Hannibal, I sought to use data to determine a general’s abilities, rather than specific accounts of generals’ achievements. The result is a system for ranking every prominent commander in military history. The Method Inspired by baseball sabermetrics, I opted to use…
-
At this point you may be asking yourself, if sobriety sucks so hard, why bother? But you know damn well why! If you’re reading this right now and you’ve been through these things and you’ve been the addict, you know why. Because addiction is a lie and one that leads to a nightmare. — Read…
-
AI webpage crawlers are now being served their very own ads that ordinary visitors never see, with one firm’s boss openly describing a strategy to influence what chatbots say about brands. The next time you ask Claude about where to bank, its answer may have been influenced by this bot-targeted content. — Read on www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/05/time-magazine-has-a-separate-version-of-its-website-with-ads-only-ai-can-see/5283640
-
Humanity’s beliefs on many important topics have long been just inconsistent and incoherent across disparate fields of inquiry. Creating a huge opportunity to learn lots of big stuff fast: search for more contradictions between fields, and resolve them. (More) If you learn key consensus results from many different fields, you will often find that they…
-
“I keep coming back to the Midwest because there is a relaxed contentment here that I find refreshing. The American Dream is largely working here again for both the front-row and back-row, after a rough couple of decades, at least relative to the rest of the U.S. I saw this in Michigan City, in South…
-
One thing we’ve found very useful is to determine a uniform dimension for door frames. This has a few benefits. It allows us to transition from kit to kit without unique pieces, as well as allowing easy re-use of doors between kits. More importantly, it gives AI and animation a fixed standard to work from, which can…
-
The Pentagon on Friday released a new batch of documents and images related to UFOs, also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP, including a military pilot’s recollection of a huge, strange triangle that blocked out the stars over Afghanistan in 2002. — Read on www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-files-pentagon-5th-release-documents-videos/
-
I’m listening to the Odyssey narrated by Dan Stevens. Odysseus gets lost. No one has made a workable map of the Mediterranean at this time. How do you get home? We live in an age where everyone has a map. Even if you get lost without a phone, everyone near you has a map. Hard…
-
You notice the way a raven walks. The sun’s moving lances of light piercing the dark clouds. The unfurling white banners of the crashing waves. You notice these things because it’s in your nature to notice. With a phone, you notice: Every injustice and every fear – real, imagined and exaggerated. You notice this because…
-
…don’t think you can time it so that you reach the same second of the same day each year and end up on the same spot on the Earth in its orbit. The whole solar system orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy at around an estimated 500,000 km/hr. Just one hour of moving…
-
One of the biggest misconceptions people have about intelligence is seeing it as some kind of unbounded scalar stat, like height. “Future AI will have 10,000 IQ”, that sort of thing. Intelligence is a conversion ratio, with an optimality bound. Increasing intelligence is not so much like “making the tower taller”, it’s more like “making…
-
..,your name has a good chance of breaking down into two parts in exactly the same way as a Homeric hero’s, especially if you’re a George, Philip, Richard, or Roger. This pattern, grafting two meaningful elements together, is extremely ancient, and extremely widespread: you see the same pattern not only in Ancient Greek names like…
-
He seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never actually see him get to do much warrioring … Nolan makes the protagonist a likeable, all-American hero; Homer’s Odysseus wants glory, and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city! I kept looking in vain for a sense that this…
-
Emily Wilson listed some of the difficulties of translating Homer into English. Among them: “There aren’t enough onomatopoeic words for very loud chaotic noises” (#2 on the list), “It’s very hard to come up with enough ways to describe intense desire to act that don’t connote modern psychology” (#5), and “There is no common English…
-
Writing is still as important as ever, and it should be you doing the writing, not your AI. Writing forces you to think clearly and confront gaps in your logic. What has changed is that writing is no longer the only way to make an idea tangible. Coding agents are compressing the time between defining the problem…
-
And while he has been warned and tricked and occasionally even guided by the gods, he finds—as Nolan’s protagonists often do—that they are cold and distant. The responsibility to fix what is broken is his, not fate’s. Man is alone in an uncaring universe, but he can also be the master of his own fate.…
-
From the iPhone home page: As part of our efforts to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, iPhone 17 does not include a power adapter or EarPods. Included in the box is a USB‑C Charge Cable that supports fast charging and is compatible with USB‑C power adapters and computer ports. We encourage you to use any compatible…
-
We thought—I thought—the internet served to create new forms of social participation. As in the old joke, we thought it was an orgasm, but it was asthma. The internet’s true affordance has been the emergence and training of AI. The internet digitized all our knowledge and all our language, making them available to AI. Now…
-
Culture is not your friend. Ideology is not your friend. And ideology…some people think what we’re trying to do here is sort out good ideologies from bad. Should I be a Marxist? Should I be a deconstructionist? And the answer is: no, none of the above. All ideologies are viral infections of some sort, memetic…
Basement Whatever 