A beautiful example of how technology can massively improve a person’s life: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia (discussed on Hacker News): Today marks two years since I first set up an e-ink display in my mom’s apartment to help her live on her own with amnesia. The display …
I found Traceroute isn’t real, or: Whoops! Everyone Was Wrong Forever (discussed on Hacker News) a fascinating read, as someone whose knowledge of computer networking is admittedly relatively weak: Traceroute is a filthy hack. I can’t find any proper history of the tool, but my …
I’ve really enjoyed the video Is Our World Broken? from Kurzgesagt. We indeed live in times where the general consensus appears to be that we as a society and as a species are doomed: the world just seems too hard and too bad, and we as individuals are all bombarded with all of this negativity …
Doomsday theories appear to be a popular pastime of humanity, but they come in wildly varying types. One of the types I personally find more concerning are those that have to do with natural limits and use of non-renewable materials and resources. Recently, sand of all things have seen attention in …
Since the excellent The Three-Body Problem book trilogy and the similarly great Netflix adaptation, I have been wondering why exactly is the name-giving physics/mathematics problem called the three-body problem considered unsolvable. Frustratingly, searching on Google didn’t let me find any …
Crashes and Competition (also in video essay format) was written following the CrowdStrike-caused outages worldwide just a few months ago. In a nutshell, the issue was caused by the security software provided CrowdStrike. On Windows, in order for the security software to do its job, it would have to …
An absolute wild read: The Time I Built an ROV to Solve Missing Person Cases It is long (a series of articles), but it is very worth reading. The amount of dedication, energy, money, and effort they have spent on this hobby project is truly astonishing, and I think humbling. Here is the intro, to …
Money Stuff: Crypto Brothers Front-Ran the Front-Runners talks about a fascinating case, with further details in Money Stuff: The Endless Shrimp Investigation under header “ETH consensus”, the linked CoinDesk article: What the DOJ’s First MEV Lawsuit Means for Ethereum, as well as the …
The Verge has a really good – though very long – article on the maintenance of the cables that keep the world connected to the internet: The Cloud Under the Sea. These cables are laid under the seas and oceans, sometimes thousands of meters deep, and this is exactly as vulnerable as it …
Amazon Ditches ‘Just Walk Out’ Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores, because, as it turns out, it wasn’t actually all that technological: Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The …
Humans Need Not Apply was a YouTube video by CGP Gray published in 2014. It talks about how technological advancements, especially making computers smarter and more able to think and make decisions, will increasingly make humans unnecessary. It was made in time where AI research was still in its …
A fascinating summary of recent AI research: AI Sleeper Agents A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue. … So there’s been a dispute in the AI safety community - if for some reason you start with an AI sleeper agent, and you train it on normal …
A really interesting video with some details about how the Stockfish chess engine works and what makes it so good at chess: .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, …
I feel like that as much hype as AI has gotten, rightfully so, the people advocating for caution and restraint, such as the Effective Altruism movement, have not been very popular. Part of that is just being in the unenviable and intrinsically unpopular position of a naysayer, but I think a large …
This will be huge, if true: A genetically modified bacterium that outcompetes bacteria causing tooth decay (Hacker News discussion): Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the …
As much hype and attention that the machine learning / artificial intelligence field gets, and in spite of some impressive results that have come out of it in the form of e.g. ChatGPT, overall we have very little understanding in exactly how do these models work. We can train them, and we can use …
I’ve encountered a statement today in a random blog post about the IBM PowerPC 600 series that broke my brain for a minute while I was trying to figure out what it could possibly have meant, so now I’m going to subject you to it as well. Here goes: Moving a register to itself is …
I was reading California suspends Cruise’s autonomous vehicle deployment, which is about a self-driving car company’s (Cruise) failures, and how regulators banned them because they were deemed unsafe. The triggering incident: In the Order of Suspension, the California DMV said that the …
Did you know that Nike has smart sneakers, since like 2019? I certainly have not, and I am having difficulty figuring out what to do with this piece of information, so I am posting about it here. The Verge has an article on the topic, which sometimes reads like a parody of itself: Hands-on with …
I’ve come across The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and, well, I have thoughts. (I know, it was bound to happen eventually.) I agree with a lot of the points, perhaps even with most of them, but the rest strikes me as plainly naive: As techno-optimists, we believe that we must, and we will, create …
Beauty is the promise of happiness. (Stendhal) I’ve been reading Ted Chiang’s short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others and I have to say that I can really recommend it. I’m rarely in the mood for short stories, but every single story here presents a unique and …
And so it… begins? Continues? Let’s say continues to begin: Mushroom pickers urged to avoid foraging books on Amazon that appear to be written by AI (seen on Hacker News). Amateur mushroom pickers have been urged to avoid foraging books sold on Amazon that appear to have been written …
Installing NVIDIA Graphics drivers have become annoying. For one, they bundle this GeForce Experience horribleness in it, which requires an NVIDIA account (WTF is that and why would I ever want one?) but in turn has a lot of useful features locked behind it: automatic driver updates, for one. …
I’ve been reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. In the first chapter The new human agenda, the author gives his interpretation of history and how humanity has ended up as it is today due to scientific and technological development – roughly as follows: humans seeking comfort …
I’m a big fan of traveling by trains, and it always pains me how impractical it is in most parts of the world, even in places where they would make economic and environmental sense. Europe has been getting better at this, with excellent high-speed rail connections from Amsterdam to Paris for …