We need the frontier labs to have a deep and robust safety culture. Alas, this is not the case. Anthropic devotes considerable effort to cultivating and maintaining such a culture. It shows, especially among the members of technical staff. Having conversations with them can be a very different experience than talking to those at other labs, and there is a much greater sense of understanding and responsibility. But even there, the appreciation of the problems and their difficulties seem woefully…

In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Sally Otto, University Killam Professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the United Kingdom's Royal Society, member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is internationally recognized for her contributions to evolutionary biology, particularly the mathematical understanding of how evolution works. Our conversation centres on…

At first I thought Riccardo was joking when he posted this screenshot from Daring Fireball. I can only assume “lost their minds” is a watermark: If you have stayed away, or even just mostly away, from X for years and then come back, people just say things like “Hey, glad you’re back! On the other networks, especially Mastodon, they tell you you’re “feeding Nazis” — by going to the platform where Tim Cook posts Pikachu videos. These people have either lost their minds or refuse to check their…

Peter Bihr, in Do we all want to be middle-managers for AI assistants?, writes:These AI assistants are like putting an intern in charge of your life. Do you really want to middle-manage all of this, focus on quality control and all, rather than just do the thing yourself? The doing, that friction that it brings, that is the life, that is the work!I mean, who wants to be a middle-manager for their own life?An echo of a similar sentiment from China that I linked to yesterday.Peter’s reference to…

Over the last week, I worked pretty consistently on our paper for the annual CHAT meeting in Innsbruck at the end of the month. In fact, I’ve passed it on to my wife, who is my writing partner in this project, for fact checking, revision, and images. I posted the first part of the paper last week, and I then shifted to the final two sections. I’m happy enough with it as a first attempt to narrate (and, in a modest way) analyze the post-war small town. I’m getting increasingly keen to refine and…

In the late nineteenth century, visitors to Maine observed something strange: French-Canadian lumberjacks who, at the slightest stimulus, seemed to jump, strike out with their limbs, or mimic languages they could not speak. Ross Bullen introduces us to these so-called “Jumping Frenchmen” and to their greatest investigator, George M. Beard, who saw a link in their behavior between religious frenzy and neurasthenia.

When you watch this video about a fascinating but somehow almost forgotten bit of post-war era scientific history featuring perhaps the last interview with the famous (101 at the time) researcher behind the project.I want to keep spoilers to a minimum but it's a story worth hearing for:What they were trying to do...The tech they used to accomplish it...The remarkable extent to which they succeeded...And the reason why they failed. "I promise this story about microwaves is interesting."

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame is back on X/Twitter. This isn't particularly interesting in itself, but there does seem to be a trend of notable people, who abandoned the platform post-Musk, returning.And I can’t blame anyone. The only network that compares to X, size-wise, is Threads — but Threads’s algorithm is weirder than X’s now, and the content I see there is relatively boring. My Threads timeline is full of engagement bait without being engaging. And if you want to judge a platform…

My physical therapist told me I'd need to ice my knee for a few days. I asked if it would need more than one icing per day. She laughed bitterly. "More than once per day? I should hope so!" It was plainly ridiculous to imagine any therapeutic effect at all from a mere single application. I was directed to ice it three times. She was making an a priori argument in a situation that couldn't support it. If 5 icings were required, or 20 or 150, one might just as easily ridicule the notion of three…

Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public…is a reasonable expectation. – Judge Sara E. Hill Bad Girls At least this report doesn’t pretend she was a real sex worker: A woman who admitted to drugging and robbing four men, killing three of them, in New York City was sentenced to 27 years to life in prison…Tabitha Bundrick…would give the men the drugs, sometimes claiming it was cocaine…[then] take their phones, money, watches, clothing, and other items. Mario…

The Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institutes (PIKSI) in Boston aim to “broaden inclusion within professional philosophy.” In part because such efforts are currently unpopular with the powers that be, its primary funding, from MIT and Harvard, has been cut. To cope with the cuts, its organizers say that “it is our plan to shrink it a bit and see what we can do to raise funds for 2027, with the hope that we can build it back up with other funding in 2028 and beyond.” In the following…

Why Kolibri Matters

Title is the title of a (1978) paper by Leigh van Valen one of the late great maverick evolutionary theorists of the late 20thC. I am happy to bring this back into discourse and Hats Off to University of Oslo Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) for archiving the journal Evolutionary Theory. It was agreeably clattered out on a manual fixed-width-font typewriter with blank spaces left to paste in pictures and diagrams and presumably, like our own contemporaneous Carnivore…

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed an AI scientist capable of generating scientific hypotheses, designing experiments and interpreting results. Making new biological discoveries with minimal human intervention is an important advance in self-driving laboratories. AI scientist autonomously generates and validates new biological discoveries

Editor’s note: Our guest contributor is based in Australia, so some spelling and usage reflect Australian English. Let’s have lunch. Let’s pack up. And let’s go to bed. I have twin toddlers, so I say some version of that all day, and a good share of it comes back declined. By about the fourth round … Continue reading What St. Thomas Aquinas Teaches Us About Anger The post What St. Thomas Aquinas Teaches Us About Anger first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post What St. Thomas Aquinas…

It is sad to observe when a basic human need is put on a pedestal only because it is socially programmed to seem scarce with so many hurdles in the way to have that basic desire being fulfilled. I see, young man in my surroundings thinking and joking about marriage almost all the time. As marriage is still the only path to fulfilling one's sexual desires for a number of people. Marriage is synonymous to having sex and sex alone. Nobody even fakes to have warmth or a long lasting relation that…

I’ve never been to Machu Picchu, but it was the site that demonstrated to me at an uncomfortably young age that history wasn’t just one thing but many, and that those many things were subject to a wide range of interpretations. Even, possibly, that they might end friendships. Which is appropriate, because that’s exactly what Wiñay Kawsay, designed by Alison Collins, is all about. Machu Picchu, from above. At a sky-high level, Wiñay Kawsay is set at Machu Picchu. You can see it right there. The…

I have a soft spot for indigenous religions, especially the animistic and polytheistic faiths of pre-Christian Europe. My virulent anti-theism is primarily reserved for the prescriptive and oppressive cults of the Abrahamic variety. The old ways. Blót and symbel. People of the hearth. Legends and myths I’ve almost certainly romanticized into utter fiction, but that still manage to stir my bitter soul. In an age of reason, I like to hold on to some of the magic. Everything is so serious, almost…

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus A Practical Guide To Naming Things — Smashing Magazine provides a guide on naming UI components, including conventions and resources. Odyssée — Odyssée explores a philosophy of integrity in aesthetic medicine through evidence-based treatments and enduring patient relationships. Branding How Kit Studio switched Exell to EXF.STUDIO with ASCII ingenuity — Kit Studio transitioned from Exell to EXF.STUDIO using ASCII characters, altering the brand identity. Hachette opens free…

Trigger warning: Today’s post is deliberately provocative and inflammatory! Instead of recognizing an econ giant like Richard A. Posner or Thomas Sowell (while they are still living), the 2026 Nobel Prize in “economic sciences” went to Robert Hall (Stanford) and Michael Woodford (Columbia). Alas, this year’s prize will be all but forgotten by the end of this week, if not sooner. Really?

When A.I. Comes for Your Purpose in Life – The New York Times Steven Strogatz, a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, describes the excitement and grief of watching A.I. take on work that gives people a sense of purpose — and asks what could be lost if machines deliver answers without the human struggle, insight and understanding that make solving problems meaningful. This was fascinating and, dare I say, beautiful. If you have any interest at all in the current conversation around…

Cyclamen A staggeringly beautiful plant, seen in a Norfolk garden. Quote of the Day ”During my time as a political strategist, one of the most vexing problems was figuring out why so many people vote against their perceived interests.” James Carville, Bill Clinton’s guru famous for “It’s the economy, stupid” mantra. Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Andy Irvine | Never Tire of the Road Link Andy’s tribute to Woody Guthrie. Thanks to Philip King (Whom God Preserve) for reminding me…

Rae Greiner has the kind of deep dive into word history that I love, in this case “1909: The Introduction of the Word ‘Empathy’ into English.” She begins thus: Empathy is a hot topic these days, on the lips of cognitive scientists, philosophers, literary critics, and U.S. Presidents alike. But what is it? Consider the opening paragraph of the opening essay of a 2011 collection entitled The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. In “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” C.…

What the heck is a Jack Daniel’s ad doing in a post about a podcast appearance? Good question.The answer: I think this is one of the greatest (and longest-running) brand advertising campaigns ever created. Postcards from Lynchburg by Ted Simmons for Jack Daniel’s. “We’re not selling a bottle of booze, we’re selling a place.”And if branding is about trust, trust is about character. Specifically, defining and then staying in character. No series of brand advertisements ever did it better.So,…

Since its acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022, Twitter/X has been considered a neighbourhood on the wrong side of the tracks. But not any more. Things have changed. Now it’s the place to be. Because, among other things, the platform is “cheerful” and “inclusive”. So say some people. But the question is vexed, the matter of Twitter/X being either in, or out of, favour. Especially for long time users, people there since the platform’s inception in 2006. I doubt many of them think all that highly of…

This is somewhat belated, but: on October 2, the American Mathematical Society released a report based on a recent workshop it organized on the topic of graduate education in the mathematical sciences. (If there have been other such reports that have appeared recently that were not already mentioned on the blog, please feel free to drop links to them in the comments.)

How do you move around the world knowing such horrors exist? Knowing that an over encompassing warmth exists beyond what those horrors could even hold. Strangely, I do believe that forces exists around us that help us shape reality into what we deem it should be. Maybe love is one of those, and the same with fear, hope, gratitude, rage. TBH this resurfaced after going thru the Lanterns series. It kinda makes perfect sense if we indeed are being farmed by extradimensional alien beings for our…

I’ve just signed The Planner’s Pledge, a statement assembled by a team of leading US urban designers including my friend Jeff Speck, author of the Walkable City books. It’s an attempt to create a clear statement of principles, from the planning professions, about the past harms done by the profession and the things that must be done differently. It’s preamble is unsparing: As practitioners of a discipline that has advocated for what it believed to be best practices while inevitably advancing…

Here are 12 problems that it would be fun to have an answer forHow to solve human coordination at scale?How to reduce human suffering?How to make the realisation of non-duality easily accessible, for myself and then everyone else?How to solve the public health crisis in India?How to make the world kinder?How to get enough protein?How to stop people on the roads from honking incessantly?How to reduce trash on the road?How to wield power effectively?How to learn better?I want to joyfully…

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