Feels like the AI world is balancing on a knife’s edge. On one side, the worst of big tech’s social media addiction machine and an even greater concentration of power. On the other side, the democratization of intelligence and an abundance that lifts all of society. Either outcome seems possible.
OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which I had never heard of because I’m not a mathematician, but which is apparently a very big deal:
The question of whether smooth three-dimensional fluid motion can break down has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.
There is some controversy over whether two human researchers (one at Anthropic) working on similar problems might’ve accidentally influenced the OpenAI model. It doesn’t sound like that’s true, but it does feel a little unfair regardless, where credit likely means so much to people.
Claude Code massively stinks at explaining things in a way that a human can understand.
Did a little Redis housekeeping, cleaning out orphaned records that were sitting around wasting memory. Down to 23 GB of RAM on a 48 GB machine. Still probably too much.
I had a nap yesterday and a late Dr. Pepper, so my sleep was all off. Caffeine really affects me late in the day. Woke up at 2am worried about all sorts of business and social things I can’t control.
Let it go. 🎶
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Your TV is spying on you, and it's worse than you think.
In a world where predictive policing is becoming more commonplace, TVs that report on what you're watching, record you using live mics, and scan your network for connected devices are a liability.
Might be about time to get a Switch 2… Ocarina of Time remake looks good. 🕹️
Ben Thompson in today’s Stratechery blog post:
AGI is AI that learns continuously. That’s not the case with current large language models.
I agree with Ben’s definition of AGI, but LLM memory is so good now, it’s almost indistinguishable from learning. My ~/.codex/memories folder is 7 MB, which doesn’t sound like much, but it’s only small Markdown files. It’s incredible how much it knows. That doesn’t even count ChatGPT’s dreaming memory system and computer history.
How am I just now hearing this interview with Jensen Huang? “You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser.” 🤣
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
Who’s that gull?
Forgive the pun. Who does this gull think they are? I’m checking the surf cameras on Surfline, and notice this gull in the way. Like–excuse me. Can you do your morning groom somewhere else please? Alas, birds will bird the way they want to bird. Yesterday I did maintenance on some even older parts of...
Musical dreams
On artificial intelligence • Buttondown
buttondown.com/practicaltips/archive/on-artificial-intelligence/
I hope you’ll read and understand that for many of us, this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction or a culty, cosmic doomer rant. It’s about money, power, and quality of life for me and the people I share a planet with.
Matt’s position very much mirrors my own.
As long as I have a choice, and the economic means to keep a roof over my head and a set of reasonably firm values, I am opting out of first-person interaction with AI. And if any of my situation changes for the worse, before I accept AI as my lord and master, I will go down swinging.
Making memories with music
Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 18
The eighteenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out: In Episode 18, I chat with Ava, the author of blog.avas.space about, among other things, data protection and privacy, consent in the context of privacy, the armchair of great blogging, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.
This could be really good. Trailer for a new documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Elizabeth Holmes: You Can See Everything. Amazing cut to the wider shot at the end.
People love Markdown because it's impossible to hide the crud. And because people love it so much it's become a favorite of tech startups esp in the AI field. This is a great turn of events. We're getting back to the web, and the sooner everyone gets on board, the better. I've written about this for a few years. Everything in Markdown, it's just enough HTML. And with that, Microsoft has created a white flag, here's all your data dear users, in Markdown, to use as you please. Instead of waiting for Claude et al to start reading Word files.
On the other hand, why doesn't Microsoft, which owns GitHub, make a Slack-alike tool that manages the issues sections on repos. Slack is a big part of the default communication system, but GitHub is another very big part. And the great thing is that both these products, owned by huge tech companies, have an ethos of open APIs. Every part replaceable. Small pieces loosely joined. We are family.