Clint Smith recently talked to students around the country about the “complexities and contradictions” of US history (including slavery) and found they were receptive to it. “Doesn’t seem that hard. Just say both things.”
#485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy
David Kirtley is a nuclear fusion engineer and CEO of Helion Energy, a company working on building the world’s first commercial fusion power plant by 2028.
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep485-sc
See below for timestamps, tr...
Kevin Kelly shares some essential apps & services for independent travel in...
Kevin Kelly shares some essential apps & services for independent travel in China. “A good rule of thumb is to download your apps outside of China before you leave, because most are behind their great firewall.”
All the Cats, Explained
From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of cats in the world, extinct, wild, and domesticated, and how they are related to each other. Some interesting facts I learned:
The saber-toothed tiger was the largest cat to ever live and researchers now believe...
They’re making a live-action Legend of Zelda movie?...
They’re making a live-action Legend of Zelda movie?
The Sagrada Família has become the tallest church in the world, after...
The Sagrada Família has become the tallest church in the world, after workers placed the first part of a cross at the top of its central tower. The Barcelona church will top 564 feet when the rest of the cross is placed in the next few months.
A digital atlas of the Roman Empire’s entire road network (180,000+ miles)....
A digital atlas of the Roman Empire’s entire road network (180,000+ miles). “The data creation is a collaborative ongoing project edited by a scholarly community.”
Skydiving the Sun
Skydiver & musician Gabriel Brown and astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy teamed up to capture these incredible photos of Brown transiting the Sun while skydiving. You can see a video of the jump and some behind the scenes calculations on Instagram.
We had to find th...
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
Snake Island (Classic)
A tiny island off the coast of Brazil is known for being a dangerous place … purely because its inhabitants are, well, snakes. But we speak to a researcher who’s seen it up close and says it’s time for this place to shed its reputation.
READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/snake-island-ilha-de-queimada-grande
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
WorkOS
workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=q12025
My thanks to WorkOS for their continuing support of DF with another sponsorship week. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. WorkOS provides a complete user management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and RBAC. The APIs are modular and ...
Quoting Andrej Karpathy
With AI now, we are able to write new programs that we could never hope to write by hand before. We do it by specifying objectives (e.g. classification accuracy, reward functions), and we search the program space via gradient descent to find neural networks that work well a...
Financial Times: ‘Apple Intensifies Succession Planning for CEO Tim Cook’
The Financial Times, under a four-person byline (“Tim Bradshaw, Stephen Morris, and Michael Acton in San Francisco, and Daniel Thomas in London”):
Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it
prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as...
★ Meta Replaced the Native Windows WhatsApp App With a Shitty Web App
Mayank Parmar, writing for Windows Latest:
WhatsApp on Windows 11 has just got a “major” upgrade, and you’re
probably going to hate it because it simply loads web.whatsapp.com
in a WebView2 container. This means WhatsApp on Windows 11 is
cooked, and it’s back to being ab...
llm-anthropic 0.22
New release of my
llm-anthropic plugin:
- Support for Claude's new structured outputs feature for Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.1. #54
- Support for the web search tool using
-o web_search 1- thanks Nick Powell and Ian Langworth. #30
The plugin previously powered LLM schemas using this tool-call based workaround. That code is still used for Anthropic's older models.
I also figured out uv recipes for running the plugin's test suite in an isolated environment, which are now baked into the new Justfile.
Tags: projects, python, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, anthropic, claude, uv
The Information: Second-Gen iPhone Air Postponed Until Spring 2027, but Might Gain Second Camera
theinformation.com/briefings/apple-explores-adding-second-camera-next-iphone-air-boost-sales
Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information on Tuesday (paywalled, alas, but summarized by 9to5Mac here and here):
Apple has since sharply scaled back production of the first
iPhone Air and delayed the release of an updated version that was
meant to launch in ...
Radiolab
• Superposition, Palestine, Quantum mechanics, Schrodinger’s cat, Gaza, Physics
Quantum Refuge
Qasem Waleed is a 28-year-old physicist who has lived in Gaza his whole life. In 2024, he joined a chorus of Palestinians sharing videos and pictures and writing about the chaos and violence they were living through, as Israel’s military bombardment devastated their lives. B...
Beam Dump
parakeet-mlx
Neat MLX project by Senstella bringing NVIDIA's Parakeet ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition, like Whisper) model to to Apple's MLX framework.
It's packaged as a Python CLI tool, so you can run it like this:
uvx parakeet-mlx default_tc.mp3
The first time I ran this it downloaded a 2.5GB model file.
Once that was fetched it took 53 seconds to transcribe a 65MB 1hr 1m 28s podcast episode (this one) and produced this default_tc.srt file with a timestamped transcript of the audio I fed into it. The quality appears to be very high.
“A Personal Business is run by people who are truly into what...
“A Personal Business is run by people who are truly into what they are doing, and invested enough to offer products, services, and/or experiences that are both high-quality and idiosyncratic.”
Jett Brunet carves incredibly realistic duck decoys....
Jett Brunet carves incredibly realistic duck decoys.