Some of the most storied problems in mathematics, those posed by Paul Erdős, are being solved by LLMs.

Lovely short video about artist Jas Knight, who is a participant in the Met Museum’s Copyist Program: The Copyist Program offers time and space for artists to develop their own interpretation of an artwork through intimate study in the Museum’s galleries. Copyists have cr...

Here’s how Rocky’s musical language from the Project Hail Mary movie was created. The filmmakers didn’t “want it to feel like a human language because he’s supposed to be really more musically communicating”.

I’m Done Using AI. “It made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software.”

Why weren’t bicycles invented sooner? “Why was no one…even considering the question of human-powered vehicles until the 1400s? Why weren’t there bicycle mechanics in the 1300s, when there were clockmakers, or at least by the 1500s, when we had watches?”

Death Cab for Cutie rolled into the NPR offices for a Tiny Desk Concert, which featured two new songs from their current album and some oldies: Title and Registration and Soul Meets Body. Gibbard noted:

I’m starting to realize that some of our earlier records came out a similar distance away from, like, the Beatles records when I was a kid.

This is Death Cab’s second Tiny Desk…here’s the first one from 2015:

I took this as an opportunity to listen to my favorite Death Cab song, Transatlanticism. And when are we getting a Postal Sevice Tiny Desk? Come on, we’ve been good! We need this!

Tags: Death Cab For Cutie · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same. “A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates.”

Oh wow, Williams College’s Hopkins Observatory has a huge collection of eclipse glasses & viewers (and other eclipse ephemera), some of them dating back to 1793. Here are a few of my favorites: (via present & correct) Tags: design · eclipses

Stories that the authors of the Bible borrowed from other cultures and religions, including the flood myth, the Garden of Eden, etc. I learned about these in a religion & mythology class in college, which cemented my atheism.

“Widely regarded as the most complicated board game ever made, The Campaign for North Africa tries to simulate WW2’s North African theater in as granular fashion as possible…” 1500 hours to finish the game — that’s 1h20m every day for 3 years.

New vocabulary term: “soft secession”.

Good sentence: “The market’s most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.”

“Your brain is a gambling addict that bets on reality. It doesn’t wait for information. It guesses what should happen and adjusts when surprised. Most bets win. But when they don’t, you run into walls.”

I’ve felt this for years (blogs have global context): “The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.”

British climate scientist Kevin Anderson (from a 2024 video): So there is lots that you will hear — lots of rhetoric, lots of good words, lots of optimism about the future. But given we’ve known about this subject and apparently been working on it for 30 years, the trend ...

“Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years… For every death averted, 66 years of full health were gained on average, translating to 10.2 billion years of full health gained.”

“Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease.” The key difference: “the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change.”

Stories of “people finding weird, wild and defiant ways to avoid using AI in their professional lives”. Like: “I keep a to-do list in a paper notebook, but my boss believes I have an AI task-keeping assistant via Claude.”

Crocs Has a Trick for Dodging Taxes: a Tiny Office in Malta. “Come tax season, the Broomfield, Colo., company has claimed that all its global profits were actually earned in this two-person office.” The US is not a serious country.

The Doulas Who Help Us Die. “Instead of assisting in the birthing room or the nursery, end-of-life doulas could keep vigil over people during their last hours, providing comfort and companionship and helping a family find peace.”

NASA has provided some early-stage funding to explore the idea of releasing a swarm of tiny probes (weighing only a few grams each) into Saturn’s rings to study them up close.

So, I’m not exactly sure what this is, but what it appears to be is a fan-assembled album of the recording sessions for Tron: Legacy by Daft Punk & Joseph Trapanese. 67 tracks in this YouTube playlist and 61 tracks from the Internet Archive (not sure of the overlap here…) Some of it sounds just like the 31 tracks from the “Complete Edition” of the soundtrack, some of it is alternate studio takes, and some of it is probably just random bits and bobs from the movie that didn’t make it onto the soundtrack.

Anyway, if you love this album as much as I do, I’ll leave you to explore.

Tags: Daft Punk · Joseph Trapanese · music · Tron Legacy · video

Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed. “A whole lot of people under the age of 45 no longer believe that indicators such as wages, unemployment, or the number of college degrees that are handed out…have much to do with a healthy economy.”

If You Haven’t Recently Used Claude Code, You Might Not Understand Where AI Is At. “There’s a huge gulf between a chatbot that’s just putting text into your brain and an agent that uses code to interact with an external environment.”

Socialists Are Winning Because They Listen to People (and don’t just treat them like ATMs). “The best of them are running campaigns that acknowledge that to win, Democrats are going to have to organize voters — not just fund-raise off them.”

Thing that I am now invested in: this woman has spent 30 weeks secretly training to beat her brother (a former competitive player) at Dance Dance Revolution. The showdown is today…

The video rental store as “third place”. “Decades before recommendation algorithms, video stores served as social hubs where conversation and camaraderie became a form of taste-making.”

The End of Google Search. The internet giant is “changing the formula” of its products and media folks are beginning to assume that there will be no search traffic in the future…and fretting about their survival.

Media Matters: “ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 194 segments about the three major heat events” that hit the US this summer and not a single one of them mentioned climate change. Not one!

Fun little review by Marcin Wichary of a 1984 flying video game called Sopwith, which was never supposed to be released to the public (an event that the game’s creator didn’t learn about until years later).