To Land a Job in AI, Try Reading Kant. “If a for-profit AI company signs your paycheck, might that compromise your research? By playing Aristotle to AI Alexander, do you risk your work becoming an instrument for hype-building and myth-making?”

“Observe the moth in its monumental fight for life, and do likewise. We gain life’s powers by knowing that eventually they will be taken away. There is beauty in this struggle. Murmurations of starlings occur only in the evening.”

I have a pizza oven and baked very underwhelming bread twice during the pandemic, but I’ve found it difficult to fall into a proper rabbit hole when it comes to dough-making. Focaccia might do it for me. My daughter and I had been wanting to experiment with focaccia (and sc...

My Son’s Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon. “As I watched my son play Prodigy, it became clear there wasn’t much learning happening. In about 10 minutes of gameplay, he spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions.”

The first-ever Enhanced Games (open to those using performance-enhancing drugs) featured 42 athletes, three of whom were competing clean. All three won their respective events.

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical letter yesterday; it’s entitled Magnifica Humanitas Of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV On Safeguarding the Human Person In the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It is very long and I haven’t been able to read the whole thing; here’s a tast...

The 250th birthday of the United States is coming up and I know many of us are having a tough time feeling celebratory because *waves hands around at everything*. To mark the occasion in a decidedly non-jingoistic manner, historian Heather Cox Richardson is producing a ser...

Tenderly Tracking My Husband. “Knowing when to step in and tell a loved one with [Alzheimer’s] that they can no longer do something because it’s too risky is a game of chance we caregivers hate to play.” Lovely & heartbreaking.

Great title for a book: Fascist Yoga. “Ever since, the world of yoga has been full of grifters, occultists and white supremacists, all out to exploit and recruit via the medium of exercise.”

Pinterest Has Become Unusable. “When I started painting again in January, I went back to Pinterest and found it overrun with AI slop. It’s continued to get worse and worse, and it’s now basically unusable.”

The day after ending his run on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert hosted a show called Only in Monroe on a Michigan public access channel. His musical director for the show was Jack White, nestled onstage between a boombo and a reel-to-reel recorder. His guests included Byron...

An unusual new-to-me animal: the aardwolf. It’s a hyena but it eats insects like an aardvark. The cubs are incredibly cute.

Essential summertime reading: Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. “Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.”

Eric Rodenbeck on AI as a Design Medium. “In my class, the first principle is simple: Do not take what comes back from prompts at face value. Interrogate it. Iterate on it. Stay with it longer than feels efficient.”

Art But Make It Sports is now available in book form. “Epic moments in modern sports are masterfully paired with their fine art doppelgangers…”

“A woozle effect…occurs when frequent citation of previous publications that lack evidence misleads individuals, groups and the public into thinking or believing there is evidence, and non-facts become urban myths and factoids.”

“A three-month national investigation by Beyond Plastics found that not a single tracked Starbucks cold-beverage cup ended up at a recycling facility — even when the cups were placed in clearly marked recycling bins inside Starbucks stores.”

Water World, created by Seán Doran from imagery captured by a NASA/NOAA weather satellite, is a gorgeous, swirling, painterly portrait of the Earth’s dynamic atmosphere. Doran calls it “a meditative slow gaze at Earth’s atmosphere, revealing the hidden depths of activity in the water-filled skies of planet Earth”. It’s 4K, so put it on the biggest screen you can find and just sit back and watch.

Tags: clouds · Earth · meditative · mesmerizing · Sean Doran · video · weather

The Secret to Winning on Jeopardy. “To win on Jeopardy, you don’t need to learn everything. You just need to learn one thing about everything.” As an proficient player of Yell Answers At The TV Jeopardy in my teen years, I can confirm this strat.

Paul Brown’s iPod. This is a lovely remembrance & time capsule: a playable iPod emulator of “the music on the iPod my dad had in 2018 before he died”. Click wheel works and everything.

One of the questions on The Colbert Questionert that Stephen Colbert would administer to his celebrity guests was “What number am I thinking of?” As you can see from this compilation, his answer was often, but not always, “no”.

A few of the guests said “42” but none ever said “69”?

So anyway, the Late Show is coming to an end tonight, a casualty of CBS’s newfound fealty to the Trump regime, and Stephen Colbert finally took the questionert himself. And yes, at last, he revealed the number that he was thinking of…to Robert De Niro no less:

Tags: Stephen Colbert · The Late Show · TV · video

This is impressive: an AI model has disproved an 80-year-old conjecture by Paul Erdős. “The proof came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, rather than from a system trained specifically for mathematics.”

Wow, BBC Earth has posted this three-hour-long video to YouTube of David Attenborough narrating Unbelievable Moments From Nature. I’ve had it on in the background for the last little while as I’m working and it’s great.

Tags: David Attenborough · video

“US is ‘simply choosing not to stop’ Ebola outbreak after massive public health cuts.” Just so fucking stupid and maddening and wasteful and dangerous and callous and evil.

Trump Destroyed USAID. Now People Are Dying. “Everyone, especially in South Sudan, wanted to know if the US really had cut off aid. It was easier for them to believe that the aid organizations were lying to them than to think that the US would do this.”

Free admission to Canadian national parks this summer! “From June 19 to September 7, no fees apply for: admission for all visitors to all national historic sites, national parks, and national marine conservation areas operated by Parks Canada.”

At Long Last, I Have Maxximized My Looks. “Apparently, eating a fistful of iguana tranquilizers for breakfast every morning has turned me cold-blooded, and I am no longer appropriately adapted for life on the Earth’s surface.”

Interesting observation by Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Vagrant and Ghostty) on how a company’s or product’s choice of programming language matters less in the age of agentic programming: On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programm...

This scan isn’t very good (best I could find), but these are all the lightsabers used by Jedi and Sith in the various Star Wars shows and movies. I think this is from a few years ago, so I’m not sure how up to date it is.

In the SW universe, making your own saber is a Jedi and Sith rite of passage, which accounts for the diversity in design. No shortcuts allowed…Babu Frik wasn’t out there selling Ancient Laser Sword™ kits to young padawans (kyber crystal sold separately). (via dennis crowley)

Tags: movies · Star Wars · TV

My friend Adriana wrote about her story game based on Dante’s Inferno. “In Vya, I modeled Pom after the poet Alice Notley, whose Descent of Alette (1996) is one of the great contributions to the literature of katabasis.”