FeedCity

A theory about what went wrong, and some open questions about what might happen next

Brief update to last’s week’s note re: the growing backlash.

Newsletter updates were sporadic in July because of two weddings, two conferences (with two different talks!), and finishing Logic for Programmers. Huge thank you to everybody who bought a copy, as well as for your patience with the schedule. There's some podcast appearances...

The imbalance conjecture is now a theorem. James Alexander Schreib and Yousof Yavari posted a proof last week. What does the conjecture theorem say? Start with a graph G and for every edge, calculate the absolute value of the difference of the degree of each end. Then the theorem says there exists another graph H whose vertices […]

The post The imbalance theorem first appeared on John D. Cook.

OR: an apology to my English teachers

Today's links IP can't save you from AI: Property rights cannot substitute for labor rights and privacy rights. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Flying Brits v brown people; Probability neglect; Law v "enhanced patdowns"; Onion says Brits love paywa...

Suppose you have a planet in an elliptical orbit around a star. The math is identical for any light object orbiting a heavy object, such as a moon or satellite orbiting a planet, but we’ll call the heavy object a star and the light object a planet. The center of the star is not quite […]

The post Mean distance to the sun first appeared on John D. Cook.

Egghead Software was a US retail store that sold computer software from 1984 to 2001. It declared bankruptcy 25 years ago this week, on August 18, 2001, after an attempted reinvention as a dotcom selling online failed. Why did Egghead

The post What happened to Egghead Software appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Something you have, something you know, and someone else's OAuth.

It is common for promotional pamphlets aimed at children to contain a themed variant of snakes and ladders. This is the “game” where the players toss a die, move as many places as the die says, and then some spots on the board have an event that send the player forward, or back, or give them an extra toss or whatever.

The theme is typically related to whatever the promoter wants to promote, but styled for children. I get the appeal – for children. They can probably imagine they’re really travelling along the path! In the variant pictured below, there’s forest and water and tunnels and dogs and everything!

(Continue reading the full article on the web.)

The current ransomware situation is a bit of a kludge (deep breath): a lot of ransomware (which often doesn't even involve "ware", it's just extortion) is carried out by kids who successfully make a truckload of money but can't spend it without

One of the most influential 20th century pieces of writing about AI is Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. Although there are many humans in the story, the protagonist is the computer Multivac, who evolves over the course of ten trillion years from a single datacenter to a uni...

Alignment as a rhetorical device.

Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

That's the same score as GPT-5.6 Luna (max), and just one point behind GLM-5.2 (max) and DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) - that GLM is 753B and that DeepSeek is 1.6B parameters, and Luna is size unknown but presumably a whole lot bigger than 27B.

Qwen 3.8 27B is a truly astonishing model.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, qwen, ai-in-china, artificial-analysis

The usual probing.

The post How do functions like <CODE>alloca</CODE> allocate memory from the stack? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility Excellent piece of reporting from 404 Media. For a while now there have been stories of book dealers receiving orders for large volumes of books from apparently price-insensitive anonymous custom...

What Amodei left out

In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all ostensibly from the network provider Vodafone. All pro-regime and all with the…