Optimization culture has gone too far. What started as a movement to save time or improve health has morphed into a never-ending quest to maximize everything. We track our sleep. We count our steps. We chase credit card rewards. We obsess over our allocations. And much more. While improving yourself…

Financial independence. It’s the ultimate goal in personal finance. But is it all it’s cracked up to be? Though financial independence is clearly better than financial dependence, many people race toward it without thinking through the possible consequences. As a result, they can end up creating a…

Table of Contents Remove ads Python is making history, and headlines. The much-anticipated Python: The Documentary premiered last month, capturing 34 years of programming history. But Python isn’t just looking back, it’s also moving forward at breakneck speed. The recent developer surveys revealed…

Last month, the Trump administration and Nvidia worked out what some have called an unusual and surprising deal for the latter to export its defeatured AI chips. That is, President Trump reversed a decision made by his own administration to decategorize Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s chips as a national…

Follow @popovicu94 I recently implemented a minimal proof of concept time-sharing operating system kernel on RISC-V. In this post, I’ll share the details of how this prototype works. The target audience is anyone looking to understand low-level system software, drivers, system calls, etc., and I…

Say you’re a senior member of your team at work. You’re 12 minutes late to the weekly staff Zoom. Once you’ve “joined audio,” the first thing you hear is your old friend’s voice. “There you are! So glad you could fit us in.” You laugh and explain the disastrous traffic, difficult drop-off at your…

Trains still hold a powerful grip on the American imagination. Last week, that fascination was split into two starkly different realities. In Charlotte a homeless guy murdered a 23 year old Ukrainian refugee on a train which the President even commented on. Meanwhile, Amtrak unveiled its NextGen…

When buying and selling homes, there is no national record of who owns a property, who has a title to it. The Planet Money team has the story of a new kind of villain trying to exploit that system. Sponsor Message STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Homebuyers have to ask, does the person selling the house…

Arundhati Roy’s latest book, Mother Mary Comes to Me, is the first memoir she has written — the book is, therefore, deeply personal to her and gives the reader an intimate account of who Roy is as a person. (There was a small controversy recently on Twitter/X on that word “intimate” in relation to…

Clint Bentley’s magnificent “Train Dreams” is a film of echoes. In its generation-spanning drama, life & death intertwine in the duality of the symbol of the train, something that represents both progress and destruction. The railroad tracks that expanded their way across the United States in the…

What happens when you put four of the Trump right’s leading intellectuals together in a room? You see what it looks like when a political movement gets high on its own supply. The conversation in question is a recently published two-hour video roundtable hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies…

SHARE  New research: Eight popular, commercial VPN apps operate deceptively and put more than 700 million users at risk of authoritarian surveillance. Tue, 2025-09-02 13:40 New research from ICFP Fellow Benjamin Mixon-Baca finds that eight providers of popular, commercial VPN applications appear to…

Director Kathryn Bigelow wants her new movie, “A House of Dynamite,” to sound the alarm on the dangers of nuclear weapons. The tense political thriller, which premieres on Tuesday at Venice Film Festival and stars Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson, follows White House officials who scramble to deal…

September 2, 2025 A few years ago, I wrote a paper on embeddings. At the time, I wrote that 200-300 dimension embeddings were fairly common in industry, and that adding more dimensions during training would create diminishing returns for the effectiveness of your downstream tasks (classification,…

I deal with a lot of servers at work, and one thing everyone wants to know about their servers is how close they are to being at max utilization. It should be easy, right? Just pull up top or another system monitor tool, look at network, memory and CPU utilization, and whichever one is the highest…

tl;dr: For years, we've been reading the Bitter Lesson backwards. It wasn't about compute — it was about data. Here's the part of Scaling Laws no one talks about: \(C \sim D^2\) Translation: Double your GPUs? You need 40% more data or you're just lighting cash on fire. But there's no 2nd Internet…

Review of Alyssa Battistoni, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton, 2025). Marxist philosophy is perennial in part because it ever blooms in new ways. This has been especially true of work in Marxist ecology and environmental philosophy. For a long time the operative view was…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests by D.W. Gibson Simon and Schuster, 354 pp., $19.99 (paper) I was…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus Random House, 1,018 pp., $40.00 An aristocrat who goes in for…

The Register recently published a story titled Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russian dev. They should be ashamed of this story. This poor open source developer is getting beat up now to score some internet points. It’s very upsetting. But anyway, let’s look at some…

In-App Browsers subvert user choice, stifle innovation, trap users into apps, break websites and enable applications to severely undermine user privacy. In-App Browsers hurt consumers, developers and damage the entire web ecosystem. OWA recently met with both the Digital Markets Act team and the…

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Meta is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI, and sees bots as key to user engagement. REUTERS/Manuel Orbegozo An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to “engage a…

The dominant metaphor for a successful startup these days is the rocketship. The not so humble brags are all over x and the press, founders and VCs saying - “0-100m in ARR faster than any company in history” and “idea to $1m in revenue in a month.” I get why these are exciting. The stories are…

I live along the coast of America’s High-Capacity Server Coolant Reservoirs, formerly the “Great Lakes,” where the late summer air is all a hum with raw processing power. Sure, these colossal data centers drive up our utility bills and chew through our natural resources, but that’s a small price to…

WhenWhen armies invade, hurricanes form, or governments fall, a Wikipedia editor will typically update the relevant articles seconds after the news breaks. So quick are editors to change “is” to “was” in cases of notable deaths that they are said to have the fastest past tense in the West. So it was…

As the eldest daughter in a family of six siblings, with a brain wired for strong convictions, Amy Lentz was born to give advice. Lentz is a 36-year-old with sea green eyes and wavy brown hair worthy of a shampoo commercial. She works as the chief people officer — the head of human resources — at…

It started out harmlessly, a comment on hacker news roughly 16 years ago. From there it expanded to reddit, substack, twitter. And it increased in frequency, from every few months to every week, peaking at several times a day. It became an addictive, productive habit—I would scan the headlines for a…

watch now VIDEO10:5210:52 Why so many millionaires are moving to Italy CNBC Explains Italy — a perennial favorite of the rich and famous — is attracting a new wave of ultra-wealthy arrivals looking to take advantage of its investor friendly environment, thriving real estate market and low tax…

There’s a good reason Denmark is known as the home of hygge. While the word is often translated as that warm, cozy feeling you get from soft lighting and good company, it’s really about something deeper: taking pleasure in sharing life’s simple moments. And that’s something Denmark does…

Joachim Trier’s masterful “Sentimental Value” opens with two theme-defining scenes. In the prologue, we’re introduced to a home that a child has reimagined as a character for an essay, wondering if it’s happier when its belly is full of life, asking if it feels pain when its window is slammed. In…