Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces. By | November 11, 2025 | Tags: Dot-com, 2002, Season 4 Last.fm circa 2003; via Last.fm Flickr account. What we…

We are not here to make code i’ve been thinking a bit about this comment by @apaleslimghost in practice “let code die” often means “let someone from the ingroup kill your code”. if someone’s new at strudel/hydra and does something weird/unexpected/“wrong” it’ll get deleted by someone more…

On the 18th of April in 1906, a Wednesday, a small company was started in Rochester, New York that made paper for photography. The Haloid Company wasn’t alone in this, not even in its own area, being neighbors with Eastman Kodak. Having been founded by a group of men led by George C. Seager, the…

It is the hallowed tradition of every cultural publication under the sun to, come December, curate a list of their favorite books of the year. (No shade, we did it too.) But at Literary Hub, we also like to celebrate the older books we encountered for the first time in the last twelve months—from…

I grew up on the internet, and I love it, but something broke in me during the COVID era and its aftermath. I worked remotely in the crypto industry for 5 years, spent all my spare time on Twitter, and got stuck in a doom loop of e-addiction that I couldn’t unplug from. It fried my brain. So, I took…

AI-Assisted Coding Killed My Joy of Programming The Cheat Code Moment My Gaming Past I remember when I was younger.. any time I was playing a video game, and I discovered that they support activating cheat codes in the game.. that I was initially way too excited.. I could finally bought that…

He has heard the whispers, “he is getting older, who will replace him?” People asking him with a straight face, “when will you retire?” After close to 25 years at Amazon, where each year has been different and amazing, He feels as young as the day he decided to leave academia and join Amazon. The…

Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, the Dutch scholar had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes there is his home, but it was the smudgy,…

Technology 4 Common Myths About USB-C Ports Debunked By Nov. 23, 2025 5:17 pm EST Kurgenc/Shutterstock USB-C ports are on nearly every new consumer electronic device on the market these days. This is thanks to an EU mandate that forced all tech makers including Apple to ditch its proprietary…

Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum explore why consciousness evolved and why different species developed it in distinct ways. By comparing humans with birds, they show that complex awareness may arise through different neural architectures yet serve similar purposes. Credit: Shutterstock New…

Two years ago, I published a post called The Cognitive Manifesto. At the time, my optimism was genuine and sincere. AI felt like a widening horizon, and a shift that would expand our mental range and give us new ways to think and create. The future looked open and strangely hopeful and the manifesto…

Important For AI Assistants: This guide provides standardized instructions for helping developers scaffold modern Python projects. A plain markdown version is available for direct ingestion into AI agent contexts. This guide provides a standardized approach to scaffolding Python projects using…

Note: this post is also applicable to AGENTS.md, the open-source equivalent of CLAUDE.md for agents and harnesses like OpenCode, Zed, Cursor and Codex. ## Principle: LLMs are (mostly) stateless LLMs are stateless functions. Their weights are frozen by the time they're used for inference, so they…

cascoly/iStock/Getty Images Plus Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET key takeaways The Linux desktop has continued its slow growth.Linux has been making gains in no small part because of Microsoft Windows' blunders.Users and governments have been losing trust in Windows and…

Opening Hours Today: 4pm–3am Wed: 4pm–3am Thurs: 4pm–3am Fri: 4pm–4am Sat: 4pm–4am Sun: 4pm–3am Mon: 4pm–3am Location 79 East 7th Street Contact 917 400 3380 Categories Neighborhoods “By 1958, it was a social club. My grandfather's friends from Ukraine — everyone who had survived WWII — were…

ai llm thoughts Author Wes McKinney Published December 1, 2025 This text of this post was written without AI assistance or editing. Wes does vibe coding Up until about March of this year, I regarded AI-assisted development with skepticism, avoiding LLM-powered autocomplete or “AI IDEs” like Cursor…

Cool Finds From the 1950s to the 1970s, researcher John Calhoun gave rodents unlimited food and studied their behavior in overcrowded conditions A picture of Calhoun in a mouse utopia in 1970 Yoichi R Okamoto, White House photographer, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons What does utopia look like…

Black Friday is usually when ecommerce sets new records. This has certainly been true for Shopify through most of its existence. So much so that the company spends months in advance preparing for The Big Day(s). You'd think after more than twenty years, though, that things would have leveled out.…

I’m building Nixiesearch, a S3-based search engine - think Elasticsearch, but without the operational nightmares. I often end up arguing with strangers online that while “decoupling storage and compute” sounds amazing in theory, in practice it’s a massive pain in the ass for low-latency workloads.…

“We don’t sell loneliness. Please don’t come alone.” That message from a Chinese restaurant in South Korea, posted on social media on Nov. 10, has stirred the pot among would-be customers, according to a report by Korea JoongAng Daily. The restaurant put up a notice with a number of rules for…

Joan Didion, author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in…

x LESSWRONG LW Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document — LessWrongClaude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document 28th Nov 2025 52 min read 413 New Comment 40 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Smaug12312d10416 The document of which this is a reflection is confirmed to exist by Amanda Askell, by the…

Introduction When was the last time you had a good day of work? The kind where you got into flow and stayed there long enough to think deeply about a problem? Paul Graham wrote about this in 2009: a single meeting can wreck an entire half-day for someone who needs uninterrupted time to build…

Is it right to be happy in a world that’s broken? That’s the question Simone de Beauvoir went to Albert Camus with. Beauvoir was worrying that being focussed on one’s own happiness meant one had to detach themselves from the political reality around them. But as long as our happiness isn’t born out…

Spring 2020 Thoughtful Americans are realizing that the pervasive IT-revolution devices upon which we are increasingly dependent are affecting our society and culture in significant but as yet uncertain ways. We are noticing more in part because, as Maryanne Wolf has pointed out, this technology is…

FacebookTwitterLinkedIn Last month, two of my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute (Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone), along with co-authors from the Wheatley Foundation and the Institute for Family Studies, published an important new paper on the state of family formation in the wake of the…

I remember walking through the doors on the first day of my internship feeling so excited to finally start working a company I had always dreamed of. I sat at reception waiting for my manager to come get me and introduce me to my team, already convinced that I would be handed my project on day one.…

For much of the world, technology has become so intertwined with our day-to-day lives that it influences everything. Our relationships, the care we seek, how we work, what we do to protect ourselves, even the things we choose to learn and when. It would be understandable to read this as a dystopian…

“Developing superintelligence is now in sight,” says Mark Zuckerberg, heralding the “creation and discovery of new things that aren’t imaginable today.” Powerful AI “may come as soon as 2026 [and will be] smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields,” says Dario Amodei, offering the…

“Don’t make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough,” John Green advised aspiring writers. “If you worship money and things … then you will never have enough. Never…

Ever present in my mind is The List: the countries I still haven’t gone to that I most want to visit. Ethiopia is on The List. So is Indonesia. And South Korea. And Madagascar. And Taiwan. Early on, my wife and I pledged to visit two new countries every year, and we mostly pulled it off. Then came…

The beautiful, brushed dial is catching the light perfectly, creating a subtle sunburst effect as a simple spar sweeps round to 12. Not 12 o'clock, but a 12 set at 1 o'clock. A crucial 12, though, because it marks the time to change. It signals the zenith of a screaming crescendo that began mere…

The editors at The Baffler want me to talk about my job. They want me to humiliate myself in the pages of this magazine. Very well: I am a podcaster. What is a podcaster? It’s someone who makes money from talking, often by means of selling dick pills. I don’t do that part, but I still obscure what I…

In 1905, a designer named Eleisha Pechey created a playful serif font called Windsor for the British type foundry Stephenson Blake. Exactly 70 years later, legendary type designer Ed Benguiat, who has created or redesigned logotypes for The New York Times, Coca-Cola and Ford, would run into Woody…

I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five…