Share Published Feb. 08, 2025 • 8:30am Around 300 people gathered in the pews of the Internet Archive auditorium Friday in San Francisco to witness Pablo Peniche, head of growth for the startup Aqua Voice, unveil a marble bust of Aaron Swartz, the legendary programmer, activist, and open-access…

Last night I noted news which has spread like wildfire through the American scientific and medical research communities. The NIH released a seemingly down-in-the-weeds new directive which has the effect of drastically reducing the federal funds that go to institutions doing basic medical research.…

The Dream A fine suit made just for me. From the best fabrics. By the best tailor. Paired with the best bespoke shoes. A suit that would make me feel at ease, while declaring to others, “Here is a man who feels at ease.” A suit that would be appreciated by the world’s most heartless maître d’. A…

In the Trenches: What it Means to be an Engineering Manager This post is a collection of personal reflections from my time working as an EM and similar roles. It’s not meant to be a comprehensive guide but rather a snapshot of the lessons I’ve learned and the challenges I’ve faced. For those looking…

At the end of his internship at Nvidia in 2023, Zizheng Pan, a young artificial-intelligence researcher from China, faced a pivotal decision: stay in Silicon Valley with the world’s leading chip designers or return home to join DeepSeek, then a little-known startup in eastern China. Pan chose…

Often, parents tell me the world is more dangerous than it used to be. Others tell me we’re restricting our children too much and don’t let them run free. I guess I’m the worst of both worlds in that I think we should give our children more independence, but am too terrified to do so. I sometimes…

The systems administrator in the cube a few feet away from me is fidgeting more than usual. Finally he has to share his excitement. Right now, right this second, he's compiling the Linux 2.4 kernel. He grabbed the source code off the Net, and now he's building it, the first step in constructing a…

In this article AMZN Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks during a keynote address at AWS re:Invent 2024, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, at The Venetian Las Vegas on December 3, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Noah Berger | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images Amazon said Thursday it plans to…

All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is known as Zipf’s law. Researchers have hunted for evidence of this pattern in communication among…

Everyone has heard of Franz Kafka, the writer of such masterpieces such as Metamorphosis and The Trial. His troubled relationship with his father, his love life and his eventual early death from tuberculosis are all well documented. What is less well known is his work for Die…

Image Credits:Google DeepMind AI DeepMind claims its AI performs better than International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalists Kyle Wiggers 10:56 AM PST · February 7, 2025 An AI system developed by Google DeepMind, Google’s leading AI research lab, appears to have surpassed the average gold…

It feels like no one should have to say this, and yet we are in a situation where it needs to be said, very loudly and clearly, before it’s too late to do anything about it: The United States is not a startup. If you run it like one, it will break. The onslaught of news about Elon Musk’s takeover of…

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie and Ian on Signal at @cwarzel.92 and @ibogost.47. Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable,…

Charles Chen - 2025-02-07 AI's increasing competency at complex tasks like coding creates a boon for teams that want to harness AI to boost productivity. However, many teams haven't stopped to rethink their technical candidate screening and qualification process to account for these rapid changes.…

There is so much debate online about the usefulness of LLMs. While some people see giant leaps in productivity, others don’t see what the fuss is about. Every relevant HackerNews post now comes with a long thread of folks arguing back and forth. I call it the new Great Divide. I have a theory about…

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” Last week I spoke with Yuval Levin. Levin is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the book “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation —…

DeepSeek has recently released DeepSeek v3, which is currently state-of-the-art in benchmark performance among open-weight models, alongside a technical report describing in some detail the training of the model. Impressively, they’ve achieved this SOTA performance by only using 2.8 million H800…

risc-v business Framework Laptop’s RISC-V board for open source diehards is available for $199 With soldered RAM and eMMC storage, this is not "a consumer-ready experience." Andrew Cunningham – Feb 4, 2025 3:31 pm | 4 Framework and DeepComputing have collaborated to create a RISC-V motherboard that…

Last updated on November 3rd, 2022 at 09:11 pm The Gilded Age is a period of time defined by quick economic growth, materialism, living in excess, and obvious political corruption in America. It lasted from around the 1870s until the early 1900s and was a time of great wealth disparity between the…

in Science | February 3rd, 2025 Leave a Comment Image by Ken­neth Zirkel, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons There have been many the­o­ries of how human his­to­ry works. Some, like Ger­man thinker G.W.F. Hegel, have thought of progress as inevitable. Oth­ers have embraced a more sta­t­ic view, full of “Great…

Personal Software Lee Robinson Personal computers became mainstream in the 90s. Yet in a strange twist, the software they ended up running wasn’t very personal at all. Sure, you could bring the machine home, plug it in, and have your very own computer. But the programs inside—the operating systems,…

[CLIP: Theme music] Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. No matter what you believe, I’m willing to bet you’ve been feeling a lot of outrage lately. To me personally, it feels unavoidable: I can’t look down at my phone or glance up at a TV without seeing…

Julia Levy, Contributing Photographer “Introduction to Computing and Programming,” better known by its Harvard course code of “CS50,” will not be returning in fall 2025. One of Yale’s largest computer science courses, jointly taught with Harvard University, was canceled during a monthly faculty…

The MP3 format, once the gold standard for digital audio files, is now free. The licensing and patents on MP3 encoders have expired, meaning you can now include them in your applications without paying royalties. For software developers and audio enthusiasts, this might seem like a big deal. But,…

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This edition is for everyone, but do consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work and to fully unlock all 170+ essays. You can also support my work by buying my book FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters—coming soon…

Canon’s RF 100-300mm f/2.8 L IS USM takes a different approach, offering the flexibility of a zoom while maintaining the optical quality expected from a prime. The question is whether the trade-offs—extra size, weight, and price—are worth it. Coming to you from Jan Wegener, this thorough video puts…

I have 10,000 photos on my website. About 9,000 have no alt-text. I'm not proud of that, and it has bothered me for a long time. When I started my blog nearly 20 years ago, I didn't think much about alt-texts. Over time, I realized its importance for visually impaired users who rely on screen…

A bad seed? Meta torrented over 81.7TB of pirated books to train AI, authors say Meta's alleged torrenting and seeding of pirated books complicates copyright case. Ashley Belanger – Feb 6, 2025 4:26 pm | 1 Credit: Devonyu | iStock / Getty Images Plus Credit: Devonyu | iStock / Getty Images Plus…

I have had it write a number of ten-page papers for me, each of them outstanding. I think of the quality as comparable to having a good PhD-level research assistant, and sending that person away with a task for a week or two, or maybe more. Except Deep Research does the work in five or six minutes.…

This article describes the four main approaches to building reasoning models, or how we can enhance LLMs with reasoning capabilities. I hope this provides valuable insights and helps you navigate the rapidly evolving literature and hype surrounding this topic. In 2024, the LLM field saw increasing…

When we introduced GitHub Copilot back in 2021, we had a clear goal: to make developers’ lives easier with an AI pair programmer that helps them write better code. The name reflects our belief that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t replacing the developer. Instead, it’s always on their side. And…

Donald Trump has repeatedly and flagrantly broken the law since reassuming the presidency. But the national media – whose mission is ostensibly to hold the powerful accountable – is treating it like the new normal. I’m not saying our top journalists are ignoring the story – we know about it, after…