When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works Home » Premium, ‘world changing’ mirrorless camera falls in price Premium, ‘world changing’ mirrorless camera falls in price Geoff Harris 19 March 2025 / 12:10 GMT19 March 2025 / 12:10 GMT Premium…

The Literary Foundations of Civilisation Nestled in a café-bar-museum-event space in Fort Mason — San Francisco’s water-front, weathered military campus with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge —is a floor to ceiling library housing the Long Now Foundation’s Manual for Civilisation. A…

17 Mar, 2025 Every now and then I get reminded about the vast fraud apparatus of the internet, re-invigorating my pursuit of basic digital hygiene around privacy/security of day to day computing. The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of…

Listen to this post: Good morning, This Stratechery interview is technically another installment of the Stratechery Founder series; OpenAI is a startup, which means we don’t have real data about the business. At the same time, OpenAI is clearly one of the defining companies of this era, and…

"Vibe Coding" vs Reality Published Mar 19, 2025 - 11 min read - Text OnlyTable of contents There's a trend on social media where many repeat Andrej Karpathy's words (archived): "give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." This belief — like many flawed takes…

Seven hours is the ideal amount of sleep for people in their middle age and upwards, with too little or too much sleep associated with poorer cognitive performance and mental health, say researchers from the University of Cambridge and Fudan University. Getting a good night’s sleep is important at…

Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space Jan 31, 2025Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digital age, it might actually be possible to create a comprehensive collection of all human writing that meets certain criteria.…

We recently rebuilt TigerBeetle’s docs site from scratch. We wanted to apply TigerStyle and first principles thinking, not only to our database but also to our docs. To give users the fastest possible experience, given how much time they spend reading, and to do this without the dependency of…

Let’s implement leader election using Amazon S3’s If-Match condition by building a distributed lock with it. In August 2024, Gunnar Morling published a blog post that shows how to do it with the If-None-Match condition. Back then, If-Match had not yet been released. This post shows another way to…

AI is quietly upending the business models of major content sites. Platforms like WebMD, G2, and Chegg - once fueled by SEO and ad revenue - are losing traffic as AI-powered search and chatbots deliver instant answers. Users no longer need to click through pages when AI summarizes everything in…

The General Services Administration deleted 18F, a government tech consultancy that helps other agencies with their technology, early Saturday morning. The office has been deemed “non-critical,” Thomas Shedd, director of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, emailed staff at 1am. The agency’s…

Most programmers have some understanding of the basics of CPUs and sequential programming because they grow up writing code for the CPU, but many are less familiar with the inner workings of GPUs and what makes them so special. Over the past decade, GPUs have become incredibly important because of…

Balaji Srinivasan’s 2022 book, The Network State is a blueprint of sorts. It is the wild fever-dream of Silicon Valley’s libertarian investor-class. It imagines a near future in which online communities use the blockchain to opt out of government and form their own competing “network states.” It’s…

A painting by Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, wife of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and a fellow futurist Benedetta Cappa Marinett © Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Rome/ Alamy The word “futurism” was born in a car crash. At least, that is the story that poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti told back in 1909, when he…

In 2008, I found myself in Rome searching for The Savage Detectives by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The book was sold out, and the friendly clerk at the bookstore handed me Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace instead. I bought it, along with a couple of others, and perhaps three or four years…

As AI models extend their capabilities to solve more sophisticated challenges, a new scaling law known as test-time scaling or inference-time scaling is emerging. Also known as AI reasoning or long-thinking, this technique improves model performance by allocating additional computational resources…

Intelligence, ±artificial AI versus the brain and the race for general intelligence We already have an example of general intelligence, and it doesn't look like AI. John Timmer – Mar 3, 2025 7:00 AM | 79 Story text Size Width * Links * Subscribers only Learn more There's no question that AI systems…

The Barn Swallow’s Flight Whenever you feel that there is no joy in the world, you must go to a place with swallows. Few things are more euphoric than a swallow in flight. The sun flashes on their iridescent backs. They swoop and dive and wheel around in reckless arcs. Up close they fly nearly too…

This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. Swarms of autonomous robots are increasingly being tested and deployed in complex missions, yet a certain level of human oversight during these missions is still required. Which means a major question…

News March 03, 2025 From the American Bar Association The ABA rejects efforts to undermine the courts and the legal profession Share: Three weeks ago, the American Bar Association spoke to you about values that guide us. We called upon every lawyer to insist that the government adhere to four major…

DeepSeek has made a lot of noise lately. Their R1 model, released in January 2025, outperformed competitors like OpenAI’s O1 at launch. But what truly set it apart was its highly efficient infrastructure—dramatically reducing costs while maintaining top-tier performance. Now, they're coming for data…

In late fall, I was in a break room with 10 or so autoworkers at the Avon Lake Ford plant near Lake Erie. As they talked about the challenges they and their families faced, one worker asked everyone whom they were voting for in the presidential election. One by one, they went around the table: the…

Welcome back to the weekly bonus content for “One First.” I usually put Thursday’s bonus content behind a paywall as an added incentive for those who are willing and able to support the work that goes into putting this newsletter together every week. But for reasons that will become obvious, I…

Contents Whitepapers January 1, 2024 Observability for Large Language Models - Understanding & Improving Your Use of LLMs Observability for Large Language Models shows you how to build a production feedback loop into your LLM development cycle to accelerate refinements and make your product…

Marriage is hardly a new invention. But leaving your husband is, relatively speaking. There’s one political party in particular that isn’t so happy with that development. During the 2024 election, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance called no-fault divorce “one of the great tricks that I think…

This month we have a mailbag question from a reader who asks: Hi James, Your newsletter "being in the details" resonated with me. I would like to ask your opinion about managers writing code. I skim PRs but don’t critically review them and don’t write code. Should EMs write code in their day job?…

Michael Froman is president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Technological supremacy is a core pillar of American power. Conceivably, part of the “America First” agenda should be keeping America first when it comes to maintaining that edge. We owe much of our unmatched geopolitical and economic…

For years, the conventional wisdom for wide-eyed youngsters about to enter the job market was "learn to code." Now, it seems like some of the programmers themselves could use the same advice. That's according to Namanyay Goel, an experienced developer who's not too impressed by the new generation of…

At first glance, Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) might appear to be a mere copy of the story of Lawrence of Arabia with some science-fictional window dressing. Several critics have pointed to the similarities between Lawrence and Paul Atreides—both are foreign figures who immerse themselves in a desert…

Giles' blog Posted on 24 February 2025 in Blogkeeping My post about blogging as writing the tutorial that you wished you'd found really took off on Hacker News. There were a lot of excellent comments, but one thing kept coming up: what's the point in blogging if people are using ChatGPT, Claude and…

gwern3mo*Ω4011836 Idea for LLM support for writing LessWrong posts: virtual comments. Back in August I discussed with Rafe & Oliver a bit about how to integrate LLMs into LW2 in ways which aren't awful and which encourage improvement---particularly using the new 'prompt caching' feature. To…

A few weeks ago I wrote about Git’s help.autocorrect setting and the strange tale of the origin of it’s deciseconds value. It got me to thinking about other git config settings that most people likely don’t know about and which should probably be defaulted differently. In this post, I’ll go through…

Did dogs domesticate themselves? (Image credit: martinagebarovska via Getty Images) Scientists don't know exactly how wolves were domesticated into early dogs, but it's possible that they domesticated themselves by choosing to coexist with humans so that, a new study finds, they could be fed…

There are two claims I’d like to make: LLMs can be used effectively1 for listwise document ranking. Some complex problems can (surprisingly) be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems. I’ve primarily explored both of these claims in the context of using patch diffing to locate…