VisakanVeerasamy: 'Smart Writing' is about cultivating taste, suspending judgement and chasing your curiosity. I saw someone tweet “I wish smart writing came to me as easily as dumb tweeting (Twitter)” — and so I am here to share my strategy for using the latter to precipitate the former (more)

Anthony Michael Fadell (born March 22, 1969) is an American engineer, designer, entrepreneur, and investor. He was senior vice president of the iPod division at Apple Inc. and founder and former CEO of Nest Labs. Fadell joined Apple Inc. in 2001 and oversaw all iPod hardware, software, and accessories development. He is known as the "father of the iPod". As the co-creator of the iPhone, he also worked on the first three generations of the iPhone and oversaw all iPhone hardware, firmware, and accessories development from March 2006 to November 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Fadell (more)

The Importance of Fun for a Prolific and Innovative Bauhaus. Many imitators of the famous art school’s output have missed the surreal, sensual, irrational, and instinctual spirit that drove its creativity. (more)

Albert Wenger: Attention on Digital Monopolies. I am concerned that regulators are missing the fundamental source of monopoly power in the digital world: network effects arising from the control of data.... The only way to go up against this effect is to shift computational power to the network participants. (more)

MacOS-X image/PDF lite viewer/editor

Print-to-disk format used by Adobe Acrobat. Sometimes used for EBook publishing. Just horrible, pls use epub. (more)

David Chapman on Vividness: The electricity of liberated perception (more)

The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce - by Umberto Eco, Thomas Albert Sebeok et al (more)

someone who seeks knowledge via the scientific method?

Cosma Shalizi on Information Society and the Information Economy. The text which follows was mostly written in the 1990s, which explains, if it does not excuse, some of the now-dated references. (more)

A Future for Socialism, by John E. Roemer, Harvard University Press, 1994 (more)

Cosma Shalizi term: novels by non-scientists about the research life and the creative travails of scientists (more)

AI companies are racing to build AIs that are smarter than humans in every way. In AI 2027, we predicted that this would result in either extinction or irreversible concentration of power. Plan A is our positive vision for what should happen instead. https://ai-2040.com/ (more)

A good first (fiction) Robert Anton Wilson book to read. Funny yet mind-bending. ISBN:0440500702 (more)

We predict that the impact of superhuman AI (ASI) over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution. We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.1 It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes. by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean. https://ai-2027.com/ Published Apr'2025. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: On (Not) Feeling the AGI. Ben Thompson interviewed Sam Altman recently about building a consumer tech company, and about the history of OpenAI. Mostly it is a retelling of the story we’ve heard before, and if anything Altman is very good about pushing back on Thompson when Thompson tries to turn OpenAI’s future into the next Facebook, complete with an advertising revenue model. It is such a strange perspective to witness. They do not feel the AGI, let alone the ASI. The downside risks of AI, let alone existential risks, are flat out not discussed, this is a world where that’s not even a problem for Future Earth (more)

odds of human extinction (existential risk) (or at least really bad/deep collapse), most often because of hostile ASI

Zvi Mowshowitz: Introduction for and Reactions to Plan A. The folks who brought you AI 2027, a so far remarkably accurate set of predictions despite those predictions having seemed freaky to many at the time, now bring you their positive vision that involves more freaky predictions: Plan A. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Crime and Punishment #1. This seemed like a good next topic to spin off from monthlies and make into its own occasional series. There’s certainly a lot to discuss regarding crime. What I don’t include here, the same way I excluded it from the monthly, are the various crimes and other related activities that may or may not be taking place by the Trump administration or its allies. As I’ve said elsewhere, all of that is important, but I’ve made a decision not to cover it. This is about Ordinary Decent Crime. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz on AI 2027: Responses. Yesterday I covered Dwarkesh Patel’s excellent podcast coverage of AI 2027 with Daniel Kokotajlo and Scott Alexander. Today covers the reactions of others. (more)