Category: Technology
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AI Against Slop: LLMs may help the internet move on from chasing clicks
Hamilton Mann worries that AI makes monetizing content creation on the internet more difficult and less lucrative. It’s a valid concern, but there’s a more…
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Even Chances: AI could be good or bad, and we have no idea which is more likely
If betting or forecasting markets give even chances for two outcomes, it could either be that they are equally likely to happen, or that nobody…
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LLMs Are Not High IQ: AI doesn’t perform well in some intelligence tests
Practicing for intelligence tests doesn’t improve performance much. IQ tests really seem to measure some innate ability that is relatively unresponsive to training. Processing speed…
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You Can’t Access Most Books: While you’re not going to run out of reading material, this is still a problem
150 millions books have been published, according to the estimate I asked ChatGPT for. Around 70 million have been digitized, but 70% of those are…
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AI Jaggedness: The edge of what’s possible
On One Weird Thing, Ethan Mollick argues that getting AI to be more powerful (both in the sense of more useful and more dangerous) is…
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Big in 2025: Findings that could make a difference
Here is a list of scientific and engineering news of 2025, ranked by potential impact. I like the idea of considering both the probability that a…
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Can Pharma Scale? It’s not like tech
Pharma and tech are different industries. For example, tech benefits from network effects (if everyone uses LinkedIn it makes more sense to join), pharma doesn’t.…
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Overfitting Towards Blandness: The lowest common denominator
Our culture has become bland, as evidenced by fashion, building, cars, book covers, and household objects all looking the same. Even people seem to be…
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The Hundred-Light-Year Diary: A cautionary sci fi story
Thinking about forecasting and AI, I sometimes remember this story by Greg Egan. It was published as part of his collection Axiomatic. Here is my…
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Data Archival: The case for M-discs
You don’t have a lot of options if you want to preserve sure your data (your photos for example) for many years without any maintenance.…
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Child of Freedom, Parent of Prosperity: It’s innovation
How much should the government spend on science? One view is that it should spend a lot, since every dollar pays back many times over.…
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Death by AI: If anyone builds It, everyone dies
The most likely cause of death today is AI. It’s a reasonable statement. The most common cause of death right now is ischemic heart disease,…
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Life Without Clocks or Mirrors: What would it be like?
I’ve always been immoderatly clock-oriented. But that was part of what seemed wrong with my infrequent periods of actual labor: the deadly predictability of jobs…
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Getting Started With AI: A good starting point
If you haven’t yet used AI, or if you’re thinking about paying for a premium AI, this is a good guide. I find paying for…
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Free Energy
The 1990s were the golden age of free energy: Technologies that, through new or underappreciated physics, generated abundant and clean electricity. It wasn’t about boring…
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Effective Mess
Chaos always defeats order because it is better organized Terry Pratchett A few weeks ago, I shared a pointer to a podcast about the internal…
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In Tech America, AI Fact-Check You
This happens to scientists fairly often: You remember some finding you came across a few weeks ago. You don’t remember where you read it, but…
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Fractured Entanglement
The most interesting perspectives on AI can be encountered on the Jim Rutt Show, which I have previously referenced with regards to AI risk. In…
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Electric Network Frequency Analysis
Given an audio or video file, it’s possible to determine where and when it was recorded based on the electrical power grid’s hum in the…
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Not People: Don’t psychoanalyze AIs
With ChatGPT-5 just having come out, Adam Mastroianni has posted a timely reminder on Experimental History: Trying to understand LLMs by using the rules of…
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Spinning Sun-Powered Space Catapult
For years now, I’ve been following what’s happening in the field of interstellar travel. Not closely, but close enough to know what kinds of technology…
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The 1,000 Year House
There is a series of blog posts by Brian Potter on how one would build a house that would last for one thousand years. It’s…
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Talking of Children and AI
We talk about our children and AI the same way. We say, “Did you notice what they can do now?” and “Can you believe that…
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Bigger Brains
To a first approximation, bigger brains = more neurons = smarter. Dig deeper, and it turns out to be more complicated than that. Honeybees have…
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AI Rationalizations
AIs like ChatGPT’s o3 take time to think before they answer. While doing so, o3 provides some commentary on its thinking process. For example, it…
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o3 Can’t Stay Silent
I’ve recently speculated about how it may be possible to use AI to monitor the news and to alert me only when anything noteworthy happens.…
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Stainless Steel
The oldest piece of kitchenware I own is a stainless steel teapot. The previous occupants had left it behind in a flat in England I…
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LMMs as Information Retrieval: AI represents accumulated intellect, not creative intelligence
Are we close to developing large language models (LMMs) that have artificial general intelligence (AGI) soon? Some think we’re already there, but according to this…
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AI Benchmarking
A month ago, I observed that out of three big magazines dedicated to literature, none had a recent discussion of AI and what it means…
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Commodification
A friend sends me Christmas cards every year that feature cartoon versions of him and his wive. They hire an artist to create the images…
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When Being Smart is Not Enough
What kinds of problems can be solved with more intelligence, and for which is intelligence not sufficient? Dynomight speculates that a superintelligent AI could solve…
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Why are More Neurons Better?
This is an excellent question whose answer is only obvious at first glance, asked by Scott Alexander on Astral Codex Ten. The correlation between the…
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The Humanities are Avoiding AI
Few people working in the humanities have extensively tested the latest large language models, and most people base their opinions on what they have heard…
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AI in Biology
AI will soon design effective and safe drugs for any ailment. At least that’s commonly assumed, and on the surface it’s a reasonable prediction. After…
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AI Overreliance
I use AI at work and for fun, but I’m worried what it may do to us individually and as a society if we’re not…
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Do Composers Die Young? Maybe
When Mozart was my age, he was dead for five years already. He had gone from composing to decomposing. He wasn’t the only composer to…
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Paperclip Apocalypse or Profit Apocalypse?
Let’s hope AI doesn’t turn the universe into paperclips and remains aligned with its masters. Even so, this could lead to suboptimal outcomes. Imagine AIs…
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Implementing AI
The genetics research team I manage has been experimenting with AI agents for a few months now. Within my biotech company, we’re well suited to…
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Less is More
I have previously written about how sometimes, knowing less can be an advantage. One example of this was that it’s easier to detect if someone…
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The Cost of Transportation
From Austin Vernon’s blog post on reducing human and freight transportation costs: It might be difficult to fathom that a mature sector like ground transportation…
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Moon Diagrams
Bartosz Ciechanowski has created a wonderful page explaining a lot of what there is to know about the moon using animated diagrams. Also look at…
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Resist Summary
This is from Simon Sarris’ blog, The Map is Mostly Water: It is an interesting feature of stories and fiction that they resist summary. You…
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Thresholds
From L. M. Sacasas’ blog, The Convivial Society, in which he asks if and when technology is beneficial to the individual. One way view this…
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Boring News
I like my news like I like my visits to the doctor: Unemotional and infrequent. I’ve recently written about one way to achieve this. Packy…
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Total Recall
Around the time the iPhone came out 17 years ago, Charles Stross wrote an article in which he imagined a future in which all of…
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Minimizing Engagement
In recent years, I’ve tried to limit my news consumption. I’d rather spend my time and attention on things where I can make a difference.…
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Railguns
In Jules Verne’s 1865 science fiction novel From the Earth to the Moon, three men travel to the moon aboard a projectile launched from a…
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Wikibibliography
I wish there were a website that curated the best resources to learn about any topic. For example, if I want to learn about the…
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The Precautionary Principle: When does it apply?
Or: Should you really never change a working system? Given an innovation whose future positive and negative impact are uncertain, which position should be taken…
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AI Tutoring: It’s not going to work as well as human tutoring
I’m increasingly encountering the belief that capable leaders have become rarer or have even disappeared. While most often observed in the political realm, some argue…
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Bicycle Conversion
Leaving a hardware store, I saw an e-bike unlike any I had seen before chained to a lamppost. It was a standard road bike with…
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Power Table: How much is a Watt?
The only sort of power that ultimately matters is of course physical power, defined as energy per unit time. I’m not used to thinking about…
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God Hates Singletons
Wolf Tivy on Palladium explores the risk of a single artificial intelligence, through recursive self-improvement, taking over the world. This hypothetical event has been termed…
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Can AI Solve Science? Answer: No
To this ultimate question we’re going to see that the answer is inevitably and firmly no (Stephen Wolfram).
Nehaveigur 