🦍Thick and Thin🦒
Nickels are too thin! You know what you need? Thicker nickels, or thnickels.
This is a cool thin ‘pencil tower’ in New York. It has no load-bearing interior columns, relying on its ‘concrete exoskeleton’.
🧠Illusion of Thinking for Yourself🧠
I find Apple’s Illusion of Thinking paper refreshing and I enjoy the term ‘accuracy collapse’ and will try to shove it into cocktail party conversation whenever possible. Anthropomorphizing AI/LLMs is something that I’m hoping society will course correct over time, but I’m not holding my breath.
Adam Conover has an insightful piece about AI making us dumber.
Neal Stephenson is very good(lucky?) at predicting the future with his books. The Diamond Age is one that focuses on AI and learning, and I recently became curious about his opinion on this book, how its aged and what he thinks of it in today’s world. Turns out he’s got a new post talking about precisely that.
People are using AI to hallucinate issues in curl and wasting developer’s time.
🎡Wheels on the Bus🎡
A slightly frustrating aspect of public transport is figuring out how to use it. I generally use the Transit app, which provides a great alternative to Google Maps’ very car-brained directions. So it was cool to see Transitous, another public transport routing service. But how do you actually get realtime transit data into a service? Here’s a cool article about how they do it.
Plastic bag bans work in reducing the amount of litter on shorelines, but its a complex issue. It shows that good legislation in this area could be applied to other areas such as plastic bottles and paper towel waste.
Its weird to think of a chemical as having a birthday, but happy 200th to Benzene!
🔫Gunn Control🔫
I enjoy James Gunn’s work immensely. While his Marvel/DC work is very good, I still prefer his early shlocky horror. I appreciate how he is very reflective and open to re-inventing himself. The new Superman movie sounds like a different direction for him creatively and I look forward to it.