Links
3 stars
AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying | The Guardian
12-minute read
In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s targeting systems. Workers organised a walk out. Engineers quit. And Google ultimately abandoned the contract. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over and spent the next six years building Maven into a targeting infrastructure that pulls together satellite imagery, signals intelligence and sensor data to identify targets and carry them through every step from first detection to the order to strike.
The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest. A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal.
The Memory Maker | Longreads
13-minute read
My wife insists we once took a yoga class together, early in our relationship. She remembers the teacher vividly (a French acrobat, rainbow dreads, apparently quite a character), where we sat (to the left of the door), and the color of the yoga mats (teal). I insist she is misremembering: I have never been to a yoga class, even to this day. I scrolled back years through my phone’s location history once to settle it, but we’d started dating not long after the iPhone came out, and if the data ever existed, it was gone. The yoga story comes up every few years, but we never resolve it. It is probably unresolvable. As a neuroscientist, I know how these things happen—the encoding mishaps, the source confusion, the neuroscience of how two people can end up telling different stories about the same afternoon. This knowledge has never once brought us closer to agreeing.
I was thinking about this story when I heard something strange from a neighborhood friend of mine, Andrew Deutsch, who was using OpenAI’s Sora app. Sora, if you aren’t familiar, worked like this: You would record your face, say a few numbers, rotate your head left to right. Moments later, you would have an AI video replica of yourself, a self-deepfake, insertable into any scenario you can prompt the AI to produce. Scuba diving with SpongeBob. Dancing K-pop style in a futuristic cityscape. You could then share your videos with your friends and scroll through the videos of others, in what is often described as a “TikTok for deepfakes.” Sora hit one million downloads in only five days. Six months later, OpenAI shut it down, reportedly redirecting resources toward coding tools ahead of a planned IPO. Consider this, then, a eulogy for Sora, a technology with the lifespan of an off-Broadway flop that, in its brief and ignominious run, exposed a crack in human cognition that the next self-deepfake app will surely exploit.
Capitalism and Modernity | Marginal Revolution
3-minute read
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, one of the few economists in the world equally at home solving stochastic dynamic optimization problems as with sociological theory and history, has an excellent series of twitter posts on capitalism and modernity.
[...]
What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria.
2 stars
How the hypercuriosity of ADHD may have helped humans thrive | Aeon
9-minute read
This little dance isn’t unusual for me and the millions of other people who can spend hours in deep, almost joyful focus when a question grabs our attention, but who can also derail ourselves completely when we hear about a shiny new idea. For a long time, I thought this was a personal failure of discipline, a quirk I needed to manage better. It’s only when I started working at the ADHD Research Lab at King’s College London that I came to believe it might be something else entirely.
I’m a cognitive neuroscientist using behavioural experiments, eye-tracking and EEG to examine how attention is drawn toward some signals and away from others. In retrospect, the irony isn’t lost on me that I spent years studying attention without applying the same analytic lens to myself. To understand why I’d dismissed my own experience for so long, it helps to look at how ADHD is officially defined.
Sleeping Beauty | Women* Write the Balkans
11-minute read
Sometimes, when I go back home to Split, I watch the old tapes of my sister and me as children. It’s a ritual my mother and my partner adore. We connect the old VHS, put in a random tape, and go back in time. My parents filmed everything; the most mundane, wonderful days of my childhood are always there for me to revisit, curated moments unmarred by imprecision of memory. There I am, singing and twirling and exclaiming precocious things to my father as he films, preserved on tape for reevaluation. The older I am, the more I see. So, I watch again, learning anew about who I was and who I might become.
[...]
I was seven when I became aware of my longing for beautiful girls. All princesses fascinated me, but one stood out even more than Ariel. She was a beautiful blond girl on the kitchen towel my grandmother had placed above the stove, just out of my reach. It was just a dish cloth, but I couldn’t look away. “Please can I have her,” I would ask my grandmother whenever I went upstairs. Grandma would laugh and say “no” as she had already done so many times.
Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing | Stratechery
7-minute read
It’s the nature of business that the eulogy for a chief executive doesn’t happen when they die, but when they retire, or, in the case of Apple CEO Tim Cook, announce that they will step up to the role of Executive Chairman on September 1. The one morbid exception is when a CEO dies on the job — or quits because they are dying — and the truth of the matter is that that is where any honest recounting of Cook’s incredibly successful tenure as Apple CEO, particularly from a financial perspective, has to begin.
The numbers, to be clear, are extraordinary. Cook became CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011, and in the intervening 15 years revenue has increased 303%, profit 354%, and the value of Apple has gone from $297 billion to $4 trillion, a staggering 1,251% increase.
What Happened With Mars Sample Return? (I) | Mars For The Rest of Us
7-minute read
It’s not clear whether to blame Trump, Musk, NASA, or Mars itself for the collapse of a flagship mission.
[...]
Say you want to study a bunch of alien rocks. Our planet is rich in scientists and sophisticated rock-examining machinery, so one approach is to put them all on a rocket and send them to where the rocks are. But our best machines are big and too delicate to fit on a rocket, and the scientists themselves are fragile—we have managed to keep a few of them alive in low Earth orbit, but they struggle to get any science done there.
So another idea is to bring rocks back home. And so sample return has been a top goal of planetary science for thirty years or more.
There have been some successes! Most famously, the Apollo astronauts brought back a few hundred kilograms of moon rocks. In 2004, a mission called Stardust flew past the comet Wild 2 and brought back dust grains from the comet’s coma. In 2005, the Japanese Hayabusa probe landed on an asteroid called 25143 Itokawa and brought back a little surface dust for study. Its successor, Hayabusa2, did the same for an asteroid called 162173 Ryugu in 2018. And in 2023, a mission called OSIRIS-REx returned to Earth carrying a sample from the asteroid 101955 Bennu.
Investigations from these missions have been fruitful and have built expectations for a Mars sample return mission, which would bring the full power of Earth laboratories to bear on some astrobiologically interesting rocks the Perseverance rover found on Mars. The circumstantial evidence for early life on Mars is now strong, and there’s a widespread hope that analyzing samples on Earth would have spectacular results, more than enough to galvanize public support for future Mars missions.
Will Americans want more housing if it looks prettier? | Noahpinion
5-minute read
First of all, I’m skeptical that regular Americans actually like the kinds of building styles that intellectuals often yearn for. If you plunk down old-looking European-style buildings in the middle of Houston or Seattle, people tend to ridicule them as cheesy and inauthentic. The typical insult is “pastiche”, a derogatory term for a style that jumbles and mixes old European styles (even though, as Samuel Hughes points out, mixing and matching older ideas is exactly how classic European building styles were created in the first place).
[...]
Nor is ornamental architecture necessarily what makes people love a city. Traditionalists may sigh over old European styles, and urbanists may salivate over the superilles of Barcelona, but the city that has captured the hearts of Americans in recent years is Tokyo. Downtown Tokyo is a forest of electric lights, strung up along the sides of stubby concrete mid-rises called zakkyo buildings. There’s nary a fancy cornice to be found; instead, the beauty comes from the bright cheery emblems of commerce.
It Haunted Your Childhood Video Store. You Were Probably Convinced It Was Real. It Was—More Than You’d Like. | Slate
7-minute read
Some objects take up a place in memory so tangible it’s as if you could reach right into your mind and retrieve them from the past. For me, one of them is a black plastic case about the size and shape of a hardcover book, its edges rough and worn with frequent handling. On the front, large enough to be seen across the aisle of a video store, is a grinning skull, and above that, in large red letters, are the words Faces of Death. But what looms largest in my mind is the handwritten note Scotch-taped to the outside of the flimsy slipcover: “ADULTS ONLY—MUST BE 18 TO RENT.”
[...]
As it happens, much of what appears in Faces of Death is not real, beginning with those names. Both Alan Black and Conan LeCilaire—the latter meant to sound like the word killer in a French accent—were pseudonyms for John Alan Schwartz, a young TV editor in Southern California who’d been approached by a Japanese company to make an American version of a so-called shockumentary, like 1962’s notorious Mondo Cane, focused exclusively on death. Like other movies in this new “mondo” subgenre, named for that influential Italian film, Faces of Death presented itself as educational fare, an anthropological study of different cultures’ approach to mortality, hosted by the stern-voiced Dr. Francis Gröss. But it took that framing no more seriously than it did its narrator’s last name, another pseudonym for the actor (an unknown named Michael Carr) who played the part.
1 star
‘They’re gonna make me cry’: I competed at a speed puzzling championship | The Guardian
6-minute read
I have been a lifelong jigsaw puzzle lover. But in recent years, I have observed the quintessential way to slowly pass time transform into a competitive sport. So I traveled to the USA Jigsaw Nationals to test my skill against the best puzzlers in the country.
Miso Is Not a Soup | Marc Matsumoto
4-minute read
I often hear people say “miso” when they mean “miso soup.” If the only place you’ve encountered miso is in soup, the two naturally blur together. But it’s a bit like saying “flour” when you mean “bread.” Miso is an ingredient, not a soup, and once you start seeing it that way, a whole world of possibilities opens up.
I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It | Medium
3-minute read
The domain name friendster.com was registered on March 22 2002. After the site shut down in 2015, the domain did not resolve for 8 years. However, in October 2023 I noticed that the domain name was resolving once again, but it was showing a lot of popup ads. I was curious who owned it, so I looked at the WHOIS info and recognized the owner as a customer of park.io, a company I founded in 2014, and that I had corresponded with him previously over email.
I reached out to him and said I was interested to buy the domain. He told me he had bought it for $8k and now was making ad revenue from the existing traffic. He bought it at gname.com, a site that hosts expired domain name auctions where you can buy prerelease domains from various Chinese/Asian registrars.
Original link | Archive.is link
Sabastian Sawe breaks two-hour barrier to make history in London Marathon | The Guardian
3-minute read
He came. He Sawe. He conquered. Not so very long ago, the idea of anyone running an official marathon in under two hours lurked only in the realms of the fantastical and theoretical: part holy grail, part scientific curiosity.