Links
4 stars
AI 2027
36-minute read
Finally got around to reading this. As with all predictions of the future, this is very likely wrong — but it’s still a worthwhile read, with a lot of research and thinking from an impressive team with a decent track record. (I suppose it's fair if you're sceptical, as the summary reads like science fiction, but click through to all their supporting material to understand how they arrived at their narrative.)
We predict that the impact of superhuman AI 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. It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.
The CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic have all predicted that AGI will arrive within the next 5 years. Sam Altman has said OpenAI is setting its sights on “superintelligence in the true sense of the word” and the “glorious future.”
What might that look like? We wrote AI 2027 to answer that question. Claims about the future are often frustratingly vague, so we tried to be as concrete and quantitative as possible, even though this means depicting one of many possible futures.
3 stars
Unraveling the Secrets of the Inca Empire | The Atlantic [gift article]
12-minute read
The heaps of khipus emerged from garbage bags in the back of the tiny, one-room museum—clumps of tangled ropes the size of beach balls. Sabine Hyland smiled as she gazed down at them and said, “Qué lindo, qué lindo”: how beautiful. Hyland, an anthropologist, had traveled here to the remote mountain village of Jucul in the Peruvian Andes to study them, in the hope of unlocking one of the most important lost writing systems in history, that of the Inca empire.
Instead of writing on clay tablets or papyrus, as other ancient societies did, the Incas recorded information by tying knots into long cords they called khipus. Only a few Andean villages have preserved their khipus through the centuries; those that have survived are revered, and village elders have sometimes kept their existence secret even from other community members. Yet beyond scraps of lore, most villagers have no idea what their khipus say: Knowledge of how to read them has all but vanished in the 500 years since the Spanish conquered and destroyed the Inca empire in the 1500s.
[...]
Although some scholars doubt that they’ll ever be able to read khipus fully, even a partial reading of the undeciphered cords would help illuminate the history of the Andean people who began recording information on them more than a millennium ago. Hyland has already published a proposed decoding of a few syllables on khipus from other villages.
Original link | Archive.is link
AI as Normal Technology | AI Snake Oil
46-minute read
A decent counterpoint to AI 2027, though not quite as impressive and perhaps a bit drier:
We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.
The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs. We do not think that viewing AI as a humanlike intelligence is currently accurate or useful for understanding its societal impacts, nor is it likely to be in our vision of the future.
2 stars
Notes on Tunisia | Matt Lakeman
65-minute read
At first, I thought this post would be heavy on travel and light on history, but I got carried away on the background reading and surprisingly interesting politics of the country. Modern Tunisia is another one of those one-time democracies that recently fell into an authoritarian quasi-dictatorship, like Turkey’s Erdogan, El Salvador’s Bukele, Hungary’s Orban, etc. But compared to those examples, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied feels like more of an accident, a product of a flailing, random political trajectory that no one could have predicted. The fact that a guy like this ended up running a country like this in this way is more baffling than scary or exciting.
Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast | New York Magazine
14-minute read
Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment. As a computer-science major, he depended on AI for his introductory programming classes: “I’d just dump the prompt into ChatGPT and hand in whatever it spat out.” By his rough math, AI wrote 80 percent of every essay he turned in. “At the end, I’d put on the finishing touches. I’d just insert 20 percent of my humanity, my voice, into it,” Lee told me recently.
[...]
In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education.
Original link | Archive.is link
Pirates of the Ayahuasca | n+1
21-minute read
I’d never been especially interested in ayahuasca, as most of what I read about it involved personal liberation. I wouldn’t have called myself a completely healthy, wholly nonaddicted person, but I was way past wanting to heal my relationship with my family or improve my body image. I wanted something beyond what I knew of this world to show itself to me and give me some kind of strength to stay in it.
There have been times in my life when I wouldn’t have taken seriously the possibility that a South American psychedelic could help ease the horror of systems collapse. But I was not doing at all well, and this podcast guy had been on the same terrible page. Here was someone who had wrestled with the fact that an American doing ayahuasca was embarrassing, who had a well-developed but non-groveling sense of himself as a resident of the imperial core, but who had in the end decided the benefits of advocating for Indigenous plant medicine outweighed the drawbacks. He recommended the center in Peru where he “drank.” The shaman was reputable, famous in a way I found promising, and the ayahuasca good quality. I filled out a contact form on the center’s website.
Can We Afford Large-scale Solar PV? | Construction Physics
7-minute read
But how much can it continue to rise? Is it feasible for solar power to meet most of our electricity demand? In the essay Understanding Solar Energy, we used some simple simulations of solar power to understand how much electricity demand solar PV can supply under different conditions. We found that due to solar’s intermittency, supplying large fractions of electricity demand requires a fair degree of “overbuilding” (solar panel capacity well in excess of total electricity demand), as well as a fair amount of storage. For a single family home where power demand never exceeds 10 kilowatts (and most of the time is below 2 kilowatts), supplying 80% of annual electricity consumption requires at least 13.7 kilowatts of solar panels, and 40 kilowatt-hours of storage. And supplying even higher fractions of electricity demand — 90%, 95%, 99% — the infrastructure requirements gets even more burdensome. Going from 80 to 90% of electricity supplied requires nearly doubling solar panel capacity.
However, we also found that the falling costs of solar PV will make it feasible for solar to supply large fractions of electricity demand cost-effectively. Reaching 90 or 95% is indeed costly, but 70-80% appears to be well within the realm of possibility.
How to Make a Living as a Writer | The Walrus
10-minute read
“What do you do?” It’s a simple question that often gets asked on first dates. No matter how much I pare down my reply, it’s always long winded.
“Well, I’m a freelancer,” I start, “so I have a million little jobs . . .”
The first of my million little jobs is what I call “Horse News.” It works like this: every weekday, I wake up at 6 a.m. and make my way to my desk, stumbling and still half asleep. I flick on an old lamp and wince as my eyes adjust to the light. I turn on my computer and use a piece of software that shows me all of the American horse racing–related news from the past twenty-four hours. It pulls up radio clips, Fox News segments, and articles from publications called BloodHorse or Daily Racing Form—anything that could be relevant to my interests.
Life’s Ancient Bottleneck | Quillette
5-minute read
Of the six chemical elements necessary for life, phosphorus is the rarest. It determines what grows and shrinks, who lives and dies. By disrupting the planet’s phosphate cycle, unchecked factory farming could have apocalyptic consequences.
What happened when Thomas Keller asked me to leave the French Laundry | SF Chronicle
10-minute read
Thomas Keller is fidgeting on the bench next to mine in the empty courtyard of the French Laundry. There’s a slight quaver in the chef’s voice, and he tells me he is nervous. This is not something he is accustomed to doing, he says — asking a critic to leave.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Con Man, the Karate Champ, and the Workout Videos That Changed Fitness Forever | Men's Health
12-minute read
The infomercial, but not the Stimulator itself, is the creation of a mercurial Ohio businessman named Paul M. Monea. Built like a cornerback, the 5'10" Monea is an empathetic listener and a persuasive talker. He owns the patent to the device and teamed up with an Akron chiropractor, William S. Gandee, DC, to sell the Stimulator directly to consumers. The 30-minute advert is their big gambit, hosted by actor Lee Meriwether and featuring endorsements from Knievel, NBA great Bill Walton, actors playing “real people,” and Dr. Gandee.
Dr. Gandee gives a quasi-medical presentation, saying things like “The ancient Greeks realized that the body was an electrical system. You know what they did? They put a person in a tub of water, and they put eels in the tub of water with them so they could send electric current and help the body.”
The Hobo Handbook | The Paris Review
6-minute read
The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, intended to keep the wrong people—cops, journalists, nosy normies like me—from realizing what they’re holding. The Crew Change Guide is a set of best practices and guidelines for hopping freight trains anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. A “crew change” refers to a train’s personnel shift, a brief window of opportunity for those brave enough to take it. In the heist movie, this is that ten-second gap after the night watchman clocks out and before his replacement takes over. For a train hopper, it’s a rare chance to clamber up a wagon undetected.
The Guide is either the train hopper’s Bible or an outdated relic, a must-have or a crutch, depending on whom you ask. The subtitle dubs it “An Alternative Hiking and Camping Guide,” but you won’t find any trail maps inside. Instead, what you see in these unstapled pages are dense walls of highly acronymized text in a miniature nine-point font. “East Joliet YD is becoming a major CN GM YD and c-c point for thru trains,” reads a line headed “Gibson City.” “E. Jackson crosses over S end of YD IM NE of DT.” The acronyms are more shorthand than code, a way of packing as much information as possible into 154 pages. The aesthetic ethos here is lightness, economy, discretion.
1 star
My School Banned Phones for the Year. Here's What Happened. | Fit to Teach
5-minute read
Luckily, this school year has been different. This school year, students must hand in their phones at entry or we immediately call their parents. The phones are plugged into safe boxes that the students aren’t allowed to access until the final bell has rung. There are no constant vibrations reminding you you’re missing out on something, and there are no pouches to rip.
Consequences for smuggling your phone past entry are high. Immediate detention, call home to parents, and a personal visit from the dean mid class. There was some push-back in the beginning, but we teachers stuck to our guns. Every staff member made an immediate phone call to the dean-team the moment they saw any kid with tech - that included AirPods, Apple Watches, iPads, and anything kids could use to connect to the internet.
One klepto kid smuggled three separate school iPads into her backpack, so when she got caught with one, she would wait and just pull out the next. When we discovered her “trick” she received reductions in her classwork grades, phone calls home and several detentions. Every kid who tried to push the boundaries received that kind of pushback from us every single time. We didn’t budge, and the student body eventually accepted their fate. This year they would have to go through school without an entertainment system in their pocket.
The results have been spectacular.
Teachers don’t have to fight an impossible battle against tech. Students talk to each other between classes. The cafeteria has the sound of conversation. Teachers cover material faster. Cyberbullying has fallen. When a fight happens, half the school doesn’t immediately run out of the classroom to watch. Mindless doomscrolling happens on their time, not school time. Boys can’t watch porn in the bathroom (or the cafeteria). I don’t have to fight an impossible war against the greatest human behavioral psychologists Silicon Valley has ever employed.
Seriously.
The Last Nomads | The Dial
1-minute read
The villages in this mountainous landscape are home to a pastoral nomadic community that has lived for generations in close connection with the land. Every spring, families move with their cattle to the higher pastures, where they spend the summer working, harvesting hay and preparing for winter. In September, when the weather in the mountains begins to shift, they return to the lowlands.
Over the past 10 years, I have witnessed quiet but visible changes. The region lacks access to quality education, health care and essential public services; electricity outages are common, and during harsh winters, villages are often cut off entirely from the outside world. As a result, many families have left in search of better opportunities, and the villages have become quieter. There are still gatherings, still children and daily routines, but some traditions are slowly fading.
DOGE Days | Sahil Lavingia
4-minute read
On March 17 2025, I joined DOGE as a software engineer working for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
[...]
In the end, I learned a lot, and got to write some code for the federal government. For that, I'm grateful.
But I'm also disappointed. I didn't make any progress on improving the UX of veterans' filing disability claims or automating/speeding up claims processing, like I had hoped to when I started. I built several prototypes, but was never able to get approval to ship anything to production that would actually improve American lives–while also saving money for the American taxpayer.
Maybe next time.
Owls in Towels | kottke.org
1-minute read
These are owls in towels. That’s it, that’s the post. Nothing in the animal kingdom emotes better than an owl.
View of Azalea Garden from Mt. Fuji, Hasui Kawase | kottke.org
1-minute read
I love this gorgeous woodblock print from Hasui Kawase, View of Azalea Garden from Mt. Fuji. Hasui was a significant influence on Studio Ghibli & Hayao Miyazaki.