Perplexity’s Comet Browser. This is now available to the general public, of which I am an upstanding member. I downloaded it last night and played around for a bit and it’s neat! In the future your browser will surf the […]
When not to trust Wikipedia. “Wikipedia claimed Roth’s book “The Human Stain” was inspired by the life of writer Anatole Broyard. Roth said this was “in no way substantiated by fact.” He should know: he wrote it. … Roth contacted […]
How to draw construction equipment for kids. “But despite being very deliberately hand-drawn, Taback’s illustrations include a really wonderful amount of detail. If he draws a dump truck in profile, he’ll be clear to capture the wires and hydraulics. Wheels […]
Greenland is a beautiful nightmare. “Greenland appeared to have roughly 9 people living there and maybe 5 things to look at. Even professional travel personalities seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. … It reminded me a lot […]
Cook County is months late collecting property taxes. I have an annual reminder in my todo list so that I don’t accidentally forget to pay a property tax bill. After several months of kicking it out into the future because […]
The lobbying story behind the botched county systems upgrade (above). Here’s the punchline: “This, sadly, is the ‘Chicago Way’ — on steroids.” … “Tyler Technologies’ major county contracts – peppered with delays and cost overruns – were shepherded by well-connected […]
A bitter lesson for the bitter lesson fanboys. This is a really great interview by Dwarkesh Patel, who I think is really on a roll the past ~year. “Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 […]
Andrej Karpathy’s take on the Richard Sutton interview (above). “So that brings us to where we are. Stated plainly, today’s frontier LLM research is not about building animals. It is about summoning ghosts. You can think of ghosts as a […]
Why Google will win the AI race. “The AI race feels like a sprint right now, with OpenAI grabbing headlines and Meta open-sourcing everything they can. But if you’re placing bets on who wins the marathon, don’t overlook the company […]
How social media shortens your life. “The most common noun in the English language is “time”. We talk obsessively about time because it’s the most important thing in the universe. Without it, nothing can happen. And yet most of us […]