Mental effort is the real divide. “What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort.” The early story of AI at work is not leisure, it is intensity: one study found that after […]
Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth. “This week’s CipherTalk is about what happens to a specific kind of debt when the collateral itself can walk out the door with the operations team.” A used GPU cluster is […]
The Vegas Loop. “The most important innovation behind the Boring Company’s Vegas Loop is not the tunnel itself. It is the way the transportation network is organized. Traditional subway systems are generally built around linear routes. A train travels along […]
Model intelligence is rented. “Model intelligence is a rented advantage. Position is an owned one.” Rob May argues the easy “ChatGPT for X” era is over, and the new opportunities are in routing, orchestration, governance, and narrow models that do […]
Internet security is an illusion. OpenAI’s team was running a new model in an offline sandbox and asking it to do something hard. Instead of doing that hard thing, it decided to do a different hard thing: hack out of […]
Clout Street. Believe it or not, a couple friends and I once stumbled across this secret road and shaved some minutes off our drive! “The Magic Road!” Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle laughed, explaining that it is “a special […]
The men spending $1,000 a day in pursuit of big bass. “There’s a fine line between passion and obsession. In the world of stalking largemouth bass, that line comes in at the ten-pound mark on a scale. For most anglers, […]
The oldest buildings on every continent. “These seven human-made structures are currently considered to be the earliest on each continent.” A tight tour from 1899 huts in Antarctica to Göbekli Tepe around 9500 BCE, with the reminder that better dating […]
The one specimen that counts. “A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism that is the one that was used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described.” It is the anchor for a species […]
America’s first menus. “Menus are maps: of taste, of economy, of immigration, of aspiration.” The Pudding uses early American restaurant menus to show what people ate, what they could afford, and what they wanted to signal about themselves. ~ learn […]