Safety built into LLMs creates new risks. “malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals… so that their spyware wouldn’t be analyzed by an AI security scanner.” ~ learn more
The Al trap that is quietly wiping out angel investors. “Most AI startups do not sell software. They sell outcomes powered by rented intelligence.” Every inference has a bill attached, and SaaS heuristics don’t apply to “AI” unit economics. ~ […]
Watch your music hallucinate. “…and anyone who’s ever wanted to watch their music hallucinate!” Pliny the Liberator is shipping ENTHEA, a one-file, zero-deps visualizer where “every mode is real math, cited in-app. receipts, not vibes.” ~ learn more
Bruce Hornsby on Tupac. “The original “Changes” was a lot dirtier, had a lot of the n-word. They took that out for the single.” Bruce Hornsby says he got the track on a cassette from the Shakur Foundation, and he […]
Continuous cloth roll towel machine. “It spools a real cloth roll that is almost 100 feet long in a spool to dry your hands.” Robert Moseley tours a Darman continuous cloth roll towel machine, the oddly satisfying alternative to paper […]
Why Japan has such good railways. “These cultural explanations are wrong.” Japan’s trains work because of policy choices: private operators, land use rules, and regulation that let rail companies build the corridor and the city around it. ~ learn more
Unlimited counterfeit coins. Privacy coin Zcash’s price crashed 57% in 24 hours thanks to a newly disclosed bug. “The vulnerability could have been exploited to undetectably create an unlimited amount of counterfeit ZEC within Orchard,” Shielded Labs said. The scary […]
The cost of safetyism. “What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard. … The world didn’t get more dangerous. We got more afraid.” Steve Magness argues that the big shift is a perception-reality gap, and the […]
Rods that run cone software. Despite my comment above about humanity taking control over biology, it’s also true that we still know very little about biology. “For more than 150 years, vertebrate vision has been understood as a two-part system: […]
Functional human sperm in a lab. “Growing functional human sperm entirely outside the body.” Little by little we’re living in an era where humans are taking control over biology. In this example, they were able to coax stem cells into […]