Linus’s Law applies to science, too. The creator of Linux changed software by publishing his code and letting the community find and fix bugs, rather than polish for a long time before releasing. The author argues this works for research […]
The science of personality change. “Brian Little says that in the service of important personal projects, we can actually shape-shift for a short period of time in order to achieve our goals.” Olga Khazan explains how you can act like […]
Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did. “ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone.” The […]
GODMOD3. I’ve written before about Pliny the Liberator, an AI security researcher and LLM jailbreaker extraordinaire. Here’s his latest gift to the public: no sign-ups / guardrails / filters, and totally open source. “the most liberated AI interface ever built! […]
HyperAgents that rewrite their own upgrades. “A hyperagent combines the task agent and the meta agent into a single self-referential, modifiable program, such that the mechanism responsible for generating improvements is itself subject to modification.” The idea is simple: let […]
How to finance a data center buildout. “An innovation on the finance side” is a phrase you never want to hear. The ‘conduit debt financing’ allows companies to access debt markets at scale without showing debt on their balance sheets, […]
Part bank vault, part citadel. “They are part bank vault, part food store and part citadel.” In southern Morocco, these agadir (igoudar) were communal fortress granaries where families stored grain, jewelry, and documents behind thick walls and carved wooden locks. […]
A wastewater plant that grows nature. “The largest bio-remediation facility in the world” is cleaning Riyadh’s wastewater while building habitat along Wadi Hanifa. Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison visits the site and treats it like a working ecosystem, not just infrastructure. […]
Say now Shibboleth. “Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right.” So they killed him. A shibboleth is a word or habit that marks you as an […]
Interstate 19: America’s only metric highway. “There’s not many places in the U.S. where you get a little math problem while you’re driving.” Interstate 19 in Arizona is a 102-kilometer stretch where signs are in meters and kilometers, and locals […]