Recently updated blogs

This is a real question. I don’t know the answer and I’m curious. I lived in New York City for ten years and Los Angeles for seven years, and there are a lot of Jewish people in those two cities, so it could be coincidence. But I honestly didn’t realize it until one day I was thinking about the difference between shallow versus deep friendships, and made a list of …

Spotify and its bizarre, hyper-specific genres are rewriting how we understand music. Why? And should we bother fighting back? Continue reading → The post How Spotify and its Genres Define Who We Are appeared first on Aesthetics for Birds.

I’m not the first to write about how Jujutsu won me over. I’ve seen it off and on, and each time it came across my feed it was bumped a bit higher in my “list of things to look at eventually”. It finally reached the top spot, I think, when I saw Tony Finn’s post and made some time for it that week. I was skeptical; jj is one of …

Yesterday I arrived in Santa Clara for the Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference, which starts this morning, and where I’ll be speaking Thursday on “Quantum Algorithms in 2024: How Should We Feel?” and also closing the conference via an Ask-Us-Anything session with John Preskill. (If you’re at Q2B, reader, come and say hi!) And to coincide with Q2B, yesterday Google’s Quantum group officially announced “Willow,” its new 105-qubit superconducting chip …

Boy, what a month. If you haven’t heard, for the past thirty days we’ve been experimenting with a new event. We call it Mothership Month, and we hope this is the first of many. TL;DR Mothership Month ends Tuesday, December 10 at 12 PM CST (or whenever the backer train ends), so if you haven’t checked it out, do it now! What is Mothership Month? It’s essentially a month long …

Recently, noted VC Marc Andreessen kicked off a discussion about debanking, in a podcast with his co-founder Ben Horowitz (begins at 7:42) and in an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The venture firm they founded, a16z, also published a brief on this topic.The central thrust, quoting a16z’s brief (ellipsis in original): “Debanking can therefore be used as a tool or weapon systemically wielded by specific political actors / agencies against …

Figure 1. Video Editing Work Last May, when OpenAI withdrew Sky, the ChatGPT voice that resembled Scarlett Johansson’s too much for the actress’s liking, the startup learned a lesson that Disney had paid for 3 years before. Unhappy with negotiations over her lost earnings when the studio released Black Widow in theaters and on Disney+ simultaneously, she sued and later settled for breach of contract. After shrugging off the axiom …

Not much progress to report today. I’m still trying to become sufficiently proficient with the flightstick to tackle the highest level I’ve reached without it. I still maintain that it will be a benefit to me once I’ve mastered it, but right now, it’s a learning curve. It strikes me that the game’s ideal player is one who’s already over this hurdle, just as, say, Animal Well is built on …

When Manchester University Press announced the publication of this book, I could see at once that a book like this needed to be written. It is made up of 32 essays all asking how researchers can study the far right ethically. While one well-known journalist (Gary Younge of the Guardian) and two veteran theorists of […]

Wurkkos' TS10 series has been very popular with flashlight enthusiasts, and the larger 18650 battery format TS10 MAX is now available with high CRI Nichia 519A LEDs, and 2500 lumen max output. This is one of a handful of flashlights/torches with the flexible Anduril user interface (UI) that are suitable for light painting photography. Disclaimer The Wurkkos TS10 MAX was purchased with my own funds. Product links in this review …

Sometimes my brain gets so overloaded that simple decisions become too overwhelming and I start crying over what to pack for a weekend away. When this happens I have learnt that it’s helpful to empty my brain into post-it notes. This isn’t a productivity system. I have no rules. There’s no set size of each one. One might be “put on socks” and another might be “write a novel”. I …

Our last catch-up was all about one project: Museum in a Box; this one is about a couple of projects, but grouped on a single theme: bikes. We're big fans of cycling in the studio, and within our wider community in Liverpool—this summer about twenty of us headed north to do the Ride to the Sun, a 100 mile overnight ride starting in Carlisle and ending on the coast in …

Today, JFI’s Guaranteed Income project lead Jack Landry published a comprehensive report that summarizes the findings from the most significant recent guaranteed income pilot research projects–including JFI’s own just-released NBER working paper on the Compton Pledge. There is a growing debate around what the various pilot results mean. Some people have gravitated toward a handful of disappointing results to declare guaranteed income has minimal benefits, while others argue that pilots …

This weekend, the Grateful Dead will be celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors, recognizing their impact on music and culture. You can join in the celebration by listening to one of the 17,000 Grateful Dead concert recordings preserved at the Internet Archive. The Grateful Dead Collection, part of the Live Music Archive, features more than 17,000 concert recordings spanning decades of the band’s live shows. The collection is a result …

As with previous iOS versions, let’s analyze the built-in apps of iOS 18 to answer a few questions: How many binaries does iOS 18 contain? Which programming languages were used to develop these apps? How many apps are written in Swift? What percentage of apps use SwiftUI versus UIKit?