Thanks for posting. The author is provocative for sure, but I found he also wrote a similar polemic about veganism, kinda hard for me to situate it. Might fetch one of his volumes from the stacks during a slow week, probably would get my name put on a list though.
Waterfox lore - it got acquired by System1 of āGuy Who Runs Three Companies Called Fidelity But Not The Fidelity You Know Probably Doesnāt Care That Thereās Already A Company Called System1 That Does That Same Thing As The System1 His SPAC Is Buying. Just saying.ā 1 and then went private again 2, presumably they bought it back after the stock predictably tanked. Subprime adtech is a strange place.
IMHO should just bring back iceweasel, but what do i know.
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Sorry (not sorry).
Backgammon is āeasierā than chess or go, but it has dice, so it not (yet) been completely solved like checkers. I think only the endgame (ābearing offā) has been solved. The SOTA backgammon AI using NNs is better than expert humans but you can still beat it if you get lucky. XG is notable because if you ever watch high stakes backgammon on youtube, they will run XG side by side to show when human players make blunders. Thatās how I learned about it anyway.
This had slipped under the radar for me
https://www.reddit.com/r/backgammon/comments/1k8nlay/new_chapter_for_extreme_gammon/
After 25 years, it is time for us to pass the torch to someone else. Travis Kalanick, yes the Uber founder, has purchased Gammonsite and eXtreme Gammon and will take over our backgammon products (he has a message to the community below)
:(
Why is WSJ rehashing six month old whitepapers? Slow news week /s
Anything new vs the last time it popped up? https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
EDIT:
In mid-November, I agreed to an experiment. Anthropic had tested a vending machine powered by its Claude AI model in its own offices and asked whether weād like to be the first outsiders to try a newer, supposedly smarter version.
Whats that word for doing the same thing and expecting different results?
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/can-ucla-replace-teaching-assistants-ai
Millerās team also recently used software from startup StackAI to develop an AI-powered app that writes letters of recommendation, saving faculty members time. Faculty type basic details about a student who has requested a letter, such as their grades and accomplishments, and the app writes a draft of the full letter.
AI is āone of those things that you might worry could dehumanize the process of writing recommendation letters, but faculty also say that process [of manually writing the letters] is very labor intensive,ā Miller said. āSo far theyāve gotten a lot out ofā the new app.
Anyone using this thing should be required to serve on the admissions committee. LoRs arenāt for generic B+ students that you donāt even remember, just say no.
I googled stackai, saw their screenshots and had ptsd flashbacks of mid 2000s alteryx. why do we keep reinventing no-code drag-and-drop box-and-arrow crap.
I went down a punch-card history rabbit hole today on the empirical software engineering discord. TIL:
We have been living in a world 10 columns too short. Think of all the HN headlines we could have had insteadā¦
I imagine it was like VHS vs Beta only with pocket protectors.
Purdue mandating AI to graduate: https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/2025/Q4/purdue-unveils-comprehensive-ai-strategy-trustees-approve-ai-working-competency-graduation-requirement/
Iām looking for the actual curricula / docs signed off by the trustees. Looks like another domino falls.
https://kevinmd.com/2025/12/why-ai-in-medicine-elevates-humanity-instead-of-replacing-it.html h/t naked capitalism
Throughout my nearly three decades in family medicine across a busy rural region, I watched the system become increasingly burdened by administrative requirements and workflow friction. The profession I loved was losing time and attention to tasks that did not require a medical degree. That tension created a realization that has guided my work ever since: If physicians do not lead the integration of AI into clinical practice, someone else will. And if they do, the result will be a weaker version of care.
I feel for him, but MAYBE this isnāt a technical issue but a labor one; maybe 30 years ago doctors should have āledā on admin and workflow issues directly, and then they wouldnāt need to āleadā on AI now? Iām sorry Cerner / Epic sucks but adding AI wonāt make it better. But, of course, class consciousness evaporates about the same time as those $200k student loans come due.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Extensions-Block-AI
Now they just need to add a slider for touchpad scroll speed.
Iāve worked on LAPD ADSB data for a couple years and then some dude goes an posts this right before thanksgiving:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009591
Flying Moneybags!
fuck, why didnāt we think of that.
I did it, I went and made a Official Public Comment IRL:
In UCLAās Strategic Plan, Goal 1 is to āDeepen our engagement with Los Angelesā and Goal 5 is to āBecome a more effective institutionā. By engaging with Los Angeles businesses, UCLA can get both better terms, prices, and services, and support the local economy. Buy Local, Spend Local.
The federal government encourages this with Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants, among other things. Furthermore, the State of California requires a portion of its spending go toward certified Small Businesses.
And yet, the University apparently awarded a contract reportedly worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to OpenAI. I have not found any documentation of an open Request for Proposals or competitive process for that award.
My question is:
If there was an RFP, where was it publicly posted, and if there was no RFP, why not, and were Los Angeles vendors or small businesses evaluated as alternatives, as recommended by UC policy and state law?
Given the scale of this spending and the context of a budget crisis, transparency, compliance, and small-business participation are critical to our effectiveness and engagement.
Iām asking for clarity on how this decision was made, how it aligns with procurement guidelines and University goals, and how DTS plans to ensure that local and small businesses are meaningfully included moving forward.
Thank you.
My college used the green Russell Norvig text, which had (checkingā¦) 12 pages on neutral nets out of 1000 pages. I liked the class well enough, but we used Java 1.3 and lisp would have been better.
I need to quit clicking, my yt recommendations are so cursed now.
Love the Edgar Allen Poe thing at 3:30 though, wtf. Also where did he find the sephiroth at 4:19?
Is there even any young people we could plausibly call whippersnappers on orange site anymore, it feels like theyāre all well into their 30s/40s at this point.
I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.
But in fairness to actual whipper snappers, and to your point, the '56 Dartmouth Workshop forward privileged Symbolic AI over anything data driven up through the first AI winter (until roughly the 90s and the balance shifted) and really warped the disciplines understanding of its own influences and history - if 70s RMS was taught anything about Neural Nets, itās relevance and importance would probably have been minimized in comparison to expert systems in lisp or whatever Minsky was up to.
Slopocalypse Now h/t The Syllabus
For context, Kunzru wrote the novel Red Pill a few years back.
Candace is a pioneer. Following her, we are exiting the age of the public sphere and entering a time of magic, when signs and symbols have the power to reshape reality. Consider the āMedbed,ā a staple of QAnon-adjacent right-wing conspiracy culture. Medbeds are one of the many things about which ātheyā are not telling āyouā; they can supposedly regenerate limbs and reverse aging. How evil would you have to be to deny such a boon to We the People? In late September, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself promoting the scam, promising that every faithful supporter would be given a card that would give them access to this magic technology. Trump posted it because it made him look good, a leader healing the sick, but also because it is a way to hyperstition a version of this fiction into reality. No one will really be cured, of course, because the Medbed doesnāt exist. Except now it is someoneās job to make sure it does: The president is a powerful magician who never tells a lie, so some loyal redhats will have to be given cards that let them lie down in some kind of cargo-cult version of a Medbed. Perhaps it will be a job for TVās own Dr. Oz, who has crossed to the other side of the screen as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
God we live in the dumbest possible world.
This is not art as critique. Critique is just sincere-posting, dutifully pointing out yet again that the Medbed isnāt āreal.ā Art can mess with our masters in ways we donāt yet fully understand.
I hope so, Jesse Welles getting on the Colbert and playing Red shows some people are moving in that direction, but is also definitely sincere-posting, and ultimately that kind of performance just doesnāt pay the bills like if he went Truck Jeans Beer. Eddington seems to have gotten under some peopleās skins in an interesting wayā¦ And Iām skeptical that /any/ novel would have any impact or reach outside the NYT class, what with having to actually read something.
h/t YT recommender, mildly unhinged: The Secret Religion of Silicon Valley: Nick Landās Antichrist Blueprint
0:40 In certain occult circles, Land is a semi-mythical figure. A man said to have been possessed by not one, but four Lemurian time demons. Simultaneously.
Well, that explains things.
Is this some CCRU lore Iām not aware of?
UIUC prof John Gallagher had a christmas post - Firm reading in an era of AI delirium - Could reading synthetic text be like eating ultra processed foods?