Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war! True strength is shown in serving life. With evangelical simplicity, Saint John XXIII once wrote: “The benefits of peace will be felt everywhere, by individuals, by families, by nations, by the whole human race.” And echoing the incisive words of Pius XII, he added: “Nothing is lost by peace; everything may be lost by war” (Encyclical Letter Pacem in Terris, 116).
— Pope Leo
The whole guide is pretty excellent, but I liked this assessment of the issues of AI content.
LLMs (and artificial neural networks in general) use statistical algorithms to guess (infer) what should come next based on a large corpus of training material. It thus tends to regress to the mean; that is, the result tends toward the most statistically likely result that applies to the widest variety of cases. It can simultaneously be a strength and a "tell" for detecting AI-generated content.
For example, LLMs are usually trained on data from the internet in which famous people are generally described with positive, important-sounding language. Consequently, the LLM tends to omit specific, unusual, nuanced facts (which are statistically rare) and replace them with more generic, positive descriptions (which are statistically common). Thus the highly specific "inventor of the first train-coupling device" might become "a revolutionary titan of industry". It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated.
I learned that (almost) all mammals take the same amount of time to urinate from a book of facts.
All mammals that weigh more than about six-and-a-half pounds take about the same time to urinate, thanks to the structure of the urethra. Karen Hopkin reports
But today I learned that mammals also defecate in the same amount of time!
What else did we learn? Bigger animals have longer feces. And bigger animals also defecate at higher speed. For instance, an elephant defecates at a speed of six centimeters per second, nearly six times as fast as a dog. The speed of defecation for humans is in between: two centimeters per second.
Together, this meant that defecation duration is constant across many animal species – around 12 seconds (plus or minus 7 seconds) – even though the volume varies greatly. Assuming a bell curve distribution, 66 percent of animals take between 5 and 19 seconds to defecate. It's a surprisingly small range, given that elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog's, at 10 milliliters. How can big animals defecate at such high speed?
...
Putting the length of feces together with the properties of mucus, we now have a cohesive physics story for how defecation happens. Bigger animals have longer feces, but also thicker mucus, enabling them to achieve high speeds with the same pressure. Without this mucus layer, defecation might not be possible. Alterations in mucus can contribute to several ailments, including chronic constipation and even infections by bacteria such as C. difficile in the gastrointestinal tract.
Beyond simply following our scientific curiosity, our measurements of feces have also had some practical applications. Our defecation data helped us design an adult diaper for astronauts. Astronauts want to stay in space suits for seven days, but are limited by their diapers. Taking advantage of the viscosity of feces, we designed a diaper that segregates the feces away from direct contact with skin. It was a semifinalist in the NASA Space Poop Challenge earlier this year.
Arctic Ground Squirrels hibernate for something like eight months of the year—and when they are hibernating, their body temperature goes down to freezing (or even slightly below!) and they let their brains die. Then, over a couple hours when they emerge from hibernation, they regrow their brains. And, they indeed don't have the same memories they had before—they don't fear theings they feared the year before. But, don't worry, they do remember their friends.
Listen to this great Radiolab Terrestrials episode to learn more.
The photo is by Joel Sartore. Here's what he posted about the squirrels:
Hibernating Arctic ground squirrels (Spermopilus parryii) at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. This animal is the grand champion of all hibernators. It’s the only mammal that can drop its body temperature to below freezing. They hibernate for seven months. Females go in first, in August. Males follow a month later. They come out again to feed on tundra plants in May. Biologists at UAF have been studying the animal for 20 years, but still can’t figure out how this animal maintains a flat body temperature for all those months just above freezing. “You could put people into hibernation for space trips if you could understand it better,” said Franziska ‘Fran’ Kohl, one of the biologists here. “They also show symptoms of Alzheimers during hibernation.” She added that traumatic head injuries heal when in hibernation, another thing scientists are trying to figure out.
Just look at the "R": Fluor Corporation
Is AI conscious? What's happening when we see AI try to keep from being shut down or stop to "look" at cat pictures? How do we go about making a "moral" chat bot?
“We're starting to see AI systems that don't want to be shut down, that are resisting being shut down.
With published research saying it could blackmail the engineer that's going to shut it off if given the opportunity to do so.
Even when ordered, allow yourself to shut down, the AI still disobeyed 7% of the time.
So my feeling was we were out way past where theory was. You couldn't really approach these questions from a theoretical perspective, because we just didn't have enough data to be able to make categorical theoretical assessments of what was going on. But there was all this interesting experimental work happening that was just showing this is the kind of behavior that's coming out of these things.
We should try to figure out what's going on to say, here are the things we can say with any degree of reasonable confidence for now. Here's where we draw the line and beyond that, it's all murky and speculative and we really don't know. So I wrote to a guy at Anthropic, whom I had met 10 years ago at Google, when he was 11 years old prodigy, and said, this is not about Anthropic[…]”
This is one of the first things on AI I found really interesting. It forces us to look at the holes in our current tactics—AI, like the calculator did to math, reveals that the essays we ask students to write are about checking off boxes, not engaging with the task of writing, which is also a task of thinking and communicating.
Maybe the formulaic, three-point, five-paragraph essay was never actually a good assignment.
A teenager explains why he shouldn’t have to write homework essays anymore. Is there some way for adults to force teens to still do homework? Or to convince them they should want to?
Should design+code tools be trying to turn visuals into code? Or somehow facilitating the design and code working on the same thing directly?
There’s a version of this where we end up in five years with translation tooling that actually works well. Code to canvas in milliseconds. Canvas back to code with full token fidelity. Collaboration happening fluidly across both environments.
And we’d still be running two parallel systems, kept in sync by increasingly sophisticated automation, with all the maintenance overhead and structural drift that creates.
The other version is one where the design system is the substrate both environments read from directly. Where a decision made in one place propagates to the other not through capture or export or handoff, but because they’re drawing from the same structure. Where AI agents generating UI are composing from a system that knows what it is, not generating approximations from visual reference.
I know which version I think we should be building toward. I’m not sure the tooling announcements of the past six months are pointing there.
The roundtrip is getting smoother. I’m more interested in why we need the trip at all.
One action (zooming) changes the size of a pixel, while the other (resizing) changes the size of the browser itself – but both change the number of pixels across the width of the browser. As the window gets smaller, or the pixel gets larger – there are fewer pixels in the viewport.
That disconnect makes responsive typography unreliable. If your text is set to resize based only on a viewport or container, then the user zoom will have no effect! Similarly, neither 1vw nor 100vw accounts for the user default font-size.
This whole video from Oddbird was worth watching to see Miriam work through the reasoning. In addition to giving me much to think about in terms of writing good css for website visitors to have good experiences, I'm left wondering if it is possible for AI to have this sort of wondering. Can an LLM ask "hmm, I wonder how this approach to font sizing actually impacts with user preferences and zoom?"
Generative AI has broken that contract. Increasingly writers receive content that looks polished, yet contains inaccuracies. This can be because the SME, while polishing their content using AI tools, has missed the fact that the tool has also modified some code or changed the meaning of text. It can also be that the drive for productivity with these tools has meant that people are being asked to cover broader subject areas, so are relying on AI tools for research rather than their own knowledge. AI can be very confidently wrong, and if the text seems clear, it’s possible to miss that it’s clearly nonsense.
Whether productivity gains have broadened who we ask to be experts or experts are missing the polishing effect of an AI "edit", the human editors have to do much more to ensure good content is good and true.
But it’s very striking that at the end of that section I had with her [Laurie Tisch], she said: At the end of the day, it’s hard to convince someone like me to give up power.
So I said: Then how do you change this kind of thing? How could this kind of thing ever change?
And her words were: “Revolution, maybe.”
"Each advancement addressed a real friction[…] Yet the fundamental challenge persists bc it’s not mechanical. It’s intellectual. Software development is thinking made tangible. The artifacts we create[…]are the visible outcome of invisible reasoning about complexity."
The title is a little misleading, as it requires a couple pieces be in place, but, if you're using css custom properties ("variables", colloquially), to set your background color, it only takes one line of css to change the foreground to either black or white.
More to come by way of an explanation and more strategies, but here's the code as I'm using it now:
color: hsl(from var(--c) 157 54 calc(18 + round(nearest,calc(100 - l),100)));
The Stakhanovite movement (стаха́новское движе́ние) was a mass cultural movement of workers which originated in the Soviet Union, and encouraged socialist emulation and rationalization of workplace processes. The Stakhanovites (стаха́новцы) modeled themselves after Alexei Stakhanov and took pride in their ability to produce more than was required by working harder and more efficiently, thus contributing to the common good and strengthening the socialist state. The movement began in the coal industry but later spread to many other industries in the Soviet Union. Initially popular, it eventually encountered resistance as the increased productivity led to increased demands on workers.
The first known use of lily-livered was in 1605. From the medieval belief that the liver was the seat of courage, and the pale color of the lily flower. A person who had no blood in their liver would have no courage and would thus be a coward. Equivalent to lily + livered.
lily-livered apparently means cowardly and just comes from the color of lilys being pale and thus not courageous.
For a kid watching TV in the 1980s and '90s, seeing grown-ups get weird meant that adulthood might not have to be a drag.
—NYT
The dramatic removal of eyeglasses is a cinematic cliché. On Streep, it’s a revelation.
He told me that AI right now is like having a little assistant to boss around and make you some stuff so you can say, 'Most of this is garbage, but I can use this part, and you’ve given me something to work with or against.'
—Austin Kleon, AI as intern
For a kid watching TV in the 1980s and '90s, seeing grown-ups get weird meant that adulthood might not have to be a drag.
Reblogged from Tumblr
I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.
It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.
I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.” It can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart. In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.
— An excerpt from 90-year old William Shatner’s new book, “Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder.” The “Star Trek” actor reflects on his voyage into space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space shuttle on Oct. 13, 2021.
is a home for being in, for cradling outside the harsh edges of the world? is it for inviting, for sharing and laying open?
maybe one reason people like work is you get relationships but with guarantees of civility and of consistency.
Reblogged from Humans of Seoul
“Happiness? That’s going out for a quick break during my exam period and drinking beer with my classmate. This is the scenic haven we have found. This is exactly how the gods play.”
“행복이요? 시험기간에 동기랑 나와서 캔맥주 한잔 하는거요. 여기가 저희가 찾아낸 신선자리에요. 이게 바로 신선놀음이죠.”