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You can't build a moat with AI

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Differentiating AI applications is a hot topic, and it’s hard. Is everything just a RAG application?...
Differentiating AI applications is a hot topic, and it’s hard. Is everything just a RAG application? (No.) If a company gets good enough at RAG in one domain, does it neatly transfer to another domain? (Maybe! We’re not sure.) Are all AI applications just going to be built by OpenAI? (Probably not.)Managing technica...
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Herman Goldstine and the IAS Machine: Unveiling the Modern Computer

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Robert Oppenheimer and John von NeumannSometimes even men from the future need a little help.It’s quite...
Robert Oppenheimer and John von NeumannSometimes even men from the future need a little help.It’s quite hard to escape Oppenheimer at the moment. So it’s a good opportunity to go back to the 1940s and consider the contribution of someone who knew and worked with members of the Manhattan project.I recently came acros...
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Scaling will never get us to AGI

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The Internet Feels Dead, Doesn't It?

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Photo by mikoto.raw PhotographerRemember the early days of the internet? (I was born in 1992, so...
Photo by mikoto.raw PhotographerRemember the early days of the internet? (I was born in 1992, so I do.)It was a wild, untamed frontier, brimming with possibility. A digital punk rock revolution, where ideas flowed freely, relatively unencumbered by the suffocating grip of corporate control. It was beautiful, chaotic...
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Bring Me Anything but Jokes

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You already know that I have a lot of frustrations with Letterboxd, the annoyingly-named site for...
You already know that I have a lot of frustrations with Letterboxd, the annoyingly-named site for community movie reviews. Still, I like the interface, the archive is truly comprehensive, and most importantly I find the basic premise very attractive. I like movies, I like people’s opinions about movies, and I especi...
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Datadog Has a Security Footgun

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I’ve just finished dealing with an incident at Corporate Clash (a fan reimagination of the defunct...
I’ve just finished dealing with an incident at Corporate Clash (a fan reimagination of the defunct Disney MMO, Toontown Online) where a misconfigured Datadog RUM (Real User Monitoring for user sessions tracking) config led to customer data being sent to an unauthorized 3rd party for a week, whenever a user visited o...
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Picking Apart Baldur's Gate 3, Part 2 (Talkin' 'Bout D&D)

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I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve got some ideas to improve Dungeons & Dragons. One....
I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve got some ideas to improve Dungeons & Dragons. One. Whenever Shadowheart’s not in the game, all the other characters should be asking, “Where’s Shadowheart?”It's always a huge holiday for me when a turn-based, story-heavy RPG manages to break through and be popular with the Norm...
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The Open Secret about Confidential Computing

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Image by RenanConfidential Computing is an emerging field that aims to protect running workloads (“data in...
Image by RenanConfidential Computing is an emerging field that aims to protect running workloads (“data in use“) from their environment, thus reducing the Trusted Computing Base (TCB). For VMs, this means that the threat model is updated to not trust the hypervisor. The main push is from the public cloud vendors to ...
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The Fire This Time: Aaron Bushnell and the Rage That Burns Within All of US

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This article is dedicated to Aaron Bushnell, his family, and everybody struggling with the guilt and...
This article is dedicated to Aaron Bushnell, his family, and everybody struggling with the guilt and despair that helped stage Bushnell’s final act of protest. I’m still shaken.24 hours after watching the video, the young man’s sullen face as he paced stay with me. The words he uttered while he stepped toward the si...
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PFAS in non-stick pans: how fast does it migrate to food?

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This is a blog where I go in-depth into questions and topics, I am personally interested...
This is a blog where I go in-depth into questions and topics, I am personally interested in related to contamination and toxicity. The goal is to break down and interpret the actual data behind many of these compounds in the news for a non-chemist like me. Each blog is based on secondary research, primarily from pub...
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Is the frequency domain a real place?

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Why Do Python Lists Multiply Oddly? Exploring the CPython Source Code

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I was scrolling down on X/Twitter when I noticed the following Python related post with 2.5k...
I was scrolling down on X/Twitter when I noticed the following Python related post with 2.5k likes on it.At first glance it does appear to be a surprising output and I agree with the sentiment that it is counter intuitive. I am not going to debate whether this is the right behavior or not. Instead, I want to take th...
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The Secret Lives of Ernest Beaux

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Ernest Beaux is known for Chanel No5, the most famous perfume in the world. But the...
Ernest Beaux is known for Chanel No5, the most famous perfume in the world. But the man himself remains in the shadows, a name less well known than some of the other personalities in Chanel’s circle: Stravinsky, Diaghilev & Nijinsky of the Ballets Russes, and Winston Churchill, to name a few.Beaux was born in Moscow...
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WebAuthn and Passkeys

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Heya,WebAuthn, also known as passkeys, is a standard which makes authentication easier on the web. Common...
Heya,WebAuthn, also known as passkeys, is a standard which makes authentication easier on the web. Common other methods of authentication have their weaknesses:A username and password means that the user must remember the password. Humans, XKCD notwithstanding, are not great at creating secure passwords. When a pass...
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When Will the GenAI Bubble Burst?

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In early August, I wrote a piece called What if Generative AI turned out to be...
In early August, I wrote a piece called What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud, picked up in the Financial Times and elsewhere.I am not yet ready to claim victory. But as time goes on, I increasingly believe that call was correct. Some new facts have come to light, and the dud idea itself has become quite main...
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Male archetypes in fairy tales

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I’d planned, for this weekend, another post about the psychology and mythology of midlife, but something...
I’d planned, for this weekend, another post about the psychology and mythology of midlife, but something happened which hijacked my thought patterns. Just over a week ago I appeared at the Oxford Literary Festival; I gave a talk about Hagitude. Just one man sat, attentive, on the edge of the sea of women. After fort...
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The Color of Silence

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Sergi Marló | UnsplashSilence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.― Charlotte Brontë, VilletteOn August...
Sergi Marló | UnsplashSilence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.― Charlotte Brontë, VilletteOn August 29, 1952, the pianist David Tudor walked onstage at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, NY, to premiere a new composition by the American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992). Tudor s...
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How can Robinhood afford 3% cash back on its new credit card?

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Hi Fintech Futurists — Today’s agenda below.FINTECH: Robinhood Unveils New Credit Card OfferingLONG TAKE: Launching our...
Hi Fintech Futurists — Today’s agenda below.FINTECH: Robinhood Unveils New Credit Card OfferingLONG TAKE: Launching our AI indexes, and reflecting on the Web3 AI mega-merger (link here)CURATED UPDATES: Paytech, Neobanks, Lending, Digital InvestingTo support this writing and access our full archive of newsletters, an...
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Banning open weight models would be a disaster

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In response to an Executive Order from President Biden, The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) has...
In response to an Executive Order from President Biden, The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) has asked the public for comments on “Open-Weight AI Models”—models like LLaMa, Stable Diffusion, and Mixtral—which are freely distributed to the public. They are considering blocking access these models in order to prevent...
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Good information still pollutes the epistemic ecosystem

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What do The Last Psychiatrist, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and the Breaking Bad showrunners have in common? We’ll...
What do The Last Psychiatrist, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and the Breaking Bad showrunners have in common? We’ll get to this, but first we have to talk about...I’m largely positive on Cal Newport's work. With the release of his latest book "Slow Productivity," I went back summarized his underlying message in my previous p...
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There were no ancient computers and it's fine

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Last August, in an article about the history of the calculator, I opened with the following...
Last August, in an article about the history of the calculator, I opened with the following quip:"I find it difficult to talk about the history of the computer. The actual record is dreadfully short: almost nothing of consequence happened before the year 1935. We keep looking for a better story, but we inevitably en...
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Not so fast, Mr. Fourier

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Anarchy in the US (The Revolution That Almost Happened)

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This is the first of a multi-part series. 1894: the Pullman strike! Ken Burns has never...
This is the first of a multi-part series. 1894: the Pullman strike! Ken Burns has never done one of his trademark documentaries on it, and there are no iconic photographs like those of Lincoln, Grant, Frederick Douglass, or Robert E. Lee like we have for the Civil War. PBS’s The American Experience series did do a d...
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Identity, authentication, and authorisation from the ground up

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This piece was originally posted on the koodos labs engineering blog — follow there for updates...
This piece was originally posted on the koodos labs engineering blog — follow there for updates on what we’re working on! 😆In an earlier post we learnt the basic concepts of identity, authentication, and authorisation — important terms that are easily confused by hackers and technologists.In this post we will dive d...
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~hackernews | Bookmarks (257)

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