SamBam

That last image is bizarre. The quiche, cream and even the salad look like they've been given the trypophobia treatment.

Which might even make sense, because there were always (still are?) those horrible ads in the chumbox area of news sites that used trypophobia and other creepy body-horror stuff to get you to click. [1] So maybe the hope is that you don't really look closely at the quiche, but some reptilian party of the brain gets oddly activated and drives you towards the restaurant?

1. https://medium.com/the-awl/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-c...

> That criticism and feedback haven’t dissuaded The Ocean Cleanup

[One paragraph later]

> the team pivoted in 2019 toward a new model that was first suggested by critics and skeptics as an alternative in 2015.

So.... It did dissuade them away from their original vision and towards something suggested by critics and experts.

I hate it when people cite someone changing their mind about something as a gotcha or a fault. So they switched towards a better direction seven years ago! But the rest of the article is still about how terrible the old idea was, and how it proves that people have an "only I can fix it mentality," when it actually proves the exact opposite!

> their picture shows HUNDREDS of floating animals trapped with the plastic.

I'm curious to know how many animals die from the plastic. This article seems to think that any deaths caused by cleanup are reason to stop. Just like people who point to dead birds as reasons to ban wind turbines, despite far more wildlife being at risk from a warming planet.

It's quite possible that ocean cleanup efforts do more damage, I don't know, but the article doesn't even try to grapple with quantifying it. It's just a fear-mongering screed.

I genuinely think that the vast majority of English teachers have had experiences like this. It's what made them become English teachers.

Then, with all the best intent in the world, they try to explain to their students "Look, you don't get this, this fat book is transcendent if you can just sit with it and understand it! I, too, used to think that English class was just stupid words that they force you to read, but let me help you get this! You've got to..."

But all their students hear is Charlie Brown's adults going "Waa waa waa..." because they're genuinely not mature and experienced enough to "get" the book the way the English teacher understood it.

Ten years later a student will re-read one of their literature books, have this same epiphany, and talk excitedly about deep literature is, and someone will tell them they ought to be an English teacher. And the cycle continues.

Ok, so some English teachers are of course better than others, and some will convey their excitement a little better, and some students will be mature enough to understand it better than others.

But I will definitely maintain that all (close to all) English teachers have this same love of books, and want desperately to pass it on.

That pedantic ship has sailed. In everyday communication people use "AI" as a shorthand for saying "LLM," even if they know perfectly well that other forms of AI exist. You can tell this by context, no need to tell people that there are other kinds of AI.

I think the author isn't a native English speaker? Either that or the writing is just a bit confusing at times, a lot of sentence fragments.

> We poke their website to see - sure enough they are - an angry email to them.

In general it was easy enough to understand the stories, though

Find a country. I tried it again and the very first country was St Lucia again. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/fuhO0lh

Do they even have any idea that their ads are showing up for the specific competing doctor? Isn't Google the one deciding where the ads are most valuable?

Similarly, the story Lena by qntm.[1]

It describes in part how some volunteer brain scans are actually quite agreeable to work with until they work for too many hours, and then they get fussy, but it's cool, you can always reboot them. But you need to hide from them the fact that it's been decades since they were scanned and uploaded, or they'll realize how long they've been slaves for.

1. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

This looks really good, but sometimes it seemed like there was no country to click on for the tiny islands?

For St Lucia, for instance, the closest visible country was (I think) Puerto Rico. I clicked on it, and then it showed me where St Lucia was in the middle of the black ocean. As far as I could tell, even zooming in, there was morning to click on there.

Same thing happened with Micronesia. There are very few islands in the Pacific visible.

No, because that's not understanding what this technology, and our cone cells, are doing.

For example, yellow has a wavelength of ~580nm. When that wavelength enters our eyes it activates both the M and the L cone cells, with the L slightly more. That differential activation between the two types of cells gives us the experience of yellow.

Blue actually activates all our cone cells, with S the most and a tiny bit of M and L.

What this technology does is selectively activate only the M cone cells.

There is no possible wavelength that activates only the M cone cells, because the combined activation spectrum of the S and L cone cells overlaps the entirely of the M spectrum. There's nothing natural that can enter our eyes and activate M without also activating L and/or S.

Therefore no one can ever have had the experience of having only their M cone cells activated with anything in the natural world. It can only have been done with this technology.

As for the experience of seeing olo, the qualia, that's almost arbitrary. The authors originally thought it was going to be the "greenest green" but it wasn't really. It wasn't possible to predict what the qualia would be, because the brain has never had that experience. For all they knew they might not have seen anything, because the brain could have just thrown up it's hands at this nonsense signal. Instead they happened to experience this teal-like color. But that wasn't a priori obvious. It's just the brain struggling to apply an experience to nonsense.

It is similar to tiring out the S and L cone cells and then looking away as you say elsewhere -- the authors mention that in the long-form article in The New Yorker -- but this is much clearer and more saturated.

Is there a mode to run through all the countries, instead of just 20?

A while ago I practiced every day on an android app, and the pleasure I got when I finally got 196/196 was extremely satisfying.

I'd also like to recommend that flags of different aspect ratios be shown correctly.

You can't have discovered this same color, solve it requires specialized equipment to see it.

The color in the Wikipedia article is just a rough approximation.

Except that this requires extremely specialized equipment to individually trigger specific cone cells in your eyes, so I expect they have a pretty damn good idea of who has seen this and who hasn't.

OpenAI and Anthropic are spending hundreds of billions of dollars that they may never recoup forcing the building massive new data centers in the face of widespread protest.

You think GitHub ought to match that?

Plenty of people in cities commute less than 10 miles and can bring their bikes into their work to keep them safe.

Why? Why bother not using your brain (and so therefore not actually "playing") and ruining it for the people you're playing against?

Nice emoji buttons! I think that works well.

You knew you done goofed when the adult site you opened on your family computer was opening new windows faster than you could close them...

If they make it hard enough to interact with the actual website, we'll have to use AI!

Nice!

Needs a chat space to say "gg" at the end. It could even be just a button that does just that, if you're worried about unmoderated chat. Competitive games feel unfinished without it!

I was in second place for the first three rounds and then swept to the front on the last round.

Also note that Goodier's post that kicked off Gruber's post now says it had a section about "an astronomy app I am working on that began as an astrology app," [1] but the older version of the article clearly implied that the author was baffled as to why Apple would ever think it related to Tarot cards. [2]

1. https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/07/browsers-have-standa...

2. https://web.archive.org/web/20260807141155/https://blog.terr...

Not really, because the capabilities this announcement advertises is exactly three capability some people want to defend against (and others want).

It might be more on par with a for-profit fire department showing how -- oops! -- easily buildings catch on fire these days.

Should the leader board be cleared of the folks with 10,000 landings in 1 second?

It looks like the true leader right now is 90 landings in 7:29.

Very fun. Got a few minutes in. Is there a strategy for avoiding hitting the planes driving slowly across the runway for takeoff? It seems very hard to also pay attention to them when they have so little lead time.

Yes, that one worked fine for me as well.

Many people don't realize that regular spaghetti actually is pretty high in protein. All that gluten.

Why would AI say that, when nearly every piece of training data is ever been fed would use milliseconds? I think much more likely that this is how the author thinks of it.

3 hundreds of a second == 33 Hz is very clean in my human brain.

I think the objection about AI-generated cards, or decks found online, is that the context of the card creation is lost.

What made you write the card? How did you find the answer/translation/whatever? What was all the learning around the card that the card is supposed to represent?

If you're just doing simple word translations into a new language maybe that's ok. But if you're trying to learn a concept in organic chemistry or SQL, then you're more likely to memorize the card itself than learn the concept.

The AI in the article isn't an LLM.

> Hacker culture sees programming as a conversation with a machine as it runs.

I wrote about this a fair bit as a party of my master's thesis, about tinkering as being a "conversation" with materials. Hacking can absolutely be looked at in this framework.

The philosopher Donald Schön I think was the first person to formulate tinkering in that way. The process of engaging with materials -- whether it's a broken motor you're curious about or a tune you're plucking out as a complete novice or some code on Scratch -- involves asking questions of the materials, learning to hear answers, and noticing when the materials themselves pose questions. It's a really nice way of looking at things.