Benjamín Labatut draws a line from the Vedas to George Boole and Claude Shannon onward to Geoffrey Hinton and Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad.
In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them.
Once a privately owned, centralized platform closes its public APIs, the platform will invariably lose any usablity except for people who publicly or privately admire Hitler.
A new programming language where you pray to Greek gods.
An invocation has three parts: the god’s name and adoration (praising of that god), supplication to show the humbleness of the asker, followed by a request to add one or several of what we ordinarily call “commands” to the program.
Here’s the source code for “99 bottles of beer” in Olympus and here it is transpiled into JavaScript.
Technologies are always coming out of networks that require other related ideas to have the next one. The fact that we have simultaneous independent invention as a norm works against the idea of the heroic inventor, that we’re dependent on them for inventions. These things will come when all the other pieces are ready.
A filter (for Mac and PC) to block violence, misogyny, superstition and other mainstays of religious content.
Loving Godzilla 17 syllables at a time.
"The repetition this week of the weary old canard that atheism is 'a faith proposition' shows that our archbishops need a lesson in semantics."