the observatory
437 signals · 45 fresh — the day's best catch, ranked by resonance.
Author’s Note: This article is not about ‘endless wars’ as a critique of U.S. military interventions — that debate belongs elsewhere. It examines a distinct and increasingly visible pattern: how U.S. adversaries wage continuous, long-term conflict against the United States…
Today's links How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech: Their common enemies are Trump and his tech giants. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Sex work synonyms; Carthedral; French pirates; Suffragette surveillance; Hidden library…
The most popular take on the standard free will debate is that you are the algorithm. Your preferences and reasoning that determine your actions IS free will. But this resolution leaves me not entirely satisfied because it means free will is binary - you either have it (you are…
A spotted lanternfly stands in front of the skyline of New York City in August 2023, in Weehawken, New Jersey. | Gary Hershorn/Getty Images Last summer, I was standing on a block near my house when I saw a very distinctive bug skittering up a tree trunk. It had a polka-dotty…
If you read anything about health or longevity, you’ll soon find yourself in a world of hazard ratios. Some study might say that eating more fiber might change your risk of dying by a factor of HR = 0.90. Another might say that occasional smoking might change it by HR = 1.30.…
Introduction: To help mobile developers run LLMs on devices, we use quantization to compress models. This blog builds on a previous quantization blog and gives a practical overview of various quantization techniques. We focus on the key challenges specific to LLMs and the…
🏆 Highlights Add LazyFrame.gather (#27501) Nested common subplan elimination (#27340) Stabilize streaming engine (#27497) Speed up parquet metadata decode with hand-written Thrift (#27427) Add streaming support for grouped AsOf join (#27293) 🚀 Performance improvements…
⚠️ Important note on release candidates This is a Release Candidate of OctoPrint. It is not a stable release: severe bugs can occur, and they can be bad enough that they make a manual downgrade to an earlier version necessary - maybe even from the command line. You should be…
In 1987, Richard Greenhill, a British photographer who was fascinated by (but had no actual training in) robotics, decided he wanted to build a life-size humanoid that could do useful things, like carrying luggage. He was working at a startup called Intergalactic Robots, but he…
History Late 19th c. through Schrödinger and Dirac Introductory books/courses? Comic books Bub, Totally Random: Why Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics (A Serious Comic on Entanglement) McEvoy, Introducing Quantum Theory: A Graphic Guide to Science's Most Puzzling Discovery…
“Where are the docs?” It’s a question nobody on a product team enjoys answering. The honest reply is usually some variant of “behind.” A writer is staring at a closed pull request, trying to reverse-engineer what changed. The pull request’s author has already moved on. By the…
... government of the people, by the people, for the people ... The cost of AI is dropping rapidly. GPT-4-class capabilities cost roughly $30 per million tokens in early 2023; today the same runs under $1, and some providers are pushing costs below $0.10. Across benchmarks,…
Meg didn’t want to swing, but it didn’t matter. Her friend’s kid wanted her to swing. What was ostensibly a hangout for Meg and her friend was quickly overtaken, as it usually is, by the kids’ desire to be entertained. On the third hour of playing with her friend’s children at a…
Generative AI should be managed like a human source: useful, fast, sometimes brilliant, sometimes wrong, and never a substitute for disciplined questioning and human judgment. The three of us spent our careers in an environment where bad information costs lives. We learned early…
This is an essay that recently appeared in Asterisk. Consider the rest of the risk issue for all your risk needs. Lots of people die after overdosing on acetaminophen (paracetamol, Tylenol, Panadol). In the U.S., it’s estimated to cause 56,000 emergency department visits, 2,600…
This release of MicroPython sees machine.PWM support finally added to the stm32 port, as well as the alif port. This rounds out PWM support to all Tier 1 and Tier 2 microcontroller-based ports, making it easy to create and control PWM outputs in a consistent way. A new…
This is a bug fix release for various issues discovered after we released v1.5.1 What's Changed Backport various race condition fixes to v1.4 by @Mytherin in #20804 bump ref to azure for v1.4.4 (rebuild) by @benfleis in #20888 Internal #7584: AsOf Simple Joins by @hawkfish in…
BETA RELEASE! Marlin 2.1.3 is a major update focusing on stability, performance, and user interface. Pre-Built Firmware We now publish pre-built binaries for many common 3D printers and other machines, according to the tuned configuration examples donated by users like you!…
AI-powered job application framework built on Claude Code. Fork it, fill in your profile, and let Claude evaluate jobs, tailor CVs, write cover letters, and prepare you for interviews. AI Job Search An AI-powered job application framework built on Claude Code. Fork it, fill in…
This work was largely done during Neel Nanda's MATS 10.0 Exploration Phase. J Rosser and Dohun Lee are co-first authors for this post with equal contribution. Josh Engels and Neel Nanda supervised the project, and provided guidance and feedback throughout. Tweet Thread TLDR…
The bottom line: Try to see a connection with your neighbors as an investment in your health and happiness, not a chore. | Laura Simonati for Vox As a 30-something who works remotely, I’ve gone days without speaking to another human. And after living in the same apartment…
“We [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] often times in the national security decision-making process or White House meetings -- outside of the Pentagon process -- will go back and forth between military issues and political issues. And I think it's incumbent upon us to kind of stay in,…
I write every word I post on this blog myself. I can’t prove this, of course, but there’s some evidence: This blog existed before AI could write blog posts. If you put any of my posts into an AI-detector they will (I assume) come back squeaky clean. And now let me add this: I,…
Unreal Nanite is a virtualized geometry system for creating and rendering highly detailed 3D content . Nanite uses a highly compressed mesh format and a cluster-based streaming architecture . It displays only the pixel-scale detail visible to the camera, eliminating traditional…
This release of DuckDB is named "Variegata" after the paradise shelduck Tadorna Variegata, also known as the paradise duck, a species of Shelduck (a group of goose-like ducks), endemic to New Zealand. Please also refer to the announcement blog post:…
A comprehensive dataset of 433 fitness exercises. Each entry includes name, category, target muscle group, equipment, instructions, thumbnail image, and animation video. 💪 Exercises Dataset A developer setup wizard + structured, multilingual exercise dataset — scaffold your own…
Simple mathematical models are almost always too simple to model complex phenomena in the real world, and the one I want to discuss in this post is not an exception. However, I believe it is a good first order approximation. Let me begin with the model first and then talk about…
When Gaby Lieberman moved in with her boyfriend Elvin Pavlenko, she didn’t think she’d be so closely scrutinized by their neighbors. But from the start, she was fighting an uphill battle: Pavlenko spent his entire life on the same block in Teaneck, New Jersey; when he moved out…
Your phone buzzes with a text from your bank: “Did you authorize a $2,400 transfer? Reply NO to stop it.” You reply, and seconds later a calm “fraud agent” calls, knows your name and the last four digits of your card, and walks you through “securing” your money by moving it into…
For a while there, many people thought vitamin D was magical—that it could improve bones, the heart, infections, cancer, heart disease, longevity, even mental health. But among people I respect, opinion is now overwhelmingly that taking vitamin D does nothing unless you’re…
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