Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly, that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and
consciousness Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare By Dan Falk April 19, 2024 A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic
artificial intelligence How Do Machines ‘Grok’ Data? April 12, 2024 By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems. Read Later Irene Pérez
After dismissing Mr. Williams, who was one of its senior news analysts, NPR argued that he had violated the organization’s belief in impartiality, a core tenet of modern American journalism. By renewi
With over one billion posts and 16+ billion comments, Reddit has 76 million daily active users, who spend an average of 16 minutes on the site per day. On average, about 1 million posts are added to R
Animation by Slate NPR, the great bastion of old-school audio journalism, is a mess. But as someone who loves NPR, built my career there, and once aspired to stay forever, I say with sadness that it h
If you scroll down to the end of almost any article on Newsweek.com right now — past the headline, the article copy, several programmatic ads, and the author bio — you’ll find a short note. “To read h
We are likely about 5 weeks away from Canon officially announcing the EOS R5 Mark II, along with a development type announcement for the EOS R1. Canon is going to be using Euro 2024 and the Paris Olym
The latest monthly update of the TIOBE index asks, “Is PHP losing its mojo?” For the month of April, TIOBE’s programming language index ranked PHP 17th, “its lowest position ever.” It’s not just TIOBE
As a geek born in the early 1990s, who has been playing with computers from a young age, I think fondly of what tech looked like in the late 1990s and early 2000s. So, naturally, when I got my hands o
When I started writing this newsletter, I did it because I had to write. If I don’t write, I feel bad - I feel like I haven’t created anything (as my job is really about convincing other people to mak
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reas
Take your pick of any flagship phone — iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel, hell, even OnePlus or Xiaomi — and it will have a great camera. Not just one great camera, but a system of lenses (on the b
Credits Maria Farrell is a writer and keynote speaker on technology and the future. She has worked on technology policy at the International Chamber of Commerce, the Internet Corporation for Assigned
FOSDEM 2024 NetBSD 10 marks a new level of maturity for this venerable open source Unix system, which somehow manages to be both modern and retro at the same time. By our reckoning, including the mino
This essay is adapted from a talk given at California’s Novato Public Library earlier this year. There are ecological reasons to question how books are made out of trees but metaphysical reasons to re
Alex Garland has been working on “Devs” for more than two years, and there are still months of work ahead before the show’s spring 2020 release. Knowing the commitment required for his mysterious FX l
On March 29, 2024, a single message on the Openwall OSS-security mailing list marked an important discovery for the information security, open source and Linux communities: the discovery of a maliciou
I have been thinking about programming language scalability. I am not talking about performance here, but organizational scalability. Let us start with a bit of background. One of the reasons I origin
Some readers might have heard of CHERI. Of those who’ve heard of it, most have probably got the rough idea that it’s a “more secure” CPU — but, after that, I find that most people start to get rather
Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. In the world of popular psychology, the work of one giant figure is hard to avoid: Carl Jung, the
I’m a surgeon. I’d like to think that I’m resilient and well adjusted, having gone through medical school and rigorous surgical training. I’ve been a doctor for 13 years and much of that period has be
Axion is but the latest in a long line of custom Google silicon. Since 2015 we’ve released five generations of Tensor Processing Units (TPU); in 2018 we released our first Video Coding Unit (VCU), ach
Notion cofounder Ivan Zhao captivated Silicon Valley investors and everyday consumers alike with a sleek productivity app that went so viral its servers crashed. Now, the profitable startup’s CEO sees
Philosophy and science haven’t always gone hand-in-hand. Here’s why that should change. Daniel Dennett, an Emeritus Professor from Tufts University and prolific author, provides an overview of his work at the intersection of philosophy and science. Many of today’s philosophers are too isolated in…
A man passes away without a word in the mountains of North Carolina, and his grandson sets out to write about the importance of a seemingly unimportant life. Essay by Jeremy B. Jones June 6, 2023 My g
artificial intelligence How Do Machines ‘Grok’ Data? April 12, 2024 By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems. Read Later Irene Pérez
I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was. And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff and put it on
I have been coding since I was eight or nine years old. I started with drag-and-drop programming, trying to figure out how to make a game in a tool called Microsoft TouchDevelop. I recall making one o
November 23, 2021 systemd by example Part 1: Minimization Series overview This article is part of the series systemd by example. The following articles are available. Part 1: Minimization (this articl
Our last newsletter on our shifting perspective on blockchains forced us to ask the question: what caused us to see merit in that technology in the first place? And one answer was that we thought the
My friend sent me a tunnel link where he had to manually set it up with socat and his nginx ingress controller in his k8s cluster. He made an offhand comment about needing a better way to setup tunnel
Greased by lobbying and campaign cash, tax breaks for retirement savings are one thing Congress agrees on. But they also blow out the deficit and add to income inequality. Illustrations by Audrey Malo
They might be an awesome sight to see from a safe distance on safari as they lumber around with their big, lopping ears and long trunks, but for those who live side by side with elephants, these mamma
Keywords: Financial crisis, 2008, corruption, economic disparity, accountability Introduction "The Men Who Stole The World," directed by Benoit Bringer and released in 2018, is a compelling documentar
On an elegant residential block in Brooklyn Heights stands what once may have been the most famous church in America. Plymouth Church, on Orange Street, was founded in 1847 with just twenty-one member
At the bottom right of my computer screen, just out of my direct line of vision, lurks an animated scold: a cartoon giraffe named Rafi. He is the playful icon of an app called Posture Pal, which works
For the past five years or so, I’ve read books on my phone. The practice started innocently enough. I write book reviews from time to time, and so publishers sometimes send me upcoming titles that fal
2024-03-29 software Python The catch in the Rye. One of my least popular takes as a Professional Python Developer™ seems to be that I don’t actually consider the Python ecosystem and its tooling to be
04 June 2022 · 13753 views · Updated 17 April 2024 This is a comprehensive guide designed for current and aspiring CTOs. What I aimed with this guide is to bridge the gap in traditional engineering ed