Both China and Taiwan have told Elon Musk to stay in his lane when he started coming out with peace plans for them. Musk said the conflict between Taiwan and China could be resolved by making the island a “special administrative zone” similar to Hong Kong. The Taiwanese officials lashed…

With green tech now cheaper than fossil fuels, the transformation to renewables is well on track to being done by 2040. Yet I still debate with folks everyday who are insistent that it’s impossible to live sustainably on earth because ‘we’re destroying the planet everyday and using up everything’. I…

I have just been told that a friend of mine has died from cancer. It was eleven days from diagnosis to death. She was a warm and giving person, and she will be missed. The first horror I remember as a child was being told that everyone would die. I…

This existential threat could even come as early as, say, 2026. Or might even be a good thing, but whatever the Singularity exactly is, although it’s uncertain in nature, it’s becoming clearer in timing and much closer than most predicted. AI is nevertheless hard to predict, but many agree with…

Would you put up with this level of service, for a good cause? — Suddenly a table of 6 to my right erupted simultaneously … “We did it” … “We did it…”! And with that, every waitperson stopped, and they all started clapping. The entire order was perfectly executed. And as this seldom happened, there was cause to celebrate. Next to them, I sat…

It’s not that different from what we see now — Reading a specific book again at different stages of life is such a pleasure. In a previous article, I went into why this is: Once More, With Feeling: The Joy of Reading a Book for the Third Time Valuing a book’s impacts at different points in your lifemedium.com I am about half way through The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, a 1939 novel about the trials and tribulations of the Joad Family as…

AI is certainly the buzzword of the tech community — it’s everywhere. And for all the growing concerns of evil, there is good to be had by it as well Deepfaking Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) first came into my line of vision last year with OpenAI’s Dalle-E 2 which creates stunning, creative, realistic images from typed prompts. As much as it was mind-blowing, it failed to capture the imagination of those outside the tech space. …

It’s just making things even worse. — I hate to have to keep telling all you “green warriors” out there this bad recurring news but here’s another peer-reviewed bit of research telling you you’re wasting your time. Not only your time but everyone’s water too. …

Maybe more importantly, what don’t we spend it on? — I don’t know if you realize just how much richer Americans are than other rich people around the world. We talk a lot about the ways in which the American economy is broken — and it is broken in a bunch of ways. People on both sides of the political…

Why is good economic news a surprise? Why is any economic news a ‘surprise’? No economist saw it coming. The trends in our economy can be better forecast using some random factor like baseball:

Get the most out of the powerful AI tool — Most people using ChatGPT don’t know how to get the full value out of the tool. As it’s a powerful system that can help with everything from education to mental health, business and coding, knowing how to get what you want from the chatbot can be a tremendous asset in…

There were a lot of sidebars — It was a long day, so I am just going to post the drawings tonight. I hope you can get an idea from my words and sketches, which are not in any particular order. The whole day was mostly cross examination of Ms. Carroll from Trump’s lawyer Tacopina. She was…

Breaking up the day — We had a doctor visit today to check up on my wife’s broken wrist. She complained that the cast was too tight, so the doc decided to change it and add more padding. That meant another visit to the technologist — the cast person — who sawed the old one…

Joe Biden’s persona is at the whim of fate; his story is captured in the morphing of an insult (“Go Brandon”) into laser-eyed alter ego of sheer power (“Dark Brandon”). The popularity of that meme among Biden supporters was so swift and powerful that it has become a super-charged affirmation…

Why you may never need to charge your wearables again — For hundreds of years, self-winding watches have offered the wearer a symbiotic relationship not attained with regular automatic or manual watches. Automatic watches rely on a battery and manual watches rely on the wearer to regularly wind them by hand. But there is an aspect of the organic and the…

Note: This story is an update from one that generated 50,000 readers. It now has a sequel revealing how an open gate destroyed the world’s longest-lasting empire. Many who argue that America is in decline like to point to a perceived parallel with the decline of Rome, where citizens went…

The new approach improves the effectiveness of LLMs in complex tasks. — I recently started an AI-focused educational newsletter, that already has over 150,000 subscribers. TheSequence is a no-BS (meaning no hype, no news etc) ML-oriented newsletter that takes 5 minutes to read. The goal is to keep you up to date with machine learning projects, research papers and concepts. Please give…

Pour one out for the humble zumzy-zan. — A 19th century version of the enduring children’s alphabet rhyme “A Apple Pie” (which dates back as far as 1671) has a surprising little interloper right at the end. The poem — a lurid, sensational tale of greed, jealousy, and (if you’re an apple pie) gore — goes like this: …

The goodbye you never get to say — Five years ago this week it was unseasonably warm. I was at a friend’s house, basking in the bright sunshine, breaking in her new patio furniture. We were enjoying fruity drinks and allowing the heat to relax our stiff winter muscles. We had that peaceful elation you only experience in…

The US supreme court on Monday declined to hear bids by major oil companies to move a growing wave of climate lawsuits from state courts to federal courts. The appeals to move the venue of the lawsuits were made by Exxon Mobil Corp, Suncor Energy Inc and Chevron Corp. The…