Month: May 2025

Star Trek: The Next Generation contains evidence that the actor Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe!

— ironicsans.ghost.io/proof-that-patrick-stewart-exists-in-the-star-trek-universe/

The point is, you can read all the Wikipedia summaries you want, but they won’t give you a holistic understanding of an idea. That only happens once you have a layered, three-dimensional perspective, which writing helps you achieve. 

Charlie Munger calls this the difference between “real knowledge” and “chauffeur knowledge.” He tells an apocryphal story about Max Planck, who went around the world giving the same knowledge about quantum mechanics after he won the Nobel Prize. After hearing the speech multiple times, the chauffeur asked Planck if he could give the next lecture. Planck said, “Sure.” At first, the lecture went well. But afterwards, a physics professor in the audience asked a follow-up question that stumped the chauffeur. Only Max Planck, who had the background knowledge to support the ideas in the talk, could answer it.

— Read on perell.com/essay/how-philosophers-think/

It’s both sad and not at all surprising. After letting it languish for years, Mozilla has now put Pocket out to pasture. And it will be formally slaughtered in October. Along with all your saved items. All those glorious saved items that you never got to but were totally just about to.

— Read on spyglass.org/rip-pocket/

In a safety test, the AI company asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant to a fictional company, but then gave it access to (also fictional) emails saying that it would be replaced, and also that the engineer behind the decision was cheating on his wife. Anthropic said the model “[threatened] to reveal the affair” if the replacement went ahead.

— Read on www.semafor.com/article/05/23/2025/anthropics-ai-resorts-to-blackmail-in-simulations

Klarna claimed that AI chatbots were handling two-thirds of customer service conversations within their first month of deployment and went on to claim that AI was doing the work of 700 customer service agents. The problem is that it’s really doing the work of 700 really bad agents, and that quality took a toll.  “As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality,” Siemiatkowski said. “Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us.”
— Read on gizmodo.com/klarna-hiring-back-human-help-after-going-all-in-on-ai-2000600767

Slop world is here already, you just haven’t noticed yet.

In the face of this, I am going to try to write more. A lot more. I think you should too.

— Read on miloandthecalf.substack.com/p/three-reasons-to-write-more-in-an

“Data is the modern lighthouse, helping us plan our lives: it shows where we are so we can plan where we’re going,” Cushman said.

— Read on www.yahoo.com/news/archivists-scrambling-save-us-public-191322244.html