A scientific breakthrough, years of investment and some highly trained dogs have finally made it possible to consistently harvest truffles in the U.S. We visit North Carolina’s Burwell Farms for a look inside their operations.

Volvo AD

NYT - The fake news organizations, experts say, represent a technological leap in the Kremlin’s efforts to spread false and misleading narratives.

Ted Gioia - Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it's not pretty)

A feature documentary on the life and work of civic guru Robert Putnam.

Tutorial on how to display real-time CO2 measurements from an Aranet4 monitor on my website using a Raspberry Pi.

Tim Bray - I think I’m probably going to lose quite a lot of money in the next year or two. It’s partly AI’s fault, but not mostly.

Andrej Karpathy - The Tokenizer is a necessary and pervasive component of Large Language Models (LLMs), where it translates between strings and tokens (text chunks).

Casey Niestat

open platform for building developer portals

list influenced by https://sive.rs/pg

Becoming expert in repair, finding creativity in the historical and material weight of existing conditions: for architects in the Anthropocene, this is a growth opportunity. Or better, a de-growth opportunity.

Headless custom element library

Lucian Grainge, the chairman of UMG, has helped record labels rake in billions of dollars from streaming. Can he do the same with generative artificial intelligence? John Seabrook reports.

There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.” Rachel Syme reports.

2023 Rivian R1T Truck Camper in Asheville

who host mastadon instances

A complete GPT2 implementation as a single SQL query in PostgreSQL.

The opening of my talk Of Time And The Web deals with our collective negativity bias. The general consensus is that the world has become worse.

AI coding assistants are here to stay—but just how big a difference they make is still unclear.

Little Feat - Rock and Roll Doctor (Live In Holland 1976)

Mozilla’s innovation group and Justine Tunney just released llamafile, and I think it’s now the single best way to get started running Large Language Models,

As an engineer, I write documentation all the time to answer these questions and build up a knowledge base other team members can refer to. I think this should apply to housing.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.

Draw a picture (fast) with tldraw with https://www.fal.ai

Inventor of Robot Wars / Industrial Light and Magic - chief model maker/animatronic designer

simple easy to use whiteboard

The New Yorker - James Somers, a professional coder, writes about the astonishing scripting skills of A.I. chatbots like GPT-4 and considers the future of a once exalted craft. ~ "What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles."

pseudoprose is pseudocode[^1] for writers.

Michael B. Paulson - The Primeagen - a good take on Remix vs Next.js

xkcd

Acclaimed illustrator Christoph Niemann shares the 10 rules that guide his drawing practice as part of our Manifesto series.

Snarkmarket

Directed by Robert Gordon and filmed and edited by John Olivio, this video was produced in the lo-fi aughts of 2006 for Matador Records to support Cat Power's acclaimed album "The Greatest". The video also features 20th century art world legend William Eggleston.

Most people look for solutions. But few seek out problems.

This essay reviews some theories of what it is for something to be funny.

So, I suppose the moral of the story is: find yourself work you can give a shit about. And work with people who give a shit. It’ll make shit a lot more pleasant – I guarantee it.

Reponse to Marc Andreessen's “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.

European Space Agency report on the ozone layer.

The supernatural creatures said to roam these forests are intimately tied to the landscape, which is older than most of life on Earth.

A world of AI-assisted writing and reviewing might transform the nature of the scientific paper.

Michael Halbert is a scratchboard illustrator that specializes in scratchboard illustration.

lead author of the "bibles" of system administration: UNIX System Administration Handbook

Mickey Angelov - Look Aside Films

That is the eeriest part of these videos — the parents are barely interacting with their kids. Instead they are relating to a mirror image of their children that they are spreading online. And they are reveling in their power over that image.

Harvard Business Publishing Education

American Journal of Physics - We present an overview of the thermal history of the Universe and the sequence of objects (e.g., protons, planets, and galaxies) that condensed out of the background as the Universe expanded and cooled.

Architect - Holland Brady

Speech by Holland Brady 2007

They make more money from mileage programs than from flying planes

https://a16z.com

why monolithic code bases are good

the work of the seventeenth-century French military engineer Allain Manesson Mallet

IBM's World of Numbers publication about the history of numbers, computation, and computers to 1958.

distinction between amateurishness at craft, and amateurishness at business.

browser-based search engine for Wikipedia, where you can search more abstractly

The OpenTF Foundation. Supporting an impartial, open, and community-driven fork of MPL-licensed Terraform.

Wonderful trompe l'oeil tumbling block design quilt incorporating signatures from such luminaries as Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rembrandt Peale, and Abraham Lincoln ( one of eight American presidents represented ).

Digging into the philosophical roots of the battle between Essentialists and Pragmatists

The New Yorker | Dhruv Khullar writes about the effect that heat can have on human bodies, and how the rise in global temperatures can cause severe illnesses and injuries.

Matt Kirkland

Blue Ridge Mountain Landscape Paintings by Rebecca King Hawkinson in the tradition of Classical Realism.

Garden & Gun - For almost a century, one dance has captured the spirit of the coast and beyond. Follow along with three generations of the Free family as they pivot, belly roll, and boogie walk to keep the tradition alive

– a free and open database and web application for gardening knowledge

GDPR-Compliant Bot Protection

Wikifunctions, the newest Wikimedia project, is a new space to collaboratively create and maintain a library of functions.

on Github CoPilot

In a case study, scientists detected the costly infection in cabernet sauvignon grapevines before they showed symptoms visible to the human eye - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The model beyond ChatGPT passed the first three sommelier theory exams. What does that mean for the wine business and our professional certifications?

The history and context of Aleksandr Afanasev’s obscene Russian folktales.

Artist - Designer

Lincoln Beach once provided the only waterfront access for Black residents of New Orleans. Despite decades of city neglect, it remains a joyful, if contested, haven for ritual and play.

The New Yorker - Elon: “X needs to have an AI feel with blockchain vibes. And it should always be tracking you.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) shows videos of Rogers Stone before, during and after January 6th including documentary footage of him stating: "I said, f*ck the voting, let's get right to the violence."

LLM that'll fit on a small device with low memory

On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

3/23

Looking back, and forward

Open source alternative to Notion, Miro, and Monday.

the Forecasting Research Institute has released the results of the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament

The VACUUM process in PostgreSQL is a historical artifact that traces its roots back to the Berkeley Postgres project, which implemented a concept known as infinite time-travel. The concept, while innovative at the time, was eventually dropped by the PostgreSQL community. However, it led to the implementation of a Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) system prone to table bloat.

I started writing on my blog some years ago, and since then I’ve had a lot of reasons to stop writing. Here’s a list of why nobody cares about your blog

Study: Some consumers have an unerring knack for buying unpopular products.

Terence Eden - Discord is perfect for ephemeral communications. But it is not a fucking substitute for documentation!

Jeff Hewitt - Television’s language and logic in everyday life.

In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of fundamental principles claimed to exist in an objective reality.

Jeremy Keith on syndication to social networks - https://adactio.com/journal/7698

Exploring potential privacy vulnerabilities in Apple devices. This article discusses revealing a user's first name without permissions using the mDNS protocol.

https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/165/ - Binaural recording from various jazz kissa in Tōhoku and Hokkaido Japan. As part of the BASIE!BOP!JAMAICA! 16-day Tōhoku and Hokkaido jazz kissa tour: June 1...

An influential M.I.T. professor and an outside-the-box scientific theorist, he gained fame with unorthodox views as a pioneer in digital physics.

Large language models (LLMs) have only just emerged into mainstream thought, and already they’ve shown themselves to be a powerful tool for interacting with data. While some might classify them as merely a really cool new form of UI, others think that this may be the start of artificial general intelligence.

Smithsonian ( pdf ) - A way to remember bird calls.

Paul Graham Essay - How to do great work

Full Stack Developer and Entrepreneur. - see: https://paul.copplest.one/blog/realtime-user-store.html#problem

The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman - 2023 Penguin Random House. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way, a brilliant scientific investigation into owls—the most elusive of birds—and why they exert such a hold on human imagination

Vonnegut, Kurt | Vonnegut's stirring response to the censorship and burning of Slaughterhouse Five. Typed letter signed ("Kurt Vonnegut"), to Charles McCarthy, head of the school board at Drake High School in North Dakota, responding to the censorship and burning of Slaughterhouse Five at Drake - https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2022/fine-books-and-manuscripts-including-americana/vonnegut-kurt-vonneguts-stirring-response-to-the

Video - Phil Edwards

Breathtaking views | Large deck areas ~ 25 min to TIEC

Much has been written about the Reddit boycott recently, but I have kind of a wild take. what if we thought of Reddit as, functionally, subservient to OpenAI?

What would a copilot for writing and thinking look like? To try answering this question, I built a prototype: Obsidian-Copilot

A legible monospace font… the very typeface you’ve been trained to recognize since childhood.

This is a collection of modern resources on various undergrad level computer science topics, for someone with an interest in theory.

Author and federal prosecutor Brendan Ballou explains why private equity is buying everything from vet offices to tech conglomerates, how this system is broken, and what can be done to fix it. - See also: https://www.plunderthebook.com

Laphams Quarterly - Those ancient humans who might have scratched directions in the sand or carved lines on wood were the first to practice the art of symbolic representation in the form of a map.

In a now-taken-down blog post summarizing an event with Sam Altman, Altman revealed that he doesn’t believe that ChatGPT plugins have product-market fit (outside of the browsing plugin) and won’t be coming to the API soon. Why? A few hypotheses (not mutually exclusive). "Chat is not the right UX for plugins. If you know what you want to do, it’s often easier to just do a few clicks on the website. If you don’t, just a chat interface makes it hard to steer the model toward your goal."

Expert Pierre Sourzat spills secrets about finding fungi around the globe with his trusty pup, Leo.

We are experienced growers of inoculated seedlings for truffle orchard establishment. We have several key components in orchard establishment and management

Dogs and their owners go to school to hunt and harvest an expensive fungus.

Clinical predictive models can help physicians and administrators make decisions by forecasting clinical and operational events.

Ze Frank explains all about slime molds, which are super interesting! Slime molds can efficiently solve mazes, plan efficient train routes, adapt to changing conditions, and learn from each other.

In March and April 2023, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) received three (3) subpoenas for PyPI user data from the The Python Package Index.

SwingVision is the #1 tennis app for real-time automated score keeping, stats & line calling. Measure your serve speed, match stats & more!

As we continue our development journey towards Deno 2, this minor release is primarily focused on boosting compatibility with npm and Node.js, enhancing the overall quality of life and developer experience, and establishing the foundation for future performance enhancements.

Como is a laid back e-bike with a clean look and upright rider position for convenient comfort and style

The blockEditor.useSetting.before filter is a client-side JavaScript filter that lets you set block-level theme.json settings before the Editor is rendered. And, since it operates in the client, you get much more control than you have with server-side PHP filters.

Amelia Wattenberger makes a convincing argument for why chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs.

TX–6 is our ultra-portable, battery-powered mixer and multi-channel audio interface. comparable to larger units, but with even more tech packed into one sturdy little machine.

Isn’t that what we want from the internet? I’m sitting in a small room in an old house in Durham, North Carolina...

So, with all that in mind, I am looking forward to going the Coronation. I think I’ll wear a suit. You can ask me anything. There will be no moderator. This will be between you and me. Let's see what happens. Much love, Nick

Introducing MPT-7B, the latest entry in our MosaicML Foundation Series. MPT-7B is a transformer trained from scratch on 1T tokens of text and code. It is open source, available for commercial use, and matches the quality of LLaMA-7B. MPT-7B was trained on the MosaicML platform in 9.5 days with zero human intervention at a cost of ~$200k. Starting today, you can train, finetune, and deploy your own private MPT models, either starting from one of our checkpoints or training from scratch. For inspiration, we are also releasing three finetuned models in addition to the base MPT-7B: MPT-7B-Instruct, MPT-7B-Chat, and MPT-7B-StoryWriter-65k+, the last of which uses a context length of 65k tokens!

With the MosaicBERT architecture + training recipe, you can now pretrain a competitive BERT-Base model from scratch on the MosaicML platform for $20. We’ve released the pretraining and finetuning code, as well as the pretrained weights.

Note: Only shows FDIC-reported bank failures; does not include investment banks and non-U.S. banks. Data: FDIC, FRED

2016 Oscar-Winning Short: “Stutterer” | The Screening Room | The New Yorker

Good basic explainer on vector databases.

Sometimes referred to as the "crown jewel" of the UK's technology sector, Arm was founded in Cambridge, England, in 1990. Arm Limited (“Arm”) has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form F-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) relating to the proposed initial public offering of American depositary shares representing Arm’s ordinary shares. The Arm IPO will likely double, or possibly triple, the $3.5 billion listing of Kenvue, the consumer health business of Johnson & Johnson

Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind GPT-4, ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, and many other state-of-the-art AI technologies.

When we peer into our patient portals, we don’t always see ourselves more clearly.

Use the new GPT-4 api to build a chatGPT chatbot for multiple Large PDF files.

The Center for Public Opinion & Policy Research (CPOPR) is a full-service survey research and data analysis entity at Winthrop University, specializing in telephone and online surveys.

An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning

Pew Research Center - In 2021, there were 2,590 gun deaths among U.S. children and teens under the age of 18, up from 1,732 in 2019.

This time, we spent the whole episode talking about large language models: ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bing, Bard, Claude, LLaMA and more.

Long before the invention of the general-purpose computer, bureaucrats and researchers had begun gathering and cross-tabulating sets of numbers about populations—heights, weights, ages, sexes, races, political parties, incomes—using punch cards and tabulating machines. Sergey Brin said "Auto insurance companies analyse accident data and set insurance rates of individuals according to age, gender, vehicle type,” he pointed out. “If they were allowed to by law, they would also use race, religion, handicap, and any other attributes they find are related to accident rate.”

Talk with an LLaMA AI in your terminal / Port of OpenAI's Whisper model in C/C++. Contribute to ggerganov/whisper.cpp development by creating an account on GitHub.

The New Yorker | OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?

Illustrator

Grace Hopper - Computer Scientist - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

Twitter thread from Jackson Fall on using gpt to create a website for making money.

We report the development of GPT-4, a large-scale, multimodal model which can accept image and text inputs and produce text outputs. While less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, GPT-4 exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks, including passing a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers.

Dataset Repository of Awesome ChatGPT Prompts from https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts

The Oatmeal - You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you - This is a comic about the backfire effect.

A creature is formed of clay. A puppet becomes a boy. A monster rises in a lab. A computer takes over a spaceship. And all manner of robots serve or control us. For generations we’ve told ourselves stories, using themes of magic and science, about inanimate things that we bring to life or imbue with power beyond human capacity.

Linux now supports the ARM ( Apple M1 ) architecture

Let’s start with one of those insights that are as obvious as they are easy to forget: if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. It is therefore not surprising that those who grow up to be exceptional tend to have spent their formative years surrounded by adults who were exceptional.

MotherDuck: Big data is dead. Long live easy data.

A man who’s been called “the chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction” can be expected to act a little nervous.

VRBO - Horseshoe Hill - Polk County

Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content

is the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil

Reid Hoffman - Many of the most popular websites leveraged humanity’s less virtuous impulses.

If someone can taste the difference between a Merlot from ’78 and a Merlot from ’98, they are conservative but have a son who dropped out of college to join Antifa.

Artists’ meditations on time suggest that speed needn’t be the only goal in our online experiences.

The Earth is, on average, located in the habitable zone, but at any given time it has a certain probability of being outside it, which is why life exists on Earth but is mortal.

We chat with Lee Robinson, VP of Developer Experience at Vercel about the company’s vision for evolving from Webpack to Turbopack

John Shelton Reed (born 1942) is an American sociologist and essayist, author or editor of 23 books, most of them dealing with the contemporary American South.

Editor • Writer • Researcher • Teacher • Public Speaker | Fountain NC. ( sent the email about Dirty Dan ) | Won the 2021 NC Award for the Humanities. Owns R.A. Fountain ( https://rafountain.com )

Jerusalem is a novel by British author Alan Moore, wholly set in and around the author's home town of Northampton, England. Combining elements of historical and supernatural fiction and drawing on a range of writing styles, the author describes it as a work of "genetic mythology"

Kagi is a privacy-focused, user-centric search engine. Built by Vladimir Prelovac: Telcis Search ( http://teclis.com ) and Orion Browser ( https://browser.kagi.com )

Children's stories produced with actors and musician guests - https://www.rabbitears.com

The brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment for parody. See also AP News - https://apnews.com/article/the-onion-supreme-court-parody-72a286d21f2d484326b13a5b18884f93

Tango Brock - San Francisco/Los Angeles Production Engineer - https://www.tanobrock.com/about

The series has sold more than two hundred and seventy million copies since its launch, in 1979. It’s the fourth-best-selling children’s-book series of all time.