Jim Spohrer 2024

Agreed.

Check out Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad" - lots of fables of constructors who can build anything. Read it 50 years ago - thought it good. Re-reading it now - Lem was a time traveler - great stuff.

Bend in the road

Looks good. I need to stop by.

Thanks for the excellent town hall meet

Homestead Avenue 2

Gunsmoke “The photographer”

Here is the photo with my mentor!

Homestead A enue

Thanks Sam Arbesman for sending me a copy!

New notions of infinity challenge a plan to define the mathematical universe: "Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order?" @quantamagazine.bsky.social
(Plus- John Allen Paulos @ja-paulos.bsky.social)

Get down with Godel: roughlydaily.com/2025/07/04/a...

Wilder Ranch near Santa Cruz

Coastal fog - in retreat.

Cowell-Purisma Coastal Trail

From Nichols Kristoff on NYT

www.aeinstein.org/198-methods-...

Carl Sagan: Goal For Human Species

Samuel Arbesman’s recent book looks great!

Systems thinking and systemic design: working with complexity - learningforsustainability.net Systems design explained, with key concepts and links to tools that support systems thinking, planning, and collaboration in complex contexts.

🌍 Learning for Sustainability
I post on systems thinking, facilitation, co-design & evaluation — grounded in practice and shared learning.

📄 Worth revisiting: Systems thinking and systemic design: working with complexity
🔗 learningforsustainability.net/post/systems...

🧪 #LfSinsights

Coyote Lake in the distance

Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the *length* of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doub...

How fast is AI getting better at long tasks?
Seems to be doubling every 7 months
URL: metr.org/blog/2025-03...

Bottomline
AI is impressive, but imperfect - but it is getting better.

AI is not very good at:
Truth - it makes many mistakes
Properly citing sources
Long complex tasks - it gets lost in the weeds

AI is very good at:
24x7 access
Fast response
Summarization
Point-of-views
All languages
Generating multiple-choice questions for learning
Generating explanations of wrong answers for teacher guides
Generating python code

Orion over Apple spaceship

Neighbors napping

Blue sky

Delighted this arrived today!

Above the clouds

Oak tree

Every Jan 1 I post a scorecard on predictions I made, with dates, on Jan 1, 2018 on cars (self-driving), robots, AI, & ML, and on human spaceflight. Besides telling which turned out right and which wrong in the last year I also talk a lot of smack about these topics. rodneybrooks.com/predictions-...

New Year 2025