Rick Searle

i think there is a very simple explanation for this, at least in 2026. the cultural apparatus orbiting around Trump lives in a world entirely governed by short feedback loops.

gambling

social media

meme stonks

junk cryptocurrency

LLMs

www.quantamagazine.org/break-it-to-...

Humbled by Evolution Understanding the history and diversity of life inspires awe and wonder.

1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.

On Brian Cantwell Smith and the Promise of AI Today I had the bittersweet pleasure of participating in a symposium honoring the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, a good friend whom I’d known for over 30 years.

I wrote about the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, and his profound thinking about AI and the nature of intelligence.

aiguide.substack.com/p/on-brian-c...

I think the fundamental gap here is that non-creative people think that creative people make things for the end product, when in fact it’s the act of creation and not the end point that makes it worthwhile.

Opinion | Donald Trump’s Cowboy Diplomacy

1/Trump diplomacy is less the Wild West and more Westeros. It is not about actors untethered from the state but a powerful state serving the interests of the clans.
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/15/o...

Great story!

This is rather wonderful (written up by the ever reliable Mark Buchanan). We can imagine making quantum clocks that arefully reversible and generate no entropy. But the entropic cost of extracting a classical tick is, in relative terms, huge.
physics.aps.org/articles/v18...

AI has introduced a lot of new moves into the game tree and defied a lot of conventional wisdom, but overall the families of strategies have only changed incrementally post-AlphaGo.

In short, it seems like centuries of collective, cumulative innovation has done pretty well, all things considered. Humans can't play as good as AI but AI seem to have rediscovered much of the human strategic repertoire.

The twilight of tech unilateralism Suddenly, America is in a whole different world

"But a few short months ago, the United States believed that it could use its chokehold on advanced semiconductors to create a grand global scheme for controlling the development of AI...The technological bets...look to be going bad."

www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-twilig...

Inside the relentless race for AI capacity The quest for superintelligence is spurring a data centre boom — but critics question the cost, environmental impact and whether it is all needed

This whole thing reads like a civilisation that is daring itself to go over the brink ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...

a lot of rage against Boomers is a kind of subconscious recognition that the period from ~1950-1990 is the basis of a shared popular culture is nothing is coming to replace it

LLMs

1) Are better than their haters claim
2) Are much worse than their acolytes claim

kinda that simple

Instead of trying to find a mode of information processing that can only be done in protein/water colloids, we'd be better advised to take comfort in the things people *can't* do — like be edited or copied. We can have legal personhood because we're non-fungible that way.

this user has correctly divined how a LLM works: you imagine that you are talking to a person but you are actually talking to an abstract representation of the collective efforts of everybody involved in moving the pointer

I should say though that this is a pretty good article, explaining why the right way to develop AI is as a domain-specific tool.

Techno dystopia, libertarian hell Imagine a future in which humans succeed in colonizing other planetary systems. It is then easy to imagine an intergalactic human population numbering something huge beyond imagining – 1040, say – all...

Here is my review of two new books looking at different but ultimately overlapping aspects of the utopias and dystopias of the libertarian far right. Adam Becker delves into the fantastical techno-utopias of Silicon Valley, while...
www.the-tls.co.uk/science-tech...

This is a mosaic of the images covering the entire sky as observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), part of its All-Sky Data Release. The sky can be thought of as a sphere that surrounds us in three dimensions. To make a map of the sky, astronomers project it into two dimensions. Many different methods can be used to project a spherical surface into a 2-D map. The projection used in this image of the sky, called Aitoff, takes the 3-D sky sphere and slices open one hemisphere, and then flattens the whole thing out into an oval shape. In the mosaic, the Milky Way Galaxy runs horizontally across this map. The Milky Way is shaped like a disk and our solar system is located in that disk about two-thirds of the way out from the center. So we see the Milky Way as a band running through the sky. As we look toward the center of the galaxy, we are looking through more of the disk than when we are looking at large angles away from the center, and you can see a noticeable increase in stars (colored blue-green) toward the center of the image.

Nature presents us with 80 "octaves" of light, of which humans can see exactly 1.
Bringing the other 79 octaves into view has taken two centuries of effort, but it has transformed our ability to sense our place in the cosmic order. My new Aeon essay: 🧪🔭
aeon.co/essays/willi...

James Murray's book on Mathematical Biology has a nice chapter on the "Use and abuse of fractals in biology" which I enjoyed immensely. I think this terminology "use and abuse" can apply to many powerful (but limited!) human tools such as metaphors, power laws, stylistic models, etc.

I've said this before, but the problem is that the acceptable rate of wrong answers depends *heavily* on the task in question.

Counterintuitively, the simpler and less important the task, the *lower* the acceptable failure rate!

I have a couple of benchmark papers and it is very hard to elicit the correct identification of a problem when these models assume a lot of good faith in legit science papers. When parts of the paper have extra sound methodology, Claude will additionally amplify confidence and rigor of the paper.

You can think LLMs are aren’t intelligent, are built in exploitative ways, aren’t useful, overhyped, but if you don’t think they’re a wildly interesting scientific artifact I don’t know what to tell you

ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider In a paper published in Physical Review C, the ALICE collaboration reports measurements that quantify the transmutation of lead into gold in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Alchemy is a pretty kind of game,
Somewhat like tricks o' the cards, to cheat a man
With charming.

phys.org/news/2025-05...

imagine an ant which lives on a map of your hometown. there are many things which you know about your hometown which that ant can never learn. but it is not the case that the ant living on that map knows nothing about your hometown.

It's like these guys don't even know that meaning in these systems isn't stable or directly accessible, that it's perpetually deferred through chains of symbolic relationships. Kinda basic stuff, Sam.

Artillery centric war in Europe, navies of the world battling piracy in the Middle East, trade wars raging, a mad ruler attempts to claim the papacy, disruptive new technologies threaten societal stability…we’re 1800s maxxing