James Vincent

the one exception to the british library's no liquids rule should be for a "little jug of wine, such as you might find in a greek taverna"

ancient wisdom says: happy are they whose lives coincide with algorithmically desirable social attributes

This is amongst the most impactful two minutes of broadcasting I’ve ever seen.

By Emma Murphy, International Editor, ITV News. #Gaza

Opinion | You Are Contaminated

‘Humans are permeable creatures, and we navigate the world like cleaner fish, filtering the waste of civilization partly by absorbing it.’

New from @dwallacewells.bsky.social: You Are Contaminated.

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/o...

i don't care to apply moral censure, i don't care about the obfuscation of licensing deals, micropayments, and lawsuits (landscapes tilted in tech's favour that will never entirely replace lost revenue). i just think everyone involved should recognize the obvious and think about what happens next

The End of Publishing as We Know It Inside Silicon Valley’s assault on the media

the simple, unavoidable, ugly truth is that AI companies are killing the media industry: they're destroying the revenue streams of news, of publishers, of nonfiction titles - and this loss will impoverish the world and their own products www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Silicon Valley Is in Its ‘Hard Tech’ Era

we're not in the ZIRP era any more and SV politics have def shifted right, but the idea that tech is more serious doesn't consider things like tech cos trading at 100x+ P/S ratios or the unfalsifiable gospel of AI superintelligence that buoys investment
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/t...

an excellent report on the Boring company, showing what happens when Musk's hype meets reality: archive.is/TJ5tt

I would say it’s both. The creators of LLMs have neglected guardrails for these sorts of behaviours - that neglect is intentional because it’s v hard to separate negative uses case from positive ones. That’s predatory. They’ve also continually hyped AI in a way that contributes to tech illiteracy

The increasing intermittency of….nuclear power stations:

Source: Financial Times | “Heatwaves test Europe’s electricity system as air conditioning use soars” on.ft.com/4fsSclS

took my favourite photo of a fox last night:

Amazon review of Pride and Prejudice, left by carlton p morgan on 30 July 2010: "Just a bunch of people going to each other's houses"

Happy 15th anniversary of the peak achievement of literary criticism, to all who celebrate

‘Things keep evolving into anteaters.’ Odd animals arose at least 12 separate times Findings speak to the dramatic impact ants and termites can have on mammalian evolution

Crab-like creatures are famed for having evolved five times in evolutionary history. But anteaters have evolved at least 12 times--in half the evolutionary span. Cool story by @jakebuehler.bsky.social for @science.org

only just this second clocked that it’s Wen because when because time - I am eternally surprised, but due to my ignorance not enlightenment

thinking about the difficult of doing it again, of doing the same thing again, and of what GK Chesterton wrote about god, children, and repetition:

roger ebert has a good quote - "Of the many imprisonments possible in our world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate – to be unable to tell another person what you really feel." ... i like it all the more that it comes from a review of Heat

YouTube video by The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel Tom Lehrer - We Will All Go Together When We Go

tom lehrer was a legend. my personal fave: youtu.be/frAEmhqdLFs?...

"Oh we will all burn together when we burn.
There'll be no need to stand and wait your turn.
When it's time for the fallout
And saint peter calls us all out,
We'll just drop our agendas and adjourn"

watching the women's euros reminded me of this great little piece about the universality of holding one's head in one's hands after a mistake in sport - a seemingly innate behavior that's self-soothing, protective, and communicates acknowledgment of fault www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/s...

i mean, this is the bet than many robotics firms are making right now: the belief that the scaling paradigm that succeeded in AI (more data + more compute = success) will work similarly for general dexterity. i personally don't think there's enough evidence for any firm conclusions yet!

[me, watching a friend stumble about the dance floor at a wedding drunkenly trying to perform YMCA] hmm, his movements are adaptive but predetermined

"I'm observing a mini Moravec's paradox within robotics: gymnastics that are difficult for humans are much easier for robots than "unsexy" tasks like cooking, cleaning, and assembling. It leads to a cognitive dissonance for people outside the field, "so, robots can parkour & breakdance, but why can't they take care of my dog?" Trust me, I got asked by my parents about this more than you think ... The "Robot Moravec's paradox" also creates the illusion that physical AI capabilities are way more advanced than they truly are. I'm not singling out Unitree, as it applies widely to all recent acrobatic demos in the industry. Here's a simple test: if you set up a wall in front of the side-flipping robot, it will slam into it at full force and make a spectacle. Because it's just overfitting that single reference motion, without any awareness of the surroundings. Here's why the paradox exists: it's much easier to train a "blind gymnast" than a robot that sees and manipulates. The former can be solved entirely in simulation and transferred zero-shot to the real world, while the latter demands extremely realistic rendering, contact physics, and messy real-world object dynamics - none of which can be simulated well. Imagine you can train LLMs not from the internet, but from a purely hand-crafted text console game. Roboticists got lucky. We happen to live in a world where accelerated physics engines are so good that we can get away with impressive acrobatics using literally zero real data. But we haven't yet discovered the same cheat code for general dexterity. Till then, we'll still get questioned by our confused parents."

some great context from Jim Fan, nvidia's director of robotics, reacting to a different video. the concept of the "blind gymnast" is spot on.

the challenge for observers is similar to LLMs. chatbots simulate certain elements of writing/reasoning and so humans infer the whole spectrum of intelligence we associate with those skills. humanoids simulate dancing/parkour and so we assume those capabilities generalize as they do for people.

silly, but also illustrative of the limitations of a lot of ostensibly impressive mobility we're seeing in humanoids right now. the bot is thrashing about because its feet are trying to connect to a floor that's not there; its movements are adaptive but also predetermined
bsky.app/profile/emil...

Volunteers map 10,000 routes in Great Britain to help make walking accessible Campaign group Slow Ways launches app for disabled people, parents with children, older people and others

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle.... Here is a cheerful thing . An act of ‘citizen geography’ makes UK walking routes more accessible

Dreams - Su Shi (trans. Arthur Waley) Families, when a child is born Want it to be intelligent. I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he will crown a tranquil life By becoming a Cabinet Minister.

Here's a poem by one of the old Chinese scholar bureaucrats that I think captures a certain Vibe very well

Opinion | I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students.

"The uncanny thing about these models isn’t just their speed but the way they imitate human interiority without embodying any of its values. That may be, from the humanist’s perspective, the most pernicious thing about A.I." nytimes.com/2025/07/18/opinion/ai-chatgpt-school.html

very good piece by leif wetherby on the perennial How To Understand AI question — here, neither as scam nor saviour but... entertainment www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/o...

Israel and Iran Usher In New Era of Psychological Warfare

fascinating piece on AI generated misinformation used by Israel and Iran. it's hard to understand the impact of this stuff second-hand. the report contains many examples but can't really assess whether they're believed, and instead frames them as psychological warfare www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/t...

"One in six US workers pretends to use AI to please the bosses 20 comment bubble on white AI-nxiety is real, and it's causing some bizarre behavior"

"This unease around the technology leads some to willfully disobey their overlords by saying that they use AI when they don't. A full 16 percent (that's over one in six people) sometimes lie about using AI algorithms just to keep bosses happy." www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/a...