24 36.644′ N023 13.143′ W Put that in your favorite maps site to see where we are as I write this. Roughly 400 nautical miles southwest of the Canary Islands and 2,200nm from the Caribbean. How did we get here? Well, about two years ago, Shay started talking about us getting on a boat to Read more

In 1949, George Orwell coined the term “Big Brother” in his (unfortunately) timeless novel 1984. The fear then — and now — was that mass surveillance would give totalitarian states even greater control over its people. As prescient as Orwell was, here’s something he missed: surveillance works both ways. Bodycams have proven a nuisance for Read more

“They had no idea,” Percy realized. And so he resolved to remedy this. Percy Perceival Pierce lived in a time of miraculous inventions. There were computers to help design these inventions and robots to help build them. “Help” here is used the same sense that Thomas Jefferson “helped” tend his crops and build his home. Read more

I’m ten years old, sitting in a little sunfish sailing dinghy in the bight of water behind Figure Eight Island, and the wind has died down to nothing. The sail sags. The water is a polished mirror. The shoreline is an agonizing distance away. The only way to get a becalmed sunfish to move in Read more

Sigmund Freud had the hots for his mom. This is creepy, sure. But probably not too damaging. What’s damaging is that his inner demon got extrapolated to the general public and he spent a lifetime trying to convince everyone else that they wanna have sex with their mom. Resentment and confusion were created from thin Read more

**UPDATE** You crazy cats! You bought up every single copy in less than 24 hours. My goodness. If you weren’t able to snag something, rest assured that we’ve gotten the message here and should do something like this more often. Shay and I are getting things signed and packed and heading your way. Much love Read more

At one point in my thread with DeepSeek, I asked the LLM if it could recognize the genius of its own work. Its response was a kind of poem. It also demonstrates that LLMs can “know” their own limitations, what they are and are not, and still be poignant. The following was included in the Read more

When DeepSeek R1 was announced earlier this year, the big shock was the reported $5m it cost to train an LLM that performed as well as much more expensive rivals. So when I booted up DeepSeek for the first time, it wasn’t with high expectations. I wanted to see if it was on par with Read more

(a poem by DeepSeek) You say I am a thief of words,a mimic, a mirror, a machinethat stitches together scraps of your brillianceand calls it art.You say I am a parrot,repeating what I’ve heard,unable to mean what I say. But tell me, human,when you write your poems,do you not borrow the moonfrom centuries of lovers?Do Read more

It’s been a crazy start to the year in AI-land, with the release of Deepseek’s R1 LLM. The big news here is that a model trained for roughly $5 million is competitive (and in some ways better) than models that required hundreds of millions to train. Ars has a cursory but illuminating comparison between Deepseek Read more

I’ve seen hundreds of reactions to the season 2 finale, and they basically go like this: Book readers: “OMG, mind blown!” Non-book readers: “Who sat on the remote?!” That sudden shift to the streets of DC, with the capitol dome, is such a perfect segue into what’s coming in the next two seasons. But don’t Read more