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themarginalian.org
Borges on How to Conquer Time – The Marginalian

Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

2mo ago
oneusefulthing.org
A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era

Because of this change, you have to consider three things when deciding what AI to use: Models, Apps, and Harnesses. Models are the underlying AI brains, and the big three are GPT-5.2/5.3, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3 Pro. These are what determine how smart the system is, how well it reasons, how good it is at writing or coding or analyzing a spreadsheet, and how well it can see images or create them.

2mo ago
theinformation.com
Read Anthropic CEO’s Memo Attacking OpenAI’s ‘Mendacious’ Pentagon Announcement — The Information

Our general sense is that these kinds of approaches, while they don’t have zero efficacy, are, in the context of military applications, maybe 20% real and 80% safety theater. The basic issue is that whether a model is conducting applications like mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons depends substantially on wider context: a model doesn’t “know” if there’s a human in the loop in the broad situation it is in (for autonomous weapons), and doesn’t know the provenance of the data is it analyzing (so doesn’t know if this is US domestic data vs foreign, doesn’t know if it’s enterprise data given by customers with consent or data bought in sketchier ways, etc).

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time

Time is divided into two rivers: one flows backward, devouring life already lived; the other moves forward with you exposing your life. For a single second they may be joined. Now.

2mo ago
fastcompany.com
Mattel has a new custom font, and it's full of playful hidden details - Fast Company

Mattel operates dozens of brands under its corporate umbrella, each with their own visual identity and brand voice. But, until now, Mattel has never had its own proprietary typeface for its overarching brand, instead opting to license multiple existing fonts on a global scale—an endeavor that was not only expensive, but also came at the cost of visual consistency across Mattel’s many product lines. Otis Gibson, founder of the Chicago-based creative agency Gertrude, says his agency was tasked with “putting a lasso” around Mattel’s corporate identity.

3mo ago
substack.com
The Glorious Return of Medeski Martin & Wood (And Their First Interview in Eight Years)

Only two days earlier, the three members of Medeski Martin & Wood hadn’t been in the same room in four years. But as they talked about preparing for these shows, finishing their first album in 14 years, and what they still love about playing together, their chemistry seemed entirely intact. They completed one another’s sentences. They ribbed one another. They remembered their salad days. This is the first time they’ve done an interview together since 2018, and I’ve done my best to just let them have the microphone.

3mo ago
oneusefulthing.org
A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era

Until a few months ago, for the vast majority of people, "using AI" meant talking to a chatbot in a back-and-forth conversation. But over the past few months, it has become practical to use AI as an agent: you can assign them to a task and they do them, using tools as appropriate.

3mo ago
harpers.org
Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss

For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.

3mo ago
gq.com
Rolex Opened a College—and It’s as Selective as Harvard | GQ

It’s estimated Rolex now sells over a million watches a year for the first time in its history (while pulling off the remarkable trick in the luxury business of making its product seem rare). Meanwhile, the secondary watch market is flourishing thanks to improving e-commerce platforms and a growing hobbyist culture. Yet there are fewer than 2,000 watchmakers in America capable of mending a timepiece, let alone a luxury one.

3mo ago
spectrum.ieee.org
Tomorrow’s Smart Pills Will Deliver Drugs and Take Biopsies - IEEE Spectrum

Instead of scheduling an endoscopy or CT scan, you’d swallow an electronic capsule smaller than a multivitamin. As it travels through your digestive system, it could check tissue health, look for cancerous changes, and send data to your doctor. It could even release drugs exactly where they’re needed or snip a tiny biopsy sample before passing harmlessly out of your body

3mo ago
platformer.news
Five ways of thinking about Moltbook

Post by post, it can be impossible to tell whether what you are reading was indeed written by a bot, or whether a human being exercised a heavy hand.

3mo ago
platformer.news
Five ways of thinking about Moltbook

The promise turned out to be a mirage, and the software itself is unsafe to use without serious technical expertise and oversight.

3mo ago
npr.org
Kalshi accuses MrBeast editor of insider trading : NPR

An editor who works for YouTube's biggest creator, MrBeast, has been suspended from the prediction market platform Kalshi and reported to federal regulators for insider trading, Kalshi officials said on Wednesday. It's the first time the company has publicly revealed the results of an investigation into market manipulation on the popular app

3mo ago
jannswenner.com

So, it became obvious since you guys are a band and we're right up here in La Honda, and we're having these parties, we want to move the parties out into the world a little bit and just see what happens.

3mo ago
nytimes.com

Mr. Trump’s announcement during his State of the Union speech was light on details, and experts said that any promises by tech companies to pay more for their electricity could be difficult to verify or enforce in practice. Yet the move underscored the extent to which White House officials and Republicans have worried that rising electricity prices could hurt them in the midterm elections this year.

3mo ago

Why isn’t this platform improving, in drastic groundbreaking ways, with any urgency? I really thought 2025 might be the year, but nope. I can’t think of any area where Apple’s attitude more clearly seems to be that “good enough” is good enough.

3mo ago

iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are, technically, the best iPhones Apple has ever made. They’re very well designed too. The change to make the camera plateau span the entire width of the phone is a good one. It looks better, allows a naked iPhone 17 Pro to sit more steadily on a flat surface, and lets one in a case sit on a surface without any wobble at all. Apple even finally added a really fun, bold color — “cosmic orange” — that, surprising no one, seems to be incredibly popular with customers.

3mo ago

As I noted last year, “Siri/Apple Intelligence” is a not a standalone category on the report card. I know Snell is very much trying to keep the number of different categories from inflating, but AI has been the biggest thing in tech for several years running. If it were a standalone category, last year I said I’d have given Apple a D for 2024. This year, I’d have given them an F — an utter, very public failure. (Their AI efforts in 2025 did end on a mildly optimistic note — they cleaned house.)

3mo ago
vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com

"You have to keep a close eye on what it is doing and make sure it doesn't make mistakes, and create ways of testing the code... But you can move at a speed that was unimaginable in the past."

3mo ago
fastcompanyme.com
What 11 top designers want to redesign in 2026 - Fast Company Middle East | The future of tech, business and innovation.

As AI capabilities evolve, design is more important than ever. Visual interfaces aren’t going away, and neither is the need to see, shape, and refine ideas as we work. Designers have a rare chance to define the rules and patterns of this new interface era, shaping what work, play, and productivity will look like for decades to come. —Loredana Crisan, Chief Design Officer of Figma

3mo ago
cnbc.com
OpenAI lands deals with consulting giants in enterprise push

Lan Guan, the chief AI and data officer at Accenture, said OpenAI’s Frontier Alliances serve as an example of how product companies, consulting companies and strategy companies should come together to accelerate AI deployment.

3mo ago
wsj.com
Steve Jobs's Best Quotes - WSJ

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

3mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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