Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
Motivational saliency requires both the ability to learn and increasing difficulty – witness video games. The model I think makes sense here is the Csikszentmihalyi Flow model, by another name the challenge-skill model of effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Characterist… Roughly speaking, you might have taken a task that was in the control, flow, or relaxation zone, closer to […]
CobaltC – The Successor to C?
1. Introduction CobaltC is a statically typed systems programming language providing: explicit ownership; deterministic destruction; compiler-checked borrowing; inferred lifetimes; explicit nullability; bounds-safe operations; structured error handling; safe concurrency; explicit unsafe operations; explicit foreign-function interfaces. The language is intended for software requiring predictable resource management, strong memory safety, native execution and controlled interaction with low-level facilities. […]
Understanding ChatGPT Work
30th August 2026 OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here’s what I’ve figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is actually two products The more interesting version of ChatGPT Work is the one that runs […]
Yen weakens past ¥160 per dollar, eroding intervention gains
The yen weakened past the key ¥160-per-dollar level as it extends a slide that’s erased more than half of its intervention-fueled gains. The Japanese currency slipped as much as 0.5% to ¥160.16 versus the greenback after the dollar got a boost from Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh’s vow to hit the central bank’s inflation target. […]
Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
Lorne Trottier was born on the 15th of June in 1948 in Montréal. Trottier describes himself as a space and science geek, and he’s had a lifelong interest and passion in both space and electronics. In particular, Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight on the 5th of May in 1961 and Apollo 11 in July of 1969 […]
“I just chose words carefully.”
I don’t think anyone particularly enjoys typesetting in monospace. Regular text is okay – at least as okay as it can be: = 3x) or (width >= 700px)” type=”image/avif”> Right aligning is also fine, as long as you don’t mind counting spaces, but centering already gets tricky, as you don’t have a half space to […]
Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas
2026-08-30 | 7.5 min reading These are some of my thoughts on Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas – On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence and the encyclical video presentation. The future of artificial intelligence is in a building state; thus, the encyclical try to be a seed for discussion and […]
Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
The Idea Online STEM education is, in practice, a library of lecture videos. Think Khan Academy, Udemy, Coursera, MIT OpenCourseWare, YouTube, etc. But why videos? Picture a professor teaching a class at a blackboard. The professor is performing a form of presentation: they write an equation while explaining it, circle a term, draw a plot, […]
Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Reckoning
Comment Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Reckoning The Meta settlement will force meaningful changes on Facebook and Instagram. It also reflects the degree to which public outrage is outmatched by the speed and size of Big Tech. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells August 30, 2026 Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photograph from Getty Save this storySave this story […]
Continuous Diffusion Language Models (CDLM’s)
A flurry of recent activity in the space of continuous diffusion models for language, after a few years of relative dormancy, suggests that this approach is making something of a comeback. Fully discrete diffusion methods had largely supplanted earlier attempts to make continuous diffusion work for language, but the tide is starting to turn. In […]