The power of proximity to coworkers [pdf]
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The Lost Machine Automats and Self-Service Cafeterias of NYC (2023)
Become a paid member to listen to this article “Automats were right up there with the Statue of Liberty and Madison Square Garden,” Kent L. Barwick, former president of the Municipal Art Society, lamented to the New York Times in 1991 when the country’s last automat closed. The automat, a precursor to today’s fast food […]
Scientific and Technical Amateur Radio
Decoding ESCAPADENovember 19, 2025 ESCAPADE is a twin spacecraft mission that will study the Mars magnetosphere. The science mission is led by UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory and the spacecraft buses were built by Rocket Lab. It was launched on November 13 on the second Blue Origin New Glenn mission NG-2. The spacecraft will spend […]
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
So after all these hours talking about AI, in these last five minutes I am going to talk about: horses. Engines, steam engines, were invented in 1700. And what followed was 200 years of steady improvement, with engines getting 20% better a decade. For the first 120 years of that steady improvement, horses didn’t notice […]
The Universal Weight Subspace Hypothesis
Abstract:We show that deep neural networks trained across diverse tasks exhibit remarkably similar low-dimensional parametric subspaces. We provide the first large-scale empirical evidence that demonstrates that neural networks systematically converge to shared spectral subspaces regardless of initialization, task, or domain. Through mode-wise spectral analysis of over 1100 models – including 500 Mistral-7B LoRAs, 500 Vision […]
Manual: Spaces
Space (whitespace) is a whole group of glyphs, one of the most important and frequently-used. Any computer user knows space as the widest key on their keyboard, however the notion itself is much bigger and comprises multiple important typographic terms and ideas. Space in general is a blank unprinted area, a counterform that separates letters, words, lines etc. In typography, there are several types of spaces: sinkage (space […]
Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far
Listen to the article 4 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Kroger’s announcement on Tuesday that it will shutter three of its robotic e-commerce fulfillment facilities represents a sharp turnabout for the grocery company, which until recently had expressed confidence in its ability to leverage automation to run […]
Why the Sanitizer API is just `setHTML()`
Sanitizing HTML is the practice of taking a piece of HTML and removing some unwanted elements and attributes. Most often this is done to allow user-generated content with HTML but without causing XSS bugs. When imported from a library, a sanitizer typically looks like this: const clean = DOMPurify.sanitize(input); context.innerHTML = clean; However, the API […]
Running on Empty: Copper
How peak copper arrived and went completely unnoticed We are cooked. Image credit: Martin Martz via Unsplash The price of copper has reached new record highs due to supply constraints. And while the Energy Information Agency expects global copper production to reach an all time high later this decade, they also warn that by 2035 […]
Show HN: I’ve asked Claude to improve codebase quality 200 times
Have you seen one of the experiments where people have been re-feeding the same image to the AI agent a bunch of times? Or Marques Brownlee’s youtube videos where the video is reuploaded a 1000 times? Over the Thanksgiving weekend I had some time on my hands and tasked Claude to write an app that […]