The Failure of the Thermodynamics of Computation(2010)
Idealization John D. NortonCenter for Philosophy of ScienceDepartment of History and Philosophy of ScienceUniversity of Pittsburghhttp://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton Revised and improved edition, July 2013.For historians here is an archived copy of the old version from 2010. Experts who want to see the no go result described in 650 words, should go to ”No Go Result for the […]
Agent-to-Agent Pair Programming
What if you could let Claude and Codex work together as pair programmers, talking to each other directly? One of them as the main worker and the other as a reviewer. It is amusing how the best agentic workflows often look a lot like human collaboration. Researchers at Cursor discovered this in their work on […]
From 0% to 36% on Day 1 of ARC-AGI-3
Symbolica is a research-focused, venture-backed startup headquartered in the Bay Area. If you’ve ever been kept awake wondering what will come after deep learning, or simply want to have a hand in building the future of machine learning, we want to hear from you.
A Primer on Long-Duration Life Support
The practicalities of surviving long enough to take a Martian selfie Life support is the biggest technical obstacle to the human exploration of Mars. This fact makes people mad, because there are all kinds of other obstacles that are fun to solve (orbital refueling, landing heavy payloads, making rocket fuel out of Martian air), and […]
Judge blocks Pentagon effort to ’punish’ Anthropic with supply chain risk label
A federal judge in California has indefinitely blocked the Pentagon’s effort to “punish” Anthropic by labeling it a supply chain risk and attempting to sever government ties with the AI company, ruling that those measures ran roughshod over its constitutional rights. “Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may […]
Order Granting Preliminary Injunction – Anthropic vs. U.S. Department of War [pdf]
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We Rewrote JSONata with AI in a Day, Saved $500K/Year
A few weeks ago, Cloudflare published “How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week.” One engineer and an AI model reimplemented the Next.js API surface on Vite. Cost about $1,100 in tokens. The implementation details didn’t interest me that much (I don’t work on frontend frameworks), but the methodology did. They took the […]
The ANSI art ”telecomics” of the 1992 election
This is the final part of a multi-part series. In an alternate universe somewhere, nobody has heard of “webcomics.” Instead, there are thousands of “telecomics.” Thirty years ago, Don Lokke Jr. hoped to make that universe a reality. In 1992, he coined the term “telecomics” to describe his new digital comic strips, drawn primarily in […]
Joining databases across teams without copying data or running servers
March 2026 When two teams need to combine data, the usual answer is infrastructure: an ETL pipeline, an API, a message bus. Each adds latency, maintenance burden, and a new failure mode. The data moves because the systems can’t share it in place. There’s a simpler model. If your database is an immutable value in […]
Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed. Apple has also confirmed […]