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AI and the risk of catastrophe

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I am reminded of an episode from history involving Bertrand Russell and the U.S. writer and editor Leo Rosten. In the early 1950s, Rosten had approached Russell in London to write an article on agnosticism… 

an artist s illustration of artificial intelligence ai this image was inspired by neural networks used in deep learning it was created by novoto studio as part of the visualising ai pr

Computation that computes

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While I was recently browsing the web for interesting physics papers, I came across one in Nature titled ‘A thermodynamically favoured molecular computer’. The work itself seemed interesting but what caught my eye was a… 

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Privileged access is bad for science

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Despite some problems of its own, the ongoing Microsoft Majorana saga has been striking a pleasant contrast with the rush by artificial intelligence (AI) companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to show their proprietary models can… 

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Lesson learnt? None.

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A particular line from the open statement mathematicians wrote against the design of the new Caltech Mathathon, due to happen in late October, has stuck with me: Mathematicians do not only prove theorems: they also… 

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Semiconductor nationalism

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There’s a passage in an interview of former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, published by Frontline on September 1, that many people seem to have misunderstood, especially on Twitter, where — perhaps unsurprisingly — it has… 

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The bridge AI-writing builds

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From ‘Why not normalise use of AI in writing?’, by Amit Kumar, assistant professor in the Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh, in The Hindu, August 29, 2026: Whose authority is being protected by that… 

an artist s illustration of artificial intelligence ai this illustration depicts language models which generate text it was created by wes cockx as part of the visualising ai project l

AI shouldn’t distract journalism into a new trap

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The following is a review of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination by Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, available here. The authors write, and I agree, that journalism… 

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The Meta Ray-Ban glasses and Indian law

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1. India is not likely to find success by regulating hardware because (i) such regulations will be hard to enforce in practice and in principle, (ii) the regulatory regime could set up a new license… 

A clean, modern online writing editor displayed in the foreground against a backdrop of deep space filled with stars and a luminous spiral galaxy. The editor features formatting tools, a large article title reading ‘In the flow with Write,’ and a short paragraph beneath it, with ‘Save draft’ and ‘Publish’ buttons visible at the top.

Writing with WordPress Write

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I’m writing this post on Write, the new text composer/editor on WordPress.com. According to the official blog post, Write is a response to last year’s Creators survey, where “‘simplify the editor’ was the single most-requested… 

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Keep the crap going

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Have you seen the new ads for Google Gemini? In one version, just as a young employee is grabbing her fast-food lunch, she notices her snooty boss get on an elevator. So she drops her… 

To WordPress

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I used to love WordPress unconditionally. Then Gutenberg replaced Calypso and the user experience became quite poor. Then WordPress.com rejigged their subscription plans, got it wrong, and fortunately switched back. Finally, Matt Mullenweg’s actions and… 

Off the rails

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Either Matt Mullenweg’s screws have fallen off or I deeply overestimated how sensible a person I thought he was. On October 3, Mullenweg wrote on his blog that Automattic had offered those of its employees…