Short things, kept in the open. A commonplace book, formerly rabbitholes.garden.

It’s crazy how good good open source LLMs have gotten.

Kimi K2.5 set a new record among open-weight models on the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI), which combines multiple benchmarks onto a single scale. Its score of 147 is about on par with o3, Grok 4, and Sonnet 4.5. It still lags the overall frontier.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) for normal people is here.

Wow

“I was always a little bored by demonstrations of evil.

They relied on the same things. I used to say it always has this top hat and a cape and a tuxedo and a cane. And it has all this stuff. Glamour and costume. Maybe even a little theme music. But goodness never has anything, ‘cause it doesn’t want anything. It can’t use anything. It’s just there.”

~ Toni Morrison (2013)

YouTube · youtu.be ↗Toni Morrison on the Concept of Good and EvilThe 92nd Street Y, New York on YouTube

H/t Angus Hervey

Human psychology is eminently hackable.

The momentum effect is real.

💯 We are headed for an age of anxiety, grievances, and disillusionment, and I don’t think our systems, as they are designed, are equipped to handle the tsunami of angst:

THERE is still time for the cheerful and the gloomy to disagree, sincerely, about the net impact on employment from automation and artificial intelligence. Perhaps AI will unleash a job-creating economic boom for the ages, as boosters maintain. Maybe on balance the doom-mongers are right, and grim legions of algorithm-guided bots and robots will conquer one industry (and profession) after another.

One outcome is not up for debate. Across the industrialised world, wise politicians are braced for soaring public anxiety about change. Whether AI’s long-run effects are benign or cruel, many citizens are about to find once-valued skills and credentials surplus to the requirements of the economy. Even as new jobs are created, some flesh-and-blood workers may lack autonomy, or indeed dignity, if they feel they are serving AI masters.

John herrman on Dario Amodei’s recent essay.

Good perspective on how AI is changing the nature of work on different types of organizations.

Salvatore Sanfilippo on the distinction between vibe coding and “automatic programming”:

I’m a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate in this way is mine. My code, my output, my production. I, and you, can be proud.

If you are not completely convinced, think to Redis. In Redis there is not much technical novelty, especially at its start it was just a sum of basic data structures and networking code that every competent system programmer could write. So, why it became a very useful piece of software? Because of the ideas and visions it contained.

Programming is now automatic, vision is not (yet).

Finland is considering banning social media access for children under 15.

The concerns over social media, and in particular the effects on children, have been well-documented — but Finnish researcher Silja Kosola’s recent description of the phenomenon as an “uncontrolled human experiment” has grabbed people’s attention once again.

Kosola, an associate professor in adolescent medicine, has researched the impact of social media on young people, and tells Yle News that the consequences are not very well understood.

“We see a rise in self-harm and especially eating disorders. We see a big separation in the values of young girls and boys, which is also a big problem in society,” Kosola explains.

From Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel biography: I was an untroublesome child who looked after herself. For a short time I went to the village kindergarten, but I didn’t feel too good there. My strongest memory of the place is of being made to have a lie-down in the middle of the day and of sitting in a tree when I didn’t want…

A good post on what does it mean to translate a literary work.

New age shitty bribes.

From Maria Popova’s blog:

Goodman writes:

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

Christopher Ricks reads Paul Goodman on silence https://on.soundcloud.com/UI7DiBnWBSJd2FdFnN

Some weird, wonderful, and depressing facts.

The insatiable hunger of AI companies for structured data is ruining things for others:

As news publishers try to safeguard their contents from AI companies, the Internet Archive is also getting caught in the crosshairs. The Financial Times, for example, blocks any bot that tries to scrape its paywalled content, including bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and the Internet Archive. The majority of FT stories are paywalled, according to director of global public policy and platform strategy Matt Rogerson. As a result, usually only unpaywalled FT stories appear in the Wayback Machine because those are meant to be available to the wider public anyway.

“Common Crawl and Internet Archive are widely considered to be the ‘good guys’ and are used by ‘the bad guys’ like OpenAI,” said Michael Nelson, a computer scientist and professor at Old Dominion University. “In everyone’s aversion to not be controlled by LLMs, I think the good guys are collateral damage.”

Yes markets make people more outward looking, trusting, and tolerant, but:

All this sounds pretty good for the Montesquieus of the world. But the researchers had another result. Greater market access did seem to weaken family-based co-operation, lowering the share of vulnerable people including orphans, people with disabilities and the elderly being looked after by relatives at home.

So if you were looking for a simple answer, sorry. The study supports both sides’ view of markets — they make it easier to co-operate with strangers but potentially weaken ties closer to home. Think of the Marmite not as delicious nor disgusting, but as a complex mix of flavours reorienting your taste buds.

I don’t know if this is true:

A Ukrainian AI-powered ground combat vehicle near Lyman refused to abandon its forward defensive position and continued engaging enemy forces, despite receiving multiple orders to return to its company in order to preserve its hardware.

The UGV reportedly neutralized more than 30 Russian soldiers before it was ultimately destroyed.

While the Russian detachment was pinned down, Ukrainian infantry exploited the opportunity and cleared two contested fields of enemy presence, successfully re-establishing control over the area.

These events took place during the final week of December 2025.

h/t Zvi Mowshowitz

Bang on! The lesson to take from Nietzsche is that we all may not fully understand the implications of our most cherished values, our personal beliefs, or actions, and live our entire lives in ignorance or self-denial, unconsciously undermining ourselves and others. How do we avoid this? We need to make sure that the…

Robert Friedland on how much copper the world needs.

What will the post-AI future look like? Here are four scenarios outlined by Allison Schrager:

AI can ruin your Hinge date. It can detect cosmic anomalies. It can make history come alive. But it cannot suspend the basic laws of economics, says Allison Schrager. Elon Musk’s recent prediction — that AI will make saving for retirement unnecessary — is complete hogwash in her eyes. Consider the following four scenarios. In the future, Allison says AI will either …

1.Make us more productive in the same way that railroads, the telegraph and electricity did in the past.

2.Transform our lives in a completely novel way by speeding up and possibly even spurring innovation.

3.Become a useful tool that won’t boost productivity very much right away, but will disrupt society like the internet.

4.Kill us all.

OK, fine. I guess if No. 4 happens, you won’t be needing a 401(k). But Allison, who is bullish on the future of AI, says such apocalyptic forecasts are highly unlikely.

Rachel Thomas takes a shot against vibe coding by comparing it to gambling.

No matter how much you read about China, it’s still hard to wrap your head around the fact that they’re dominant across so many different industries. It’s even crazier that Western companies are being forced to go hat in hand begging for their technology. What a stunning reversal of fortunes. It was China that was…

Andrej Karpathy on coding with AI assistants: Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December. i.e. I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly…

Matthew Adelstein makes a case for thinking about the welfare of digital minds: Why think this? First, digital minds could be produced with amazing efficiency. Computing has grown vastly more efficient. If digital minds are possible, it should be cheap to create them in enormous numbers. Second, in the far future, we…

I was reading this article by Kyle Chan on the great reversal in technological dominance. Until recently, the West was the undisputed leader across “all” technologies, but now the tables have turned. China is now the top dog across a whole range of industries from EVs, solar, AI, robotics to pharma that Western…

Electric vehicles are reducing pollution:

For the analysis, the researchers divided California into 1,692 neighborhoods, using a geographic unit similar to zip codes. They obtained publicly available data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles on the number of ZEVs registered in each neighborhood. ZEVs include full-battery electric cars, plug-in hybrids and fuel-cell cars, but not heavier duty vehicles like delivery trucks and semi trucks.

Next, the research team obtained data from the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), a high-resolution satellite sensor that provides daily, global measurements of NO₂ and other pollutants. They used this data to calculate annual average NO₂ levels in each California neighborhood from 2019 to 2023.

Over the study period, a typical neighborhood gained 272 ZEVs, with most neighborhoods adding between 18 and 839. For every 200 new ZEVs registered, NO₂ levels dropped 1.1%, a measurable improvement in air quality.

“These findings show that cleaner air isn’t just a theory—it’s already happening in communities across California,” Eckel said.

Money may not make you happy, but it makes you free.

The robots aren’t going replace humans anytime soon. Or that’s what one hopes.

Michael Tam, chief brand officer at Shenzhen-based UBTech, which has partnerships with carmaker BYD and Apple contractor Foxconn, said its Walker S2 robots were 30 to 50 per cent as productive as humans and only in certain tasks such as stacking boxes and quality control.

Yet manufacturers are still racing to order them to avoid losing out to competitors, Tam told the FT. “You can imagine … if Tesla has the advantage of deploying their own human robots into the manufacturing line, that means maybe BYD, they are staying behind.”