Daring Fireball: The Real Problem of Humanity
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.
Page 5 — The Analog Pixel
The NPU in your phone keeps improving—why isn’t that making AI better? - Ars Technica
Almost every technological innovation of the past several years has been laser-focused on one thing: generative AI. Many of these supposedly revolutionary systems run on big, expensive servers in a data center somewhere, but at the same time, chipmakers are crowing about the power of the neural processing units (NPU) they have brought to consumer devices. Every few months, it’s the same thing: This new NPU is 30 or 40 percent faster than the last one. That’s supposed to let you do something important, but no one really gets around to explaining what that is.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares 'code red' to improve ChatGPT amid rising competition | AP News
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has set off a “code red” alert to employees to improve its flagship product, ChatGPT, and delay other product developments, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead | The Verge
Micron is retiring the Crucial brand, marking the end of its line of budget-friendly solid-state drives (SSDs) and RAM kits, as reported earlier by VideoCardz. In an announcement on Wednesday, Micron says winding down its consumer-focused business will “improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments” — a.k.a. AI companies.
OpenSeadragon
Read the full article at openseadragon.github.io
Byte - a visual archive
Read the full article at byte.tsundoku.io
Nike is trying to sell you ‘mind-body’ shoes | The Verge
Nike’s new “neuroscience-based footwear” is designed to activate an athlete’s brain before and after a big game. The two shoes, a mule (the $95 Mind 001) and a lace-up sneaker (the $145 Mind 002), feature a distinctive array of 22 orange foam nodes embedded in each sole. Nike says the nodes each move up and down independently, like “pistons and gimbals,” as the athlete walks, mimicking the feeling of walking on the ground in a way that is “scientifically shown” to stimulate the foot and thus activate the brain’s sensory areas.
Explore Offline Wikipedia and Educational Content with Kiwix- Kiwix
Kiwix is an offline reader for online content like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, or TED Talks. It makes knowledge available to people with no or limited internet access. The software as well as the content is free to use for anyone.
Soundiiz - Transfer playlists and favorites between streaming services
TRANSFER YOUR PLAYLISTS AND FAVORITES
WikiProjectMed:Internet-in-a-Box - WikiProjectMed
This is cool: Internet-in-a-Box. “Up to 32 users who are within about 100m of the hotspot can connect to the device and access or download the content that exists on the device: Wikipedia slices, medical knowledge, videos, and books.”
Trickle AI - Turn your ideas into live apps and websites with AI.
Fun & simple little browser game: Dodge This. “Move to dodge the bullets. How long can you survive?”
Parachute Backup– Backup Utility for iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos
Parachute is a set-and-forget backup companion for iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive. It automatically syncs your memories—photos, videos, and documents—to your own storage, giving you peace of mind and full control.
Chinese universities want students to use more AI, not less | MIT Technology Review
Liu recommends that students use generative AI to write literature reviews, draft abstracts, generate charts, and organize thoughts. She’s created slides that lay out detailed examples of good and bad prompts, along with one core principle: AI can’t replace human judgment. “Only high-quality input and smart prompting can lead to good results,” she says.
Future of Agentic Readers
An interview with ChatGPT. Do you see this changing in the near future as agentic LLM models will be working on behalf of users? Yes — very likely. This would shift the landscape from passive RSS tools to **active personal browsing assistants** that legally act in your user context. It’s a promising direction, especially with privacy-respecting local models or trusted cloud agents.
Pushover: Simple Notifications for Android, iPhone, iPad, and Desktops
Simple Notifications Pushover makes it easy to get real-time notifications on your Android, iPhone, iPad, and Desktop (Android Wear and Apple Watch, too!)
Alerty
Send yourself native notifications from your apps and servers. Free to try, $5/month for unlimited.
Hypercritical: Hyperspace
My interest in file systems started when I discovered how type and creator codes1 and resource forks contributed to the fantastic user interface on my original Macintosh in 1984. In the late 1990s, when it looked like Apple might buy Be Inc. to solve its operating system problems, the Be File System was the part I was most excited about. When Apple bought NeXT instead and (eventually) created Mac OS X, I was extremely enthusiastic about the possibility of ZFS becoming the new file system for the Mac. But that didn’t happen either.
What in the world are Jony Ive and Sam Altman building? | The Verge
The last 48 hours have been a wild rollercoaster ride for AI hardware. On Tuesday, Google ended its I/O keynote — a roughly two-hour event with copious references to AI — with its vision for Android XR glasses. That included flashy partnerships with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, as well as the first hands-on opportunity with its prototype glasses for the developers and the majority of tech media alike. On the ground, it was among the buzziest things to come out of Google I/O — a glimpse of what Big Tech thinks is the winning AI hardware formula.
Tech CEOs are using AI to replace themselves | The Verge
Buy-now-pay-later company Klarna featured the AI version of CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski in an 83-second video about its Q1 2025 results, as reported by TechCrunch. The video’s description says that his “AI avatar” is presenting the results, and the AI avatar kicks off the video by saying that “it’s me, or rather, my AI avatar.”
Bell Labs’ CMOS chip changed microprocessor design - IEEE Spectrum
In the late 1970s, a time when 8-bit processors were state of the art and CMOS was the underdog of semiconductor technology, engineers at AT&T’s Bell Labs took a bold leap into the future. They made a high-stakes bet to outpace IBM, Intel, andother competitors in chip performance by combining cutting-edge 3.5-micron CMOS fabrication with a novel 32-bit processor architecture.