The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed
US-centric argument that online gambling should be regulated out of existence.
[…] it is clear from studies and from what we see with our eyes that ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors.
That predation, due to the costs of customer acquisition and retention and the regulations involved, involves pushing upon them terrible products offered at terrible prices, pushed throughout the sports ecosystem and via smartphones onto highly vulnerable people.
This is not a minor issue. This is so bad that you can pick up the impacts in overall economic distress data. The price, on so many levels, is too damn high.
Dark Energy May Not Exist: Something Stranger Might Explain The Universe
I like this because it’s the rare theory that’s neatly simple and comprehensible to interested non-physicists. It possibly makes no sense to proper physicists. The basic idea is that some areas of the universe are a lot more dense than others:
More matter means stronger gravity, which means slower time – in fact, an atomic clock located in a galaxy could tick up to a third slower than the same clock in the middle of a void.
When you stretch that over the huge lifespan of the Universe, billions more years may have passed in the voids than in the matter-dense areas. A mind-boggling implication of that is that it no longer makes sense to say that the Universe has a single unified age of 13.8 billion years. Instead, different regions would have different ages.
And since so much more time has passed in the voids, more cosmological expansion has taken place there. Therefore, if you look at an object on the far side of a void, it would appear to be moving away from you much faster than something on this side of the void. Over time, these voids take up a larger proportion of the Universe, creating the illusion of an accelerating expansion, without needing to conjure up any dark energy.
Neat idea for standardised old-school website links, for old-school people who still have their own website
Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like /now, /about, or /uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb.
Neal Stephenson makes the case for geoengineering the climate by injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. Loathed by left and right, and not without risks. But better than what’s coming…? Also pretty sunsets I guess. Contains an impressively horrific prediction for an imminent climate-related disaster.
My prediction for the Trump administration is that someone will talk him into doing this, and he’ll just do it because Trump, and annoyingly it’ll work.
History has taught us that when sulfur dioxide (SO2) is injected into the stratosphere by major volcanic eruptions, global temperatures go down for a couple of years until the SO2 naturally falls out of the atmosphere and things return to normal. This is a natural scientific experiment that has been repeated many times throughout recorded history, but only since the Pinatubo eruption in 1991 have we been in a position to capture data and make sense of it.
Magic Links Have Rough Edges, but Passkeys Can Smooth Them Over
Magic links are easy for the public, frustrating for power users, and much preferred by websites who really really don’t want to store passwords any more – ie. everyone. They have their issues, and this article argues that layering passkeys on top is a good fix. I agree that this is The Way eventually, but…
Passkey technology is elegant, but it’s most definitely not usable security
…I nodded along with this argument that passkeys are not viable yet. Not because of passkeys themselves, which are certainly better than passwords. But because the surrounding infrastructure is too confusing. The tech is standardised, but each OS implements it in mutually exclusive ways that the public have zero chance of understanding. I get tripped up sometimes, and I know what I’m doing. I’ve spent a lot of time implementing password managers in the last year, and I am not shy about treating my users as intelligent enough to understand new tech, but I am not going anywhere near introducing passkeys yet.
Passkeys are now supported on hundreds of sites and roughly a dozen operating systems and browsers. The diverse ecosystem demonstrates the industry-wide support for passkeys, but it has also fostered a jumble of competing workflows, appearances, and capabilities that can vary greatly depending on the particular site, OS, and browser (or browser agents such as native iOS or Android apps). Rather than help users understand the dizzying number of options and choose the right one, each implementation strong-arms the user into choosing the vendor’s preferred choice.
No one understands how playing cards work
Solitaire is really hard to understand, and there are a bunch of variations. It’s also surprisingly popular. Fun article that wanders off into the history of cards.
“One of the embarrassment of applied probability is that we can not analyze the original game of solitaire,” […] “What’s the chance of winning, how to play well, how do various changes of rules change the answers?” Diaconis wrote. “Surely you say, the computer can do this. Not at present, not even close.”
The tech to build the holodeck
“Gaussian splatting” is an objectively fantastic thing to say. It refers to a 2023-developed technique for scanning objects into 3D space – in a much more effective way than creating a massive number of polygons. You can just do it on your phone. I got the app and it’s as impressive as they say – particularly because you can export to standard models.
When I visited my elderly mom in Germany recently, I realized it could be one of the last times I see her in the cozy little house she has called home for more than two decades. So I did what anyone would do: I busted out my phone and took lots of photos of the place to preserve as many memories as possible: the warm fireplace; the shelves full of familiar books; the rickety old garden bench up front that everyone signed during a special birthday celebration many years ago.
Then, I tried something else. I opened up Scaniverse, a 3D scanner app from Pokémon Go maker Niantic, and captured some of those things as 3D objects, crouching and tiptoeing my way around them as I slowly moved my phone to record every angle and inch. The results were a bit imperfect around the edges, but they still felt profound. When I opened the scans up later, both on my phone and with a VR headset, I was able to look at that weathered garden bench from all angles, as if I was standing right in front of it. The experience touched me emotionally in ways I wasn’t prepared for.
Which AI to Use Now: An Updated Opinionated Guide
A regularly-updated guide to which AIs are best for your use case. Doomed to be out of date the moment it’s published (DeepSeek’s image model! o3-mini! o3-mini-high! That’s just the last week!) but a valiant effort and as good as you can get.
We are going to go through things in detail, but, for most people, there are three good choices right now: Claude from Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. There are also a trio of models that might make sense for specialized users: Grok by Elon Musk’s X.ai is an excellent model that is most useful if you are a big X user; Microsoft’s Copilot offers many of the features of ChatGPT and is accessible to users through Windows; and the new DeepSeek, a Chinese model that is remarkably capable (and free). I’ll talk about some caveats and other options at the end.
I’m trying hard to keep up with AI. I find it spectacularly interesting. But I’ve had to go back to Twitter for that, because the Official Bluesky Opinion is that AI is made by techbros, who are bad, and so we work backwards from that to conclude AI is a scam a la crypto. Lots of people I admire seem to have adopted this opinion wholesale, which is dispiriting.
The Short Case for Nvidia Stock
The article that probably caused all the fuss in the markets earlier this week. Nominally about NVIDIA but really about the underlying technology, it’s a remarkably clear explanation of the current state of AI models, how they work, and why there’s so much enthusiasm at the moment for ‘reasoning’ models. Super technical but just about within reach if you’re familiar with the broad concepts. I learnt a lot.
This represents a true sea change in how inference compute works: now, the more tokens you use for this internal chain of thought process, the better the quality of the final output you can provide the user. In effect, it’s like giving a human worker more time and resources to accomplish a task, so they can double and triple check their work, do the same basic task in multiple different ways and verify that they come out the same way; take the result they came up with and “plug it in” to the formula to check that it actually does solve the equation, etc.
It turns out that this approach works almost amazingly well; it is essentially leveraging the long anticipated power of what is called “reinforcement learning” with the power of the Transformer architecture. It directly addresses the single biggest weakness of the otherwise phenomenally successful Transformer model, which is its propensity to “hallucinate”.