Why the US has nothing like the European MBDA Meteor Missile
What makes the MBDA Meteor such an amazing air-to-air missile and why doesn’t the US have anything like it?
Favorites
5 Statsmodels Functions That Give You the "Why" Behind the "What"
Statsmodels answers the questions sklearn was never built to answer: is this coefficient real or noise, does this added complexity earn its keep, can I trust these p-values in the first place, and which specific data points are quietly running the whole show.
Note: Run a regression in scikit-learn, and you get exactly two things back: a set of coefficients and a .predict() method. Ask it for a p-value on any of those coefficients, and there’s no built-in way to get one. This isn’t a missing feature scikit-learn’s maintainers overlooked; it’s a deliberate design choice they’ve stated directly: scikit-learn is built for prediction, not statistical inference…
Two Room-Temperature Antiferromagnetic Semiconductor Candidates | Vals AI
We are sharing two candidate magnets for next-generation computer memory, found by a team of Claude Opus 5.5 agents. Both are predicted to have zero net magnetism yet still sort electrons by spin: one a new compound we designed, the other a material first made in 1999. We're…
Photonics Fundamentals For Electronics Engineers: eBook
What it is, why it's important, and how it's being used.
He Changed the World of Organ Transplants. Would He Die Waiting for His Own?
A New York transplant surgeon’s experience waiting for a heart transplant laid bare the challenges of a system he had spent decades trying to fix.
Why mathematicians are hiding research results in zero-knowledge proofs
Google made a major breakthrough in quantum computing. To prevent the results from being misused, the company kept them secret. That backfired
The Quest for Universal Flu Vaccines
Modern flu vaccines have an average efficacy of just 40 percent, and they must be revamped each year. How can we make vaccines that are “universal” — both broadly-protective and highly potent?
influenza evolves so quickly that a novel virus emerges each flu season
inactivate viruses with formaldehyde
The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML — examples
The Forgotten Castles of the Garamantes • wild man life
The forgotten castles of the Garamantes lie buried beneath the Libyan Desert, the ruins of a civilisation that built cities, traded with Rome, and raised pyramids in the Sahara.
AI Chip Architectures
A look at AI Chip Architectures. NVIDIA, AMD, TPUs, Trainium, Groq, Cerebras.
The brain doesn’t just experience reality. It edits it into a story
Neuroscience is revealing how our brains are wired for narrative
The primary glue for what remains is cause and effect
therefore
Rope-a-Dope
Are the Enhanced Games an existential threat to fairness or a cure for death? Zach Helfand reports.
The next morning, I caught a training session at the pool. It was difficult to discern the outward effects of enhancement on the athletes. The swimmers looked like swimmers—sinewy and long, with huge hands and feet. An exception was James Magnussen, an Australian who’d been the first person to sign…
What is a Smith Chart?
An interactive introduction to the chart at the heart of RF engineering.
The Eight Load-Bearing Humans Every Civilization Needs
Every civilization runs on eight irreducible roles. AI is hollowing out the derivative layer on top of them. Which layer does your life actually rest on?
Every society runs on the same small set of irreducible jobs, the people who grow food, heal bodies, build and fix things, move goods, transmit knowledge, defend surplus, settle disputes, and hold communities together.
1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities
Take online courses from the world’s top universities for free. Below, you will find 1,700 free online courses from universities like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Oxford and more. Note: This page includes a lot of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
How Soviet prisons spread a secret 'language of thieves' now spoken by millions
The tricks of the jail jargon Fenya were once used to bewilder guards in Stalin's Gulags. Now they are now being used by Russian cyber-criminals.
The Nut That Holds the Guardrail
A 97-year-old fastener manufacturer in Albion, Michigan, trading below book value with zero analyst coverage, just paid a special dividend.
Black Gold and Grey Markets
Adventures in energy trading
The Invisible Landlord of Global Shipping
How Britain built a system where cargo-dependent nations pay rent forever. And why that system is finally cracking.
The EDA Primer: From RTL to Silicon
Laying the Groundwork of the Current Chip Design Paradigm
Josh Hart is more than a glue guy. He’s an example of ‘the street sweeper’ mentality
Hart remains an example of the street sweeper mindset. He does not need the ball to make an impact, and he understands who he is.
“If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry.”
Memory for AI Accelerators | American Compute
HBM, GDDR, and SRAM compared: how memory hierarchy, bandwidth, and capacity determine AI accelerator performance, cost, and which workloads each chip can serve.
prefill (processing the prompt), which is often compute-bound
decode (token-by-token generation), which is usually memory-bound
The US imports 82% of its large power transformers. How it got there, and what it will take to rebuild the capability.
Why the rebuild depends on metallurgy, apprenticeship, and one mill in Pennsylvania.
Asymmetry is all you need
What drives information markets, and why the transformer is unlike the telegraph, ticker, and terminal
The Coding Assistant Breakdown: More Tokens Please
Hands On With GPT 5.5, Opus 4.7, DeepSeek V4, Why Benchmarks Are Bad, and Who’s Going To Win
GPT-5.5 is now materially better
GLM-5.1, Qwen3.6-Plus, Kimi K2.6, Composer 2, and Gemini 3.1 Pro
Opinion | The Unlikely Recovery of America’s China-Shocked Towns
The jobs are coming back, despite President Trump’s tariffs and harsh immigration enforcement.
The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker
Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets...
The Trouble with Transformers
And the long slouch towards cyberpunk
The Aluminum Tech Stack
few analysts have sought to dissect how China’s market share of unglamorous bulk raw material inputs and intermediates across its minerals, metallurgy, and chemicals sectors actually directly enables their market share in these finished, shiny consumer products.
In reality, metals and chemicals production require muscular industrial policy of their own to succeed
The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code
Five git commands that tell you where a codebase hurts before you open a single file. Churn hotspots, bus factor, bug clusters, and crisis patterns.
The 20 most-changed files in the last year.
Every contributor ranked by commit count.
Getting Started
Start building AI apps in Ruby in 5 minutes. Chat, generate images, create embeddings - all with one gem.
The Electric Typewriter
Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers.
Good AI List
AI open source projects & developers
What We Get Wrong About Technology
Blade Runner (1982) is a magnificent film, but there’s something odd about it. The heroine, Rachael, seems to be a beautiful young woman. In reality, she’s a piece of technology — an organic robot …
The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated.
barcode
The Electric Typewriter
Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers.
How AI Labs Are Solving the Power Crisis: The Onsite Gas Deep Dive
Bring Your Own Generation, Sayonara Electric Grid, Turbines vs. Recips. vs. Fuel Cells, Why Not Build More CCGTs?, Onsite Power TCO
2025: The year in LLMs
This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about …
It turned out that the real unlock of reasoning was in driving tools.
notable result is that AI assisted search actually works now.
The State Of LLMs 2025: Progress, Problems, and Predictions
A 2025 review of large language models, from DeepSeek R1 and RLVR to inference-time scaling, benchmarks, architectures, and predictions for 2026.
DeepSeek released their R1 paper in January 2025, which showed that reasoning-like behavior can be developed with reinforcement learning, it was a really big deal
DeepSeek R1 was released as an open-weight model
How to spot a monopoly - Works in Progress Magazine
Competition makes capitalism work. A new method for measuring it may be the holy grail of economic regulation.
For one thing, looking at concentration at a national level can obscure what’s going on at the local level.
Even when concentration does rise, it’s not always bad for competition.
A Liver on Ice
How a liver goes from a brain-dead donor to a living recipient.
Note: liver transplants
The God Man - Full Film (9.5min)
Check out the film's original score by Jason Stamatyades here: https://jasonstam.bandcamp.com/album/the-god-man-original-motion-picture-scoreThe God Man Full...
The Software Tycoon Scaling AI Education to a Billion Kids
As an elementary school principal, a feared software tycoon, a genial recluse, and a technology zealot determined to redefine childhood for mankind, J
There is always an instrument invention that causes the inflection of a science,
Stuttering Has Deep Genetic Roots and May Affect Your Ability to Clap to a Beat
A massive genetic study found that stuttering is not just about nurture and may link to processing rhythm itself.
Advertising Without Signal: The Rise of the Grifter Equilibrium
Economists credit ads with two welfare‑enhancing roles: 1. Informative – trimming search costs (Stigler 1961 (pdf)). 2. Signaling – In classic models, high-quality sellers are more willing to incur large, sunk ad costs because they expect to recoup them through future…
Five Frictions That Flatten the Signal
Because tarnished names can be retired cheaply, long‑run reputation no longer disciplines bad actors.
Why Are Homes in Western States So Expensive?
Earlier this month I came across the following graphic, originally posted on Reddit in 2022, showing the state of housing affordability in the US.
To Make Language Models Work Better, Researchers Sidestep Language | Quanta Magazine
We insist that large language models repeatedly translate their mathematical processes into words. There may be a better way.
This reliance on filtering concepts through the sieve of language can also result in a loss of information
deep neural networks that allow language models to continue thinking in mathematical spaces before producing any text.
How To Build An Agent | Amp
Building a fully functional, code-editing agent in less than 400 lines.
Where Does Meaning Live in a Sentence? Math Might Tell Us. | Quanta Magazine
The mathematician Tai-Danae Bradley is using category theory to try to understand both human and AI-generated language.
Her lens is category theory,
A category consists of some objects, together with relationships between them, called morphisms.
Topic 33: Slim Attention, KArAt, XAttention and Multi-Token Attention Explained – What’s Really Changing in Transformers?
A Blog post by Ksenia Se on Hugging Face
four advanced attention mechanisms which improve how models handle long sequences, cut memory use and make attention learnable
Self-Attention which lets each token “look” at all others
The Mystery of the World's Oldest Writing System Remained Unsolved Until Four Competitive Scholars Raced to Decipher It
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/49/d4/49d4cd58-5332-4784-9f63-60895717fca3/mar2025_a12_mespoptamia.jpg)
In the 1850s, cuneiform was just a series of baffling scratches on clay, waiting to spill the secrets of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia