What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x — CatalystNeuro

A given level of LLM intelligence costs about a thirtieth of what it did a year ago, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Using Artificial Analysis's measured cost per task, this post traces the falling price of each capability level, explains why cheaper intelligence leads…

A great deal of useful work does not require the smartest model available, but a model that is good enough, applied many thousands of times

At today’s prices a full pass over the corpus costs a little over a hundred dollars with a model whose capability was at the frontier in the spring. At the prices of this past March, the same pass with the same level of capability would have cost several thousand dollars, and a year ago that…

NPO State of the Union

When NPO? Who NPO? Where NPO? Why NPO? Winners, losers, and more.

Why Thailand was never colonized

Diplomacy, reform, and a convenient stone

Mongkut came across a remarkable object: a four-sided, black stone monolith, about a meter high and inscribed with an unusual script. The stone would become known as the Ramkhamhaeng Stele.

The discovery of the Stele was, as it turned out, serendipitous. Over five centuries, European powers colonized virtually every other territory on Earth

12 Best Free Platforms to Learn DevOps with Hands-On

Practice makes a devops perfect.

Home 🍹 HTMLcat

Bari Weiss Blew Up 60 Minutes. Now She Has to Fix it.

Inside her battles with the staff and her attempts to overhaul the show.

Lead Belly: The Convicted Killer Who Changed American Music

Huddie Ledbetter served two prison terms for violent crimes and still became one of the most influential musicians America ever produced. The full story of Lead Belly.

A seriously weird study just proved confidence is contagious | BBC Science Focus Magazine

Can you catch the bug?

A 1932 Illustrated Map of Harlem's Night Clubs: From the Cotton Club to the Savoy Ballroom

Harlem’s undergoing another Renaissance, and has been for years now. Crime’s down, real estate prices are up, and throngs of pale-faced hipsters are descending to check the area out. Sure, something’s gained, but something’s lost, too.

HTML Can Do That

HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML.

Tomato Lentil Rice With Feta Yogurt Recipe • 5★ • 1 hr

This deeply comforting one pot tomato-lentil rice works equally well as a side dish or as the main part of a meal. Aromatic cumin and coriander pair well with the acidity of the marinara, while the earthy turmeric gives the dish a golden brown hue.

gralhix #004

just a blog

Incentives are for losers

OR: you must look at this fish and go insane

You Probably Don’t Get Why Stripe Bought OpenRouter — Research — AMP PBC

Stripe's purchase of OpenRouter has been read as a routing or billing acquisition. We argue it's a strategic security decision, and that this is net positive for the ecosystem.

Star Wars Cantina Auditions

The Rockefeller of solar

No drilling required

The floodgates are open after another Chinese company lands a reusable rocket - Ars Technica

We will put the booster back into service for another flight as soon as possible."

Design for Testability (DFT): How Do We Know a Chip Actually Works?

Designing a semiconductor chip is not only about making it perform its intended function.

Physicists entangle quantum memories across a record-breaking 420 km

Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information ...

FareedKhan-dev/kimi-k3-in-c: A 2.78-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 running inference on a single CPU in 8.24 GB of RAM. Portable C99: no BLAS…

A 2.78-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 running inference on a single CPU in 8.24 GB of RAM. Portable C99: no BLAS, no framework, no GPU. - FareedKhan-dev/kimi-k3-in-c

Researchers Use Photons & Phonons for Long-Distance Qubit Communication - News

The team employed a quantum material and chip architecture that could be key in scaling quantum computers to one million qubits.

The Company Riding the Thirteenth Channel

There is a hidden track baked into almost every blockbuster, a frozen eight-dollar toll, and a company the market still calls a shaky-chair vendor.

Why parabolas are crucial to cryptography

Cryptographers use points along a curve to crack especially tough codes

Python Polars: The Definitive Cheatsheet

Quick reference guide for transforming, analyzing, and visualizing data with Python Polars.

Browsing tools and Ad blockers: A guide to cleaner web experiences

Five browser-based ad blockers compared: Open Adblocker, uBlock Origin Lite, AdGuard, Ghostery, and Adblock Plus, each suited to a different browsing preference.

The Genius of Airplane!: How to Make a Comedy by Playing Everything Completely Straight

Not every 46-year-old comedy still gets laughs, but Airplane! seems only to get funnier with the decades.

Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things

Plus Gemini 3.7 Flash, Muse Glimmer, and DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813

The 100 Best Essays from Aeon

Click through for our favourite wrting from Aeon magazine

The CIA's Mystery Plane?

A plane registered to a Virginia LLC wound up involved in a CIA covert action near the Galapagos

Nothing Moves the Needle

Not that long ago, the press could root out corruption, topple presidents, and end wars. Now, even the biggest scoops have little impact. Here's how and why the media lost its mojo.

General Dynamics Failed to Build Artillery Shells for the Army — ProPublica

General Dynamics opened a Texas factory to churn out artillery shells for Ukraine, but the machines kept breaking. Robot arms smashed into things. Hunks of metal crashed to the floor. There was even a real-life dumpster fire.

#semiconductor #hbm #chiplets #ucie | Paul Chao

The most expensive part of HBM is not the DRAM. It is the piece of silicon underneath it. HBM moves data over a very wide parallel bus, roughly 1024 bits per stack. Every one of those wires has to be routed through a silicon interposer sitting between the memory and the compute…

A controversial Alzheimer’s surgery is said to reverse symptoms — here’s what scientists know

Jaw-dropping patient videos and miraculous testimonials ignited a frenzy in China over a technique that aims to improve drainage from the brain. Now it is entering trials worldwide.

Common Knowledge (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Build Your Own DRAM Supply Model

Wafer starts, die size, yield, HBM mix, node migration impacts, etc. Simple enough to follow, but detailed enough to learn from.

A Deep Dive into SRAM: The Staging Ground of LLM Inference

Fundamentals of SRAM and how SRAM constraints affect array size scaling and LLM inference performance

Why We Think We Know More Than We Do

Why We Think We Know More Than We Do: Breaking down the famous “Dunning-Kruger effect” with David Dunning himself

Those in the bottom quartile of performance wildly overestimated their skill in that domain

top quartile often underestimated their relative skill (though to a lesser extent).

View: Big tech meets Milton Friedman

Big Tech is working its way through all four stages of a money-spending matrix legendary economist Milton Friedman outlined.

Milton Friedman, the legendary economist, laid out a simple matrix. Spend your own money on yourself and you’re disciplined on cost (it’s your money) and clear on value (you know what you want.). That’s an efficient economy, though not a very vibrant one. Spend your own money on someone else and…

big tech companies are spending other people’s money on other people.

The online shopping trend where you buy nothing

On South Korea’s “dopamine sites,” the pleasure comes from aspirational shopping rituals like browsing, curating, and tracking — not from a delivery.

Note: On South Korea’s “dopamine sites,” the pleasure comes from aspirational shopping rituals like browsing, curating, and tracking — not from a delivery.

rubygems distribution docs

Documenting RubyGems, Stdlib, and GitHub Projects

HBM’s Manufacturing Complexities Mean General-Purpose DRAM Still The Primary Cash Cow For Companies Like Micron; Gross Margins Estimated To…

HBM manufacturing complexities are keeping general-purpose DRAM as Micron’s main cash cow, with DRAM gross margins projected to reach 95% by 2027

New font turns ordinary webpages into nonsense for AI scrapers - Ars Technica

“ShieldFont” aims to poison AI training data without making pages unreadable for people.

The Quest For Caffeine You Can Have At Night

...

lsblk Command in Linux: List Block Devices

Use lsblk to list disks, partitions, filesystems, UUIDs, and mount points in Linux, then customize columns and produce JSON output for scripts.

A bungled bomb plot in Poland exposed a spy – but whose spy was he?

The long read: When exiled Russian opposition campaigner Igor Rogov was accused of working for the Kremlin, his friends were shocked. Could this young activist have really been an undercover agent?

Here’s the Scoop: A Reading List on Ice Cream - Longreads

Seven stories that celebrate the surprising influence of a humble dessert.

The Mystery of Dark Oxygen

James Dinneen on the search for dark oxygen in the Moab Khotsong gold-and-uranium mine, outside Johannesburg, South Africa.

Build Wide, Ship Narrow | Blog

Splitting a finished branch into small PRs used to be the expensive part, so we decided the boundaries before the code existed. That cost collapsed. Now the code can tell you where to cut it.

The Three-Stroke Problem

When three kinds of strokes entangle with each other, the resulting design system is chaotic for most initial conditions. Let's go through the stroke rendering in design software.

The deep satisfaction of doing work that lasts | Psyche Notes to Self

In Studs Terkel’s oral history ‘Working’, some of the people happiest with their work have something in common

There are various things that workers seem to be seeking, and sometimes finding, in Terkel’s book, such as respect, autonomy or a way to be themselves. But the builders and other stories suggest that a big one is the desire to make something that lasts in the world. Perhaps this is an extended form…