The Lost Machine Automats and Self-Service Cafeterias of NYC (2023)
Become a paid member to listen to this article “Automats were right up there with the Statue of Liberty and Madison Square Garden,” Kent L. Barwick, former president of the Municipal Art Society, lamented to the New York Times in 1991 when the country’s last automat closed. The automat, a precursor to today’s fast food […]
Scientific and Technical Amateur Radio
Decoding ESCAPADENovember 19, 2025 ESCAPADE is a twin spacecraft mission that will study the Mars magnetosphere. The science mission is led by UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory and the spacecraft buses were built by Rocket Lab. It was launched on November 13 on the second Blue Origin New Glenn mission NG-2. The spacecraft will spend […]
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
So after all these hours talking about AI, in these last five minutes I am going to talk about: horses. Engines, steam engines, were invented in 1700. And what followed was 200 years of steady improvement, with engines getting 20% better a decade. For the first 120 years of that steady improvement, horses didn’t notice […]
The Universal Weight Subspace Hypothesis
Abstract:We show that deep neural networks trained across diverse tasks exhibit remarkably similar low-dimensional parametric subspaces. We provide the first large-scale empirical evidence that demonstrates that neural networks systematically converge to shared spectral subspaces regardless of initialization, task, or domain. Through mode-wise spectral analysis of over 1100 models – including 500 Mistral-7B LoRAs, 500 Vision […]
Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far
Listen to the article 4 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Kroger’s announcement on Tuesday that it will shutter three of its robotic e-commerce fulfillment facilities represents a sharp turnabout for the grocery company, which until recently had expressed confidence in its ability to leverage automation to run […]
Delivery Robots Take over Chicago Sidewalks, Sparking Debate and a Petition
LAKEVIEW — The robot revolution is here — on North Side sidewalks, at least. With names like Stacey, Quincy and Rajesh, the boxy food delivery robots are regularly zooming down side streets — and occasionally getting stuck in the snow — to deliver Shake Shack or Taco Bell to eager patrons in Lakeview, Lincoln Park […]
Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
I complained about this on the socials, but I didn’t get it all out of my system. So now I write a blog post. I’ve never liked the philosophy of “put an icon in every menu item by default”. Google Sheets, for example, does this. Go to “File” or “Edit” or “View” and you’ll see […]
Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1
NATS is a popular streaming system. Producers publish messages to streams, and consumers subscribe to those streams, fetching messages from them. Regular NATS streams are allowed to drop messages. However, NATS has a subsystem called JetStream, which uses the Raft consensus algorithm to replicate data among nodes. JetStream promises “at least once” delivery: messages may […]
Deep dive on Nvidia circular funding
I’ve spent the last 48 hours completely falling down the rabbit hole of NVIDIA’s Q3 Fiscal 2026 earnings report. If you just skim the headlines, everything looks perfect: Revenue is up 62% to $57 billion, and Jensen Huang is talking about a “virtuous cycle of AI.” But I wanted to understand what was really happening […]
Quanta to Publish Popular Math and Physics Titles by Terence Tao and David Tong
Quanta Books is delighted to announce two new upcoming books by mathematician Terence Tao and theoretical physicist David Tong. Six Math Essentials will be Tao’s first math book written for a popular audience. In the book, Tao — a recipient of the Fields Medal and one of the world’s top mathematicians — will explore six […]