A thousand-year-long composition turns 25 (2024)
As of midday today (GMT), New Year’s Eve, Longplayer has been playing continuously, without repetition, for 25 years. Playing since the cusp of the new millennium, at midnight on 31 December 1999, the composition will continue without repetition (if circumstances permit it to) until the last moments of 2999, when it will return to the […]
The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets
The nature of time is one of the most profound and longstanding problems in physics – one that no one can agree on. From our perspective, time seems to steadily progress forward with each tick of the clock. But the closer we look, the more bizarre time becomes – from equations that state time should […]
Modern Cassette Walkmans
Affordable modern portable cassette tape player & recorder with 2 track, stereo playback. Good sound quality, plays all (I-IV) cassettes. Frequency response : 40Hz-11KHz (Type I), Signal-to-noise ratio 50dB, Distorsion 1%, Wow & Flutter 0.3%, Headphone output power: 2×2 mW into 32 ohms
The power of proximity to coworkers [pdf]
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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 […]
Manual: Spaces
Space (whitespace) is a whole group of glyphs, one of the most important and frequently-used. Any computer user knows space as the widest key on their keyboard, however the notion itself is much bigger and comprises multiple important typographic terms and ideas. Space in general is a blank unprinted area, a counterform that separates letters, words, lines etc. In typography, there are several types of spaces: sinkage (space […]
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 […]