Google Gemini is about to control your messages and calls, even if you say no
On July 7, Google’s Gemini assistant will be able to send a WhatsApp message, place a call, adjust your volume, or set a timer, even if you’ve told it not to track what you’re doing. And no, it’s not something you need to opt into, nor can you opt out of it; it’s the new […]
More on Apple’s Trust-Eroding ‘F1 the Movie’ Wallet Ad
This is a funny gag from Claude Zeins, but if you think about it, it shows just how destructive Apple’s decision was to send a push notification from the Wallet app promoting F1 The Movie. It’s a fact that no company can inject an ad into your physical wallet. It just can’t happen. So if […]
Embabel Agent Framework for the JVM
Embabel (Em-BAY-bel) is a framework for authoring agentic flows on the JVM that seamlessly mix LLM-prompted interactions with code and domain models. Supports intelligent path finding towards goals. Written in Kotlin but offers a natural usage model from Java. From the creator of Spring. Key Concepts Models agentic flows in terms of: Actions: Steps […]
The Unsustainability of Moore’s Law
Roughly every two years, the density of transistors that can be fit onto a silicon chip doubles. This is Moore’s Law. Roughly every five years, the cost to build a factory for making such chips doubles, and the number of companies that can do it halves. 25 years ago, there were about 40 such companies […]
Brave creates new TLD on the blockchain
SAN FRANCISCO–May 20th, 2025: In a major step forward for digital identity and internet decentralization, Brave has become the first browser to launch its own on-chain top-level domain. In partnership with Unstoppable Domains, the new .brave domain is now available to Brave’s over 85 million monthly active users—offering a seamless way to own digital identity, […]
Genetic Code Enables Zebrafish to Mend Damaged Organs
Zebrafish have the remarkable and rare ability to regrow and repair their hearts after damage. New research from Caltech and UC Berkeley has identified the circuit of genes controlling this ability and offers clues about how a human heart might someday be repaired after damage, such as a heart attack or in cases of congenital […]
Solving `Passport Application` with Haskell
There’s a trend at the moment of solving online games with programming, let’s do one from the UK called Passport Application, which is developed by “His Majesty’s Passport Office” or HMPO. It’s a cultural phenomenon in the UK: despite being quite expensive (about £100 just to start) for the standard online version (a masterpiece of […]
The Death of the Middle-Class Musician
Rollie Pemberton was barely a teenager when he started rapping. His hometown, Edmonton, didn’t have much of a hip-hop scene in the early aughts, so he honed his craft online. He plugged an old-school microphone into his mom’s desktop computer, recorded a few verses, later turned them into tracks, and sent them out into the […]
Schizophrenia Is the Price We Pay for Minds Poised Near the Edge of a Cliff
This post discusses cliff-edged fitness functions by Randolph Nesse (psychiatrist and one of the founders of evolutionary medicine) and the 2024 paper, “The cliff edge model of the evolution of schizophrenia: Mathematical, epidemiological, and genetic evidence,” by Philipp Mitteroecker and Giuseppe Pierpaolo Merola. If you are a regular reader of this newsletter, and it deepens […]
People Keep Inventing Prolly Trees
Multiple Discovery refers to when a scientific discovery is made independently by multiple individuals around the same time. The most well-known examples are Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz’s independent invention of calculus, and Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s independent formulation of the theory of evolution. (Source: https://xkcd.com/626/) There’s even a hypothesis that multiple discovery […]