There has been the occasional gift-based economy. As opposed to our Exchange Economy or a centrally-controlled Command Hierarchy.(Eric Raymond compares them.) (more)

The Three-Body Problem (Chinese: 三体; lit. 'three body') is a 2008 novel by the Chinese hard science fiction author Liu Cixin. It is the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.[1] The series portrays a fictional past, present, and future wherein Earth encounters an alien civilization from a nearby system of three Sun-like stars orbiting one another, a representative example of the three-body problem in orbital mechanics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)

Ben Hunt term, from the Three Body Problem

'Bad idea': AOC warns Schumer and other Dems poised to make a 'tremendous mistake'. Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) doubled down on urging Democrats to reject the House GOP's stopgap funding bill, calling it a "bad idea" and a "mistake" if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) votes for cloture. (more)

Radley Prescott Balko (born April 19, 1975)[2] is an American journalist, author, blogger, and speaker who writes about criminal justice, the drug war, and civil liberties. In 2022, he began self-publishing his work after being let go from The Washington Post, where he had worked as an opinion columnist for nine years.[3] Balko has written several books, including The Rise of the Warrior Cop and The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radley_Balko

The Silurian hypothesis is a thought experiment, which assesses modern science's ability to detect evidence of a prior advanced civilization, perhaps several million years ago. The most probable clues for such a civilization could be carbon, radioactive elements or temperature variation. Astrophysicists Adam Frank and Gavin Schmidt proposed the "Silurian Hypothesis" in a 2018 paper. They argued that there has been sufficient fossil carbon to fuel an industrial civilization since the Carboniferous Period (~350 million years ago); however, finding direct evidence, such as technological artifacts, is unlikely due to the rarity of fossilization and Earth's exposed surface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis (more)

Feb02'2025 term from Andrej Karpathy: There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

Ten Senate Democrats cave to avert government shutdown. Ten Senate Democrats joined with the Republican majority in voting to move forward with a stopgap spending bill Friday — clearing the path to avoid a government shutdown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_budget#March_2025_continuing_resolution (more)

Zeynep Tufekci: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives. Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers. Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident (lab-leak) might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. (more)

Peter Rothpletz: How do Democrats harness #DarkWoke? As Donald Trump stood in the Capitol Rotunda last week, blundering his way through his second oath of office, online liberals were preoccupied with debating another matter: who will be the first Democrat to call Republicans the R-word? Setting aside the question of whether they should use a term widely considered an ableist slur, that very debate was revealing, for a number of reasons. (more)

Young Democrats’ Anger Boils Over as Chuck Schumer Retreats on Shutdown. And they are demanding that the party develop a bolder policy agenda that can answer the desperation of tens of millions of people who are struggling financially at a time when belief in the American dream is dimming. (more)

The Silurian Hypothesis: It was the Cephalopods. Text, footage and photographs by Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel. A hypothesis called “The Silurian hypothesis” wins the title of “most interesting hypothesis most likely to be false” for all of science. In brief, the hypothesis postulates that previously a species different from ours had achieved high intelligence and technological civilization on this planet. The Silurian hypothesis (named after “Silurian” aliens in the brainy British TV series “Doctor Who”) was initially proposed by two astronomers, Gavin A. Schmidt and Adam Frank, as a thought experiment, to see if it would even be feasible to detect the traces of such a hypothetical civilization which had existed many millions of years ago. (more)

Radley Balko: Three things the Democrats can do right now. When Texas Rep. Al Green stood to interrupt Donald Trump’s address to Congress last week, I had the faint glimmer of hope that maybe — just maybe — the Democrats were finally prepared to meet this crisis with the urgency it demands. (more)

Josh Marshall: Will Dems Pick Up Their Sword? (Ed. Note: I go into a lot of detail below. The bottom line is Democrats have about 48 hours to convince D senators to clip Elon’s wings. It’s still totally doable. But it has to happen in the next 48 hours.) We’re now down to the wire with the so-called “continuing resolution” fight. And just to take this out of Congress-speak, this is a temporary spending bill that will keep the government running, such as it is, until Republicans can pass their full budget in the early fall — that’s the one that will slash health care coverage and other safety net spending to give the Elon Musk crowd a massive tax cut. (more)

Matt Webb: Keeping the seat warm between peaks of cephalopod civilisation. *I often wonder what it felt like for the ancient Greeks, circa 800BC, to be wandering in the ruins of the previous Mycenaean civilisation. These cities they can no longer build; staring at writing they can’t read. The Greeks had to re-discover literacy. (more)

Fight over Donald Trump's firing of watchdog reaches Supreme Court. *President Donald Trump’s bid to expand his power to fire executive branch officials reached the Supreme Court on Sunday — the first of many fast-moving legal challenges during the early weeks of Trump’s second term to land at the high court.. (more)

The Explorers Club is an American-based international multidisciplinary professional society with the goal of promoting scientific exploration and field study. The club was founded in New York City in 1904 and has served as a meeting point for explorers and scientists worldwide. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Explorers_Club (more)

Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) is a research and scientific development company that currently belongs to Alcatel-Lucent. Its headquarters are located in Murray Hill, NJ, in addition to other laboratories around the rest of the United States and in other countries. (old note) (more)

Dan Hon: s14e03: Success Criteria; Chat. 1.1 Another thing that stuck in my head from Tim Bray’s essay about search on Mastodon was his section on success criteria. Here’s the first para, but I encourage you to read the rest..... (more)

50 Years of Text Games - From Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon - A definitive book about the first half-century of interactive fiction. https://if50.textories.com/ (more)