The demand for computing power is so fierce that OpenAI’s departure barely mattered to Nscale, which has quickly become one of Europe’s hottest startups, valued at $14.6 billion. Known as a “neocloud,” so called because it is built primarily for the needs of new AI models, it is part of an emergent category of tech companies that have risen up to satiate the market’s ravenous hunger for AI computing power. Nscale is barely two years old, but business is booming, with five data centers in various stages of construction in the U.S., U.K., and Norway. Investors are lining up in advance of a possible IPO later this year. In March Nscale raised $2 billion, the largest round of its kind in European history. Josh Payne, the company’s 32-year-old CEO, tells TIME he wants to turn Nscale into a “$1 trillion hyperscaler”—a new cloud company that can compete with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. (more)

Default Friend: Meditations on the self-diagnosis. I constantly think about self-diagnosis and the Internet. (more)

R U Sirius converses with Joseph Heath, author of Nation Of Rebels: Why Counter-Culture Became Consumer Culture. The story we tell in the book is not one about how the system has systematically co-opted countercultures, but rather about how counterculturalists have systematically deluded themselves into thinking they were challenging the system....That having been said, I should note that we think the evils of Consumerism are extremely serious. The problem is not that countercultural thinking goes too far in criticizing it, but rather that counterculturalists misdiagnose the problem - attributing it to manufactured desires, rather than competitive consumption - and therefore recommend solutions - individualistic nonconformity, DIY - that have, over the years, manifestly exacerbated the problem.

Emma Loker: Agreeableness and Neuroticism: What's the Relationship? Are agreeableness and neuroticism two sides of the same coin or inherently different?... Evidence suggests that agreeableness and neuroticism share an inverse relationship. People who score high on agreeableness typically score low on neuroticism and vice versa. (more)

Sasha Chapin: Novice Meditator's Notes, Late December. Meditation is, right now, one of the most meaningful parts of my life. But I’m not an expert; I’ve probably practiced for somewhere between 500-1200 hours in my life, which is, like, one-twentieth of what people do before they get called Roshi, or start a sex cult, or whatever. So I share these reflections with you in a spirit of curiosity, rather than authority. (more)

The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, campaigned for freer lifestyles on a broad range of social issues such as feminism, gay rights, drug policy reforms, and gender relations.[1] The New Left differs from the traditional left in that it tended to acknowledge the struggle for various forms of social justice, whereas previous movements prioritized explicitly economic goals. However, many have used the term "New Left" to describe an evolution, continuation, and revitalization of traditional leftist goals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left

Herbert Marcuse (/mɑːrˈkuːzə/ mar-KOO-zə;[4] German: [maʁˈkuːzə]; July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German and American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin and then at the University of Freiburg, where he received his PhD under the supervision of Martin Heidegger.[5] He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research, which later became known as the Frankfurt School. In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and pop culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse (more)

the supposed war on terrorism following the World Trade Center bombings

The Gulag[c][d] was a system of labor camps in the Soviet Union.[8][9][7] The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Glávnoye upravléniye ispravítel'no-trudovýkh lageréy" (Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й or "Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps"), but the full official name of the agency changed several times. The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The camps housed both ordinary criminals and political prisoners, a large number of whom were convicted in accordance with simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas or other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. The agency was established in 1930 and initially was administered by the OGPU (1923–1934), later known as the NKVD (1934–1946) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in the final years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag (more)

Samizdat (Russian: самиздат, pronounced [səmɨzˈdat], lit. 'self-publishing'), also samvydav (Ukrainian: самвидав), was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because printed texts could be traced back to the source. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet Union censorship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, romanized: Arkhipelag GULAG) is a three-volume nonfiction series written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident. It was first published in Russian in 1973 by the Parisian publisher YMCA-Press,[1][2] and it was translated into English and French the following year. It explores a vision of life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system. Solzhenitsyn constructed his highly detailed narrative from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and his own experience as a Gulag prisoner. Following its publication, the book was initially circulated in the Soviet Union by samizdat underground publication. It was not widely published there until 1989. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn[a][b] ⓘ (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008)[6][7] was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature".[8] His nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state" and sold tens of millions of copies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn

Elle Hunt: I’m disagreeable – and it’s backed by science. Can I change my personality? (more)

book by Jason Pargin (David Wong), ISBN:9781250285959 (more)

L Neil Smith and Scott Beiser have put their Roswell Texas Graphic Novel online for free.

Cosma Shalizi reviews Dan Sperber's Explaining Culture. Roswell is certainly worthy of contemplation: like Lourdes, it has become famous for something which never happened. I refer, of course, to the infamous myth that a flying saucer crashed there in 1947, making the national news, (more)

Debris found by a rancher in 1947 near Roswell, New Mexico, has become the basis for UFO conspiracy theories alleging that the United States military recovered a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. After metallic and rubber debris was recovered by Roswell Army Air Field personnel, the United States Army Air Forces[a] announced possession of a "flying disc". This announcement made international headlines, but was retracted within a day. The debris was from a complex and uncrewed military balloon train consisting of linked balloons and assorted equipment, operated from the nearby Alamogordo Army Air Field as part of the top-secret Project Mogul, a program intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests.[b] To obscure the purpose and source of the debris, the army reported that it was merely a conventional weather balloon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident (more)

book by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (more)

Dan Sperber (born 20 June 1942 in Cagnes-sur-Mer) is a French social and cognitive scientist, anthropologist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; (with British philosopher and linguist Deirdre Wilson) relevance theory; (with French psychologist Hugo Mercier) the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Sperber

Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy, and Our Lives by Joseph Heath, 2014. (more)