The IndexPeople don’t change their minds from new evidence.
They change when they feel safe enough to lose status in their old tribe.
Timo Ewalds
@tewalds@sigmoid.social
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I'm a software engineer, formerly at DeepMind where I worked on AlphaStar, fusion and weather prediction. I'm an urbanist, climate change worrier, climber, cyclist and general outdoors aficionado.
Anuj AhoojaIn the last five years, we've gone from "employees will never have to go into an office" to "employees need to be in the office because creative and innovative work can only be done face-to-face between humans" to "lol we don't need humans"
Christopher Kyba 🇨🇦🇪🇺It's a bit surreal to be in this #LPS25 panel discussion about the future of small sats and constellations, and no one talks at all about the fact that LEO is already on the way to runaway debris at the present number of space objects. http://www.researchgate.net/publication/391093502_CRITICAL_NUMBER_OF_SPACECRAFT_IN_LOW_EARTH_ORBIT_A_NEW_ASSESSMENT_OF_THE_STABILITY_OF_THE_ORBITAL_DEBRIS_ENVIRONMENT
𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"I'd like to take a moment to congratulate all Americans for now legally being defined as women.
According to Executive Order 14168 (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/30/2025-02090/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal), the "biological truth" of the genders has been legally defined:
(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.
Here's the problem, turns out that the universe isn't taking attendance at the time of conception and handing out little pink and blue genderino badges before your gonads even exist. At the moment of conception, EVERY embryo's default state is set to produce, eventually, the larger reproductive cell (the ova). It's not until 6-8 weeks AFTER conception that the Y chromosome, if present and activated, decides to show up to the party and begin the process of differentiation into a body that will, eventually, produce the smaller reproductive cell (the sperm).
So, once again, I'd like to congratulate literally everybody in America for, at this moment, being legally AFAB.
David HoLook people, no matter how much we destroy the Earth by polluting it with CO₂, microplastics, PFAS, etc. everywhere, and even if AMOC shuts down and both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt, the Earth will still be infinitely more habitable than Mars. Mars is a shithole and we're not going.
Rebecca Sear“Historically, no one lived past age 35”
"I’ve heard *so* many versions of this claim, including recently from a menopause doctor (implying menopause is not “natural” because noone lived long enough to go through it). Every time someone states this “fact,” a demographer loses a piece of their soul"
There Were Still Old People Wh...
There Were Still Old People Wh...
HaileyRemarkable chart in a new paper out of MIT looking at cognitive performance of LLM users in an essay writing task - https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Hugo van KemenadeExciting news!
PEP 779 ("Criteria for supported status for free-threaded Python") has been accepted, which means free-threaded Python is now a supported build!
We'll drop the "experimental" label already in 3.14 beta 3, due on Tuesday!
PEP 779: Criteria for supported status for free-threaded Python
Hi Thomas, The Steering Council (SC) approves PEP 779, with the effect of removing the “experimental” tag from the free-threaded build of Python 3.14. Along with this, the SC considers the following requirements must be addressed during Phase II. Meeting these ensures that free-threading support can mature into a safe and scalable default in future versions of Python. This is not an exhaustive list, and any other previous requirements should still be met. C API/ABI compatibility and Stable ...
Zach WeinersmithDo you you think there's a sort of... content creation apocalypse coming? Like this sort of thing:
1) People have limited eyeball time. You can increase it marginally, but certainly not an order of magnitude above what it is now (people have to sleep!)
2) Media creation has gotten ever easier
morganthI went to a talk lately that was mostly about something else, but the speaker came out with:
“If you only remember one thing from this talk, remember this. Everyone in this room who likes helping people, raise your hand.”
Every hand, or nearly every hand, went up.
“If you like asking other people for help, keep your hand up.”
Almost every hand went back down.
“As you can see, people like helping you. When you ask for help, you’re making them feel good, even if you don’t like asking.”
I’ve genuinely forgotten the rest of the presentation but I won’t forget that.