2026-04-23 05:38:50
“I believe in an old-fashioned virtue called Doing the Freakin’ Work. Read the book, not the summary. Write the piece, not the prompt. Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”
2026-04-23 04:48:00
Sony’s AI division has designed a robot that can beat elite human players at table tennis. From the paper:
Evaluated in matches against elite and professional players under official competition rules, Ace achieved several victories and demonstrated consistent returns of high-speed, high-spin shots. These results highlight the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks, suggesting broader applications in domains requiring fast, precise human–robot interaction.
Ace is a fine name, but I might have gone with something like WALL-E Supreme instead. (Robbie Supreme?)
Tags: artificial intelligence · robots · sports · table tennis · video
2026-04-23 04:02:33
I had somehow missed (or forgotten) that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, one of The Chronicles of Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Filming has wrapped and it’s out in theaters on Nov 26.
2026-04-23 02:55:37
A group of “unauthorized users” have accessed Anthropic’s Mythos AI model, which the company recently said they couldn’t widely release because it was too dangerous. Whoopsie doodle! Maybe don’t use guessable paths for your powerful cyberattack model?
2026-04-23 02:30:00
Filmmaker Noah Hawley was invited to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in 2018. Reflecting on the experience recently for The Atlantic, Hawley writes that today’s super-rich have stopped “pretending that the rules of human society apply” to them.
The Jeff Bezos of 2018 acted as if he still believed that people’s impression of him mattered, that his financial and social value could be affected by negative publicity. He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet freed himself—the way Daniel Plainview freed himself—from the rules of men.
Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.
The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.
Daisy Grewal in 2012 for Scientific American: How Wealth Reduces Compassion.
Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.
Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West by Justin Farrell sounds like an interesting read along these same lines.
Tags: Daisy Grewal · Jeff Bezos · Noah Hawley · wealth
2026-04-23 01:51:04
Wow, this interview! “I’ve never had an interview quite like this one with Charlize Theron.”