2025-08-15 17:25:25
We know that alcohol is not the healthiest beverage to consume. When abused, people can turn into the worst versions of themselves and it makes the body work extra hard to flush out the unhealthy behavior. Kurzgesagt, in signature illustrated style, show how your body reacts to alcohol, how much is too much, and makes suggestions for moderation.
2025-08-15 16:11:44
Jeff Horwitz, for Reuters, tells the story of 76-year-old Thongbue Wongbandue, who grew infatuated with a Meta-made chatbot via Facebook Messenger. He packed his bags for the city, hit his head on they way, and passed a few days after.
The device showed that Bue traveled around two miles, then stopped by a Rutgers University parking lot a little after 9:15 p.m. Linda was about to pick Bue up in her car when the AirTag’s location suddenly updated. It was outside the emergency room of nearby Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, where Linda had worked until she retired.
Bue had fallen. He wasn’t breathing when an ambulance arrived. Though doctors were able to restore his pulse 15 minutes later, his wife knew the unforgiving math of oxygen deprivation even before the neurological test results came back.
Bue’s family looked at his phone the next day, they said. The first thing they did was check his call history and texts, finding no clue about the identity of his supposed friend in New York.
Then they opened up Facebook Messenger. At the top of Bue’s inbox, just above his chats with family and friends in Thailand, were messages from an attractive young woman going by the name “Big sis Billie.”
Remember when Facebook was about connecting people to real people? Those were the days.
2025-08-15 01:50:12
AI companies like to say that they are close to or reached a level of “intelligence” in their tools that it’s like having a PhD assistant in your pocket. Claus Wilke argues that classification is misguided.
Now, presumably AI models have the required tenacity for a PhD (as long as somebody pays for the token budget), and I just said exceptional intelligence is not required. So what’s keeping current AI models from PhD-level performance? In my opinion, it’s the ability to actually reason, to introspect and self-reflect, and to develop and update over time an accurate mental model of their research topic. And most importantly, since PhD-level research occurs at the edge of human knowledge, it’s the ability to deal with a situation and set of facts that few people have encountered or written about.
In practical terms, I’m pretty sure most people do not want a PhD-level assistant. They want immediate answers. They want a diligent intern.
A PhD assistant is going to answer your question with more questions, and then five to seven years later, you will finally get an “answer” that might be correct but you won’t know for sure because there will be a lot of uncertainty attached. However, the good news is that you might be able to explore more with further research and future directions. You will have to do that on your own though or find another PhD assistant, because the original assistant has since moved on to a different interest.
Tags: Claus Wilke, PhD
2025-08-14 23:08:41
Hi all. Nathan here. This is the Process, the member-exclusive newsletter on data and visualization beyond the defaults. This week, we check for mistakes to avoid embarrassment and loss of trust in just a few minutes. Because no one is perfect, even those striving for PhD-level intelligence.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
2025-08-14 15:23:16
Wplace uses a world map as a canvas. Zoom in to where you live and paint with pixels, or just gander at what others’ masterpieces (given technical difficulties, it seems you can only look for now).
If this looks familiar, Wplace is based on r/place from 2017, when Reddit released a canvas that anyone could draw a pixel on every few minutes. Wplace is like that but in a geographic space and no battles for pixel space.
Tags: cooperative, paint, pixels
2025-08-13 15:20:25
In what now seems like a tale as old as time, a man grew convinced that he had untapped mathematical genius, with the help of ChatGPT. But 90,000 words later, it seems that might not be the case. For the New York Times, Kashmir Hill and Dylan Freedman evaluated Allan Brooks’ very long chat.
This is going to keep happening, and it’s probably going to get worse until people realize that the chatbot is not thinking. It’s a product of statistical convergence. The “delusions” are computer errors. Please stop pretending the chatbots are people.
Tags: chatbot, ChatGPT, error, New York Times
