Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
We have approached the end of summer. Our kids are going back to school and as every parent, I am happy about the kids being out of the house while I also miss the summer time where everybody could sleep a bit longer. Our youngest kid is starting fifth grade and is going to a new school, so everything is a bit more exciting this year. So now I won’t have a kid in elementary school anymore, this is a welcome change.
This week I picked a bunch of articles that might seem like a total arbitrary collection of articles, but there is one common thread that ties these articles together: I enjoyed reading them and learned something new.
Drop everything and read these Five Things now!
The truth, at least so far as we know, is less impressive. Instead of world models, today’s generative AIs appear to learn “bags of heuristics”: scores of disconnected rules of thumb that can approximate responses to specific scenarios, but don’t cohere into a consistent whole. (Some may actually contradict each other.) It’s a lot like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, where each man only touches one part of the animal at a time and fails to apprehend its full form. One man feels the trunk and assumes the entire elephant is snakelike; another touches a leg and guesses it’s more like a tree; a third grasps the elephant’s tail and says it’s a rope. When researchers attempt to recover evidence of a world model from within an LLM — for example, a coherent computational representation of an Othello game board — they’re looking for the whole elephant. What they find instead is a bit of snake here, a chunk of tree there, and some rope.
So what do you think, is the superintelligence near or is this just a really interesting phase, which is just a big step forward, but nothing more?
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Ghosting most often describes an unexpected cliff appearing along the meandering path of dating life: one is suddenly abandoned by a prospective romantic partner. Conversation stops abruptly; texts or app messages go unanswered without excuse or explanation. Smartphones, always online, offer the possibility of 24/7 contact with a love interest, even if they are a relative stranger; the act of ghosting closes the channel without any recourse. Ghosters become unreachable phantoms; the ghostee may feel as though they’re facing none other than the impetuously grinning ghost emoji. But Pettman describes ghosting as an experience that transcends places like Hinge. “At a certain age, we have all been ghosted at some point in our lives. Indeed, we’ve all likely ghosted somebody in turn,” he writes. The author means this in the larger sense of abandonment—of a parent, of a friend, or even of a boss. We may aspire not to ghost, knowing the pain it causes, but technology has made ghosting, in its many forms, all but inevitable.
I hate ghosting. It’s the worst. And I do make an effort to really annoy people who don’t respond. Mostly to annoy them, not because I really want to deal with them. Just to make a point.
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August 26 is not a day that is particularly known for feeling especially crisp or autumnal in most parts of North America. And yet it’s the day this year — the earliest release date ever — that Starbucks, contending with a slowdown in sales, will unleash its annual run of pumpkin spice lattes upon its customers.
You’d be forgiven for mistaking this tone for one of disdain. Since its inception in 2003, the pumpkin spice latte has become something of a straw man for discussions about capitalism, seasonal creep, and the meaning of “basic,” resulting in widespread hatred for an otherwise innocuous beverage.
Every year I am fascinated how everything turns pumpkin spice all of a sudden. And every year it seems to be a bigger phenomenon than the year before. I drink my coffee black, thank you very much.
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Font-de-Gaume contains the only polychromatic prehistoric cave art still open to the public. Lascaux, fourteen miles away, closed to visitors in 1963: the carbon dioxide and humidity from human sweat and breath was damaging the paintings. Outside the cave in daylight, large beige-grey marbled cliffs overhung the habitable cottages of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac and the ruins of human shelters around 40,000 years old. Here, in 1868, a geologist uncovered the bones of five Cro-Magnon skeletons, which, at the time, were the earliest known examples of Homo sapiens sapiens—us. Homo sapiens, in Latin, means the wise human. Inside the cave, 250 earth-colored images of reindeer, bison, woolly mammoths, ibexes, horses, and a wolf haunted the walls. Most of the animals were outlined in thick black lines and filled in with rich, earthy ochre paint.
Ok, this is really cool. I never thought about color and how people invented colors and started using it.
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For the same reason we don’t just drink coffee from American beans, knitters source some of their favorite yarn brands from all across the globe. Livestock from Argentina, Iceland, Norway, and more produce distinctly varied types of wool, from merino to lambswool, cashmere to mohair. U.S. dyers relied on this wool as the base for their own brands, which make up the rich (and literal) tapestries of U.S. crafters. These materials are the difference between a dark winter sweater and a bright summer tank top, a luxurious cashmere scarf versus rough woolen mittens.
For hobbyists, this cannot be achieved with U.S. materials alone. While the country boasted thousands of wool mills in the 1800s, America spent the past 100 years introducing trade policies, like NAFTA and the Multifiber Arrangement, that made it financially favorable for brands and designers to outsource. This dramatically reduced the industry to less than 80 U.S. mills still active today. Many of these remaining mills are small and family-run, and not built to handle the demand these tariffs will create.
My wife sent me this article. It’s really absurd how Trump tax idiocy is ruining everything for a lot of small business owners.
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That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico
