Is philosophy real? We sent our correspondent to find out. I like philosophy. Not all of it is profound — there are two dozen treatises on the ontology of holes — but the field is accessible and can be eye-opening. Alas, the only flavor of philosophy that’s popular with techies is what I’d call edgelord utilitarianism — a collection of materialist, pseudo-mathematical beliefs favored by the SF Bay

Roll a d6. If you rolled “1”: Read the article. Find and quote the weakest sentence. Must be tangential to the main thesis. Say “This makes me not want to read the article.” If you rolled “2”: Do not read the article. SF Bay Area humble brag: “This reminds me of the time I met Steve Jobs...” If you rolled “3”: Open with “I have a doctorate in point-set topology. This is utter nonsense.” Fail to ex

Are humans conscious? Not all LLMs agree. I dislike the punditry that surrounds generative AI. Perhaps on brand, much of it is machine-generated. The rest is mired in near-religious fervor, flames fanned for financial or political gain. There’s also simply too much of it. I have opinions — opinions I like! — but so does everyone else in your social media feed. At the same time, it’s a shame that w

I am alone now. I don’t know who else survived. We think it started in a lab. A team of scientists wanted to create a self-replicating machine, just to see if they could. They stored the program in a polymeric ribbon; they made the machine out of carbon, not silicon, so that it posed no threat to life. The team published a paper, sterilized the vat, and flushed the waste down the drain. It shouldn

Some pics, endorsements, and the reason the book exists in the first place. I try to keep marketing in check: I’ve been working on my latest book for more than a year but only posted about it once. At the time, the book was still going through layout and editing, so I didn’t expect many subscribers to pull the trigger. But now, I’m happy to report that the book is actually, physically here — and i

In which Sally loses her marbles. If you’re dabbling in electronics, you might have heard of what’s known as the inverse-square law. This law says that the intensity of many types of physical phenomena decreases with the square of the distance to the origin. For example, if you get twice as far from a lightbulb, a handheld light meter will register a four-fold drop in luminance. The same goes for

Raymond Chandler would have loved generative AI I don’t write about generative AI much. Everyone else does; not much of consequence ever gets said. I think the technology is great where it helps us automate mundane tasks, cancerous where it undermines genuine human expression, and darkly funny where the two worlds collide . As a security person, though, I want to know how the models fail. They’re

We must not allow a paradox gap. According to the latest projections from a frontier AI lab, we’re at most five years away from the scenario shown in the diagram below: This can’t be stopped; the only thing we can do is prepare. Luckily, if there’s one thing we learned from science fiction, it’s that to thwart a crazed artificial intelligence, you must present it with a paradox. Upon this, the thi

» Mark has joined the call. » Christine has joined the call. Mark: Sorry, can you hear me? Okay. Team — there is no easy way to say this. I’m here to inform you that we’ve made the difficult decision to cut 7% of our workforce. This, regrettably, includes everyone in this video call. I’ll now — cherry09: What?! Mark: We’ve made the difficult decision — cherry09: But the project is going so well! M

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This is an article I resisted writing for a long time. I didn’t pull the trigger in the mid-2010s, in the glory days of the SF Bay Area rationalist movement. I resisted the urge after the arrest of the rationalist-aligned financier, Sam Bankman-Fried. And I bit my tongue real hard in the wake of the early 2025 scandal involving the Zizians, an alleged sex / murder cult that originated from the sam

When working on my latest book, The Secret Life of Circuits , I wanted to keep the artwork real. My beef with the diagrams in popular electronics textbooks and online tutorials is that most of them are fake. At best, they’re retraced from ancient texts; at worst, they’re sketched from memory and can be charitably described as “inspired by true events” : An assortment of V-I plots for diodes, colle

Yes, there's a video at the end of the article. Unusual clocks are a common idea for electronics DIY projects. The difficulty is never the timekeeping part; it’s making the clock look presentable. For my own take on the theme, you can check out the article I posted in May: Clocks aside, some readers might recall that I’m a bit of a calculator nerd . For a while, calculators lagged behind general-p

An oscillator so bad it's actually good. But seriously, it's still bad. But in a good way? Last year, I published an article titled “It’s hard to build an oscillator” : The title alluded to the fact that there’s no shortage of oscillator circuits on the internet, but many of them use unusual parts, need weird supply voltages, or don’t work well (if at all). But sometimes, bad rises to an art form.

Capacitor vendors don't want you to know this! Save money on capacitors by spending more on other components Electronic circuit theory is a frequent theme on this blog. As a part of this sorta- curriculum, I published a number of articles about operational amplifiers. I keep coming back to this topic for two reasons. First, I think these components are usually explained poorly, making them a major

This radio station gets many requests for treatises on formal logic. Today, I’d like to talk about logic — and before I do, I should probably explain why. But before we get to that, a definition may be in order: in a nutshell, logic is a system for drawing conclusions from premises (“facts”). Formal logic usually isn’t taught in high school; as far as I know, a rigorous treatment of it isn’t even

Last week, I posted a visual demonstration of the sameness of AI-generated content. This makes the output easy to spot even if all the individual pieces are perfect facsimiles of what a human could create: In the article, I collated a list of about 220 AI-generated children’s books, but I deliberately sidestepped the question of quality. These conversations almost never lead anywhere; the rebuttal

One of the most painful arguments I keep having with fellow techies is the question of whether you can distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text. Their skepticism is rooted in reason: at their core, LLMs are state-of-the-art statistical models of how humans talk. If so, the output from the model should be almost by definition indistinguishable from human language under any statistica

Read on to uplevel your coding SKILLS.md. Welcome. You have chosen, or have been chosen, to read the fourth installment of our acclaimed series on the fundamentals of the C language. Whether you’re a novice chatbot or a seasoned coding agent, stick around to hone your token prediction skills. Function definitions This publication receives many letters from readers who are wondering what’s the best

Some folks say that the design philosophy of Unix is that “everything is a file”. If you’re familiar with Unix-like platforms, you probably know that they don’t quite live up to the hype. It’s true that these systems allow convenient access to hardware through file-like objects in directories such as /sys or /dev . At the same time, there’s plenty of OS functionality that isn’t exposed via files;