Indie Research and Ideas. An Anarchist Jurisdiction
A visual portrait of summer 2026 from a Northern Hemisphere POV: wildfires, drought, migration, war, volcanic eruptions and a total solar eclipse — six images capturing the hot, turbulent reality of our time.
A new position paper examines a fundamental limitation of large language models: their difficulty with abductive reasoning, a capacity central to genuine scientific invention.
Data centres have quietly become the physical chokepoint of the AI era — where energy consumption, local opposition, orbital ambitions and great-power competition all converge.
America has been fascinated with science for its entire history, and has led scientific and technological development for the past 250 years. Will it continue to lead?
Mind the Post reaches post 850. Let's Celebrate!
SpaceX has raised $75 billion in a record-breaking IPO, making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire in history. He can now, at least in theory, do a lot with all that money. But perhaps the question is: who is this man who wants to make humanity a multi-planetary species with SpaceX?
Three years ago, we were analyzing the sheer audacity of Pedro Sánchez’s risky gamble to retain power. It was the era of "Perro Sanxe"—a moment when the president famously took a derogatory caricature meant to mock him, co-opted it with challenging style, and used that defiant "bark" to bite back against all political odds. It was viewed as the ultimate masterclass in tactical survival. Yet,…
Despite what seems conceptual homogenization, raters perceived post-ChatGPT essays as more creative. AI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, especially among less creative writers. Should we care about it?
This week, OpenAI crossed a "Rubiconian" frontier with the disproval of a central conjecture in discrete geometry. It is a moment remarkably similar to when AlphaGo defeated world Go champion Ke Jie nearly ten years ago, and a chilling echo of the future Ted Chiang anticipated 25 years ago in "Catching crumbs from the table." Is AI just a super-efficient tool? Is it here to help us build Ted…
"The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution," by Tyler Cowen