person at the top of the autocracy

Autocracy is a system of government in which absolute power is held by the head of state and government, known as an autocrat. It includes some forms of monarchy and all forms of dictatorship, while it is contrasted with democracy and feudalism. Various definitions of autocracy exist. They may restrict autocracy to cases where power is held by a single individual, or they may define autocracy in a way that includes a group of rulers who wield absolute power. The autocrat has total control over the exercise of civil liberties within the autocracy, choosing under what circumstances they may be exercised, if at all. Governments may also blend elements of autocracy and democracy, forming an anocracy. The concept of autocracy has been recognized in political philosophy since ancient history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocracy

Enjoyed playing it a lot in High School, except in marching band (which I was drafted into), and also carrying the bloody thing home for over a mile. (more)

Bruno Latour (/ləˈtʊər/; French: [latuʁ]; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.[4] He was especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS).[5] After teaching at the École des Mines de Paris (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation) from 1982 to 2006, he became professor at Sciences Po Paris (2006–2017), where he was the scientific director of the Sciences Po Medialab. He retired from several university activities in 2017.[6] He was also a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.[7][8] Latour is best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern (1991; English translation, 1993), Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar, 1979) and Science in Action (1987).[9] Although his studies of scientific practice were at one time associated with social constructionist[9] approaches to the philosophy of science, Latour diverged significantly from such approaches. He was best known for withdrawing from the subjective/objective division and re-developing the approach to work in practice.[4] Latour said in 2017 that he is interested in helping to rebuild trust in science (vs Failure Of Science) and that some of the authority of science needs to be regained.[10] Along with Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, and John Law, Latour is one of the primary developers of actor–network theory (ANT), a constructionist approach influenced by the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, the generative semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas, and (more recently) the sociology of Emile Durkheim's rival Gabriel Tarde. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour

Robin Sloan: Is it okay? How do you make a (large) language model? Goes like this: erect a trellis of code, then allow the real program to grow, its development guided by a grueling training process, fueled by reams of text, mostly scraped from the internet. (more)

Seamus Bradley: Do Submarines Swim? There are two specific criticisms I’ve seen that I have in mind here that I want to address. On the basis of examples like those linked to above, people will say that the (LLM) AI app “doesn’t understand” what it’s being asked, or that the AI “can’t think”. I don’t think these criticisms help, because they’re saying that the AI doesn’t have some property (understanding, thinking) that we don’t really know how to define. (consciousness) (more)

The Power of Positive People. Are you spending time with the right people for your health and happiness? While many of us focus primarily on diet and exercise to achieve better health, science suggests that our well-being also is influenced by the company we keep. (sociogenic) (more)

PostHog is the only all-in-one platform for product analytics, feature flags, session replays, experiments, and surveys that's built for developers.

Web Traffic/TrafficAnalysis/TrafficAnalytics service from Google. http://www.google.com/analytics (more)

aka Feature Toggle

Everything is Deeply Intertwingled. See Intertwingularity

Dario Amodei on Machines of Loving Grace (more)

Machines of Loving Grace were an American industrial rock band that got their name from the 1967 poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" by Richard Brautigan... Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, a 2015 nonfiction book by John Markoff.... a 2024 essay by Dario Amodei. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(disambiguation) (more)

Dario Amodei (born 1983) is an Italian-American artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the company behind the large language model series Claude AI. He was previously the vice president of research at OpenAI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Amodei

In business, B Corporation (also B Lab or B Corp) is a private certification of for-profit companies of their "social and environmental performance". It is distinct from the United States legal designation of a benefit corporation. B Corp certification is conferred by B Lab, a global nonprofit organization with offices in the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and a partnership in Latin America with Sistema B. To be granted and to maintain certification, companies must receive a minimum score of 80 from an assessment of "social and environmental performance", integrate B Corp commitments to stakeholders into company governing documents, and pay an annual fee based on annual sales.[1] Companies must re-certify every three years to retain B Corporation status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification) (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: on DeepSeek v3: The Six Million Dollar Model. What should we make of DeepSeek v3? DeepSeek v3 seems to clearly be the best open model, the best model at its price point, and the best model with 37B active parameters, or that cost under $6 million. (more)

Gemini (formerly known as Bard) is a family of multimodal large language models developed by Google DeepMind, serving as the successor to LaMDA and PaLM 2. Comprising Gemini Ultra, Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Gemini Nano, it was announced on December 6, 2023, positioned as a competitor to OpenAI's GPT-4. It powers the chatbot of the same name... On January 30, 2025, Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash as the new default model, with Gemini 1.5 Flash still available for usage. This was followed by the release of Gemini 2.0 Pro on February 05, 2025. Additionally, Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, which details the language model's thinking process when responding to prompts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(language_model)

DeepMind Technologies Limited,[1] trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Google in 2014[8] and merged with Google AI's Google Brain division to become Google DeepMind in April 2023. The company is headquartered in London, with research centres in the United States, Canada,[9] France,[10] and Germany. DeepMind introduced neural Turing machines (neural networks that can access external memory like a conventional Turing machine),[11] resulting in a computer that loosely resembles short-term memory in the human brain.[12][13] DeepMind has created neural network models to play video games and board games. It made headlines in 2016 after its AlphaGo program beat a human professional Go player Lee Sedol, a world champion, in a five-game match, which was the subject of a documentary film.[14] A more general program, AlphaZero, beat the most powerful programs playing go, chess and shogi (Japanese chess) after a few days of play against itself using reinforcement learning.[15] In 2020, DeepMind made significant advances in the problem of protein folding with AlphaFold.[16] In July 2022, it was announced that over 200 million predicted protein structures, representing virtually all known proteins, would be released on the AlphaFold database.[17][18] AlphaFold's database of predictions achieved state of the art records on benchmark tests for protein folding algorithms, although each individual prediction still requires confirmation by experimental tests. AlphaFold3 was released in May 2024, making structural predictions for the interaction of proteins with various molecules. It achieved new standards on various benchmarks, raising the state of the art accuracies from 28 and 52 percent to 65 and 76 percent. The start-up was founded by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman in November 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind

Palmer Freeman Luckey (born September 19, 1992[2]) is an American entrepreneur best known as the founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality head-mounted display that is widely credited with reviving the virtual reality industry. In 2017, Luckey left Oculus and founded military contractor Anduril Industries, a military technology company focused on autonomous drones and sensors for military applications. Luckey ranked number 22 on Forbes' 2016 List of America's Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Luckey

Anduril Industries, Inc. is an American defense technology company that specializes in autonomous systems. It was cofounded in 2017 by inventor and entrepreneur Palmer Luckey and others.[3][4] Anduril aims to sell to the U.S. Department of Defense, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Anduril's major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS) & counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_Industries