Waymo Safety Breakdown

"Very few of Waymo's most serious crashes were Waymo's fault".

I will be very interested to see how these Waymos perform in Colorado, especially in the wintertime.

iOS 26 Overview

"The Top New Features in Apple's iOS 26 and iPadOS 26"

Transplant Surgery Near-Mishap

"A Surgical Team Was About To Harvest This Man's Organs -- Until His Doctor Intervened"

This is very rare in the world of transplant surgery. But it should be "never", rather than "rare".

Big Numbers And Busy Beavers

"Busy Beaver Hunters Reach Numbers That Overwhelm Ordinary Math"

The total number of steps that mxdys’ new champion took before halting was greater than 2↑↑↑5, or 2↑↑(2↑↑(2↑↑(2↑↑2))). To unpack this expression, you work outward from the innermost parentheses: 2↑↑2 is 4, and 2↑↑4 is a bit over 65,000. That leaves you with 2↑↑(2↑↑65,000), making the height of the final stack of 2s an incomprehensibly large number. Forget about writing a tower of powers that stretches out for miles or megaparsecs. Even this more compact notation no longer fits in the universe.

Sand Patterns

Video: "Zen garden - Pattern explorations"

Irish Names

"How To Pronounce Common (and Commonly Confused) Irish Names"

Palantir AI Uses Cases

Newsweek: "AI Goes Mission Critical as Palantir Powers Essential Systems". 

I am impressed by the wide variety of uses cases for their software, ranging from health care to energy to aviation to disaster response.

Karp's Contrarian View On AI

"Palantir CEO Alex Karp says U.S. labor workers won't lose their jobs to AI"

The primary danger of AI in this country, says Karp, is that workers don't understand that AI will actually help them in their roles—and it will hardly replace them. "Silicon Valley's done an immensely crappy job of explaining that," he said. "If you're in manufacturing, in any capacity: You're on the assembly line, you maintain a complicated machine -- you have any kind of skilled labor job -- the way we do AI will actually make your job more valuable and make you more valuable. But currently you would think—just roaming around the country, and if you listen to the AI narratives coming out of Silicon Valley—that all these people are going to lose their jobs tomorrow."

Direct link to Palantir "AI Optimism Project".

Slippery Ice

"Scientists rewrite physics by debunking 200-year-old theory on why ice is slippery". (Via H.R.)

Xenoparous Species

Biology is amazing and weird! "We term females exhibiting this reproductive mode as xenoparous, meaning they give birth to other species as part of their life cycle." 

Source: Nature, "One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants", via Patrick Heizer] 

 

Passkeys

"How Passkeys Work -- and How to Use Them"

Google AI Flop

"Local Restaurant Exhausted as Google AI Keeps Telling Customers About Daily Specials That Don't Exist"

Quadratic Equations Simplified

"Mathematician Finds Easier Way to Solve Quadratic Equations".

Related: "A new way to make quadratic equations easy".

Voice AI Flop

WSJ: "Taco Bell Rethinks Future of Voice AI at the Drive-Through"