The following article originally appeared on Mike Amundsen’s Substack Signals from Our Futures Past and is being republished here with the author’s permission. There’s an old hotel on a windy corner in Chicago where the front doors shine like brass mirrors. Each morning, before guests even reach the...
My father spent his career as an accountant for a major public utility. He didn’t talk about work much; when he engaged in shop talk, it was generally with other public utility accountants, and incomprehensible to those who weren’t. But I remember one story from work, and that story is relevant to o...
Generative AI in the Real World: Aurimas Griciūnas on AI Teams and Reliable AI Systems
SwirlAI founder Aurimas Griciūnas helps tech professionals transition into AI roles and works with organizations to create AI strategy and develop AI systems. Aurimas joins Ben to discuss the changes he’s seen over the past couple years with the rise of generative AI and where we’re headed with agen...
Stanford’s AI spots hidden disease warnings that show up while you sleep
Stanford researchers have developed an AI that can predict future disease risk using data from just one night of sleep. The system analyzes detailed physiological signals, looking for hidden patterns across the brain, heart, and breathing. It successfully forecast risks for conditions like cancer, d...
The End of the Sync Script: Infrastructure as Intent
There’s an open secret in the world of DevOps: Nobody trusts the CMDB. The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is supposed to be the “source of truth”—the central map of every server, service, and application in your enterprise. In theory, it’s the foundation for security audits, cost analysis,...
A philosopher at the University of Cambridge says there’s no reliable way to know whether AI is conscious—and that may remain true for the foreseeable future. According to Dr. Tom McClelland, consciousness alone isn’t the ethical tipping point anyway; sentience, the capacity to feel good or bad, is ...
A new superconductor breaks rules physicists thought were fixed
A shiny gray crystal called platinum-bismuth-two hides an electronic world unlike anything scientists have seen before. Researchers discovered that only the crystal’s outer surfaces become superconducting—allowing electrons to flow with zero resistance—while the interior remains ordinary metal. Even...
This tiny chip could change the future of quantum computing
A new microchip-sized device could dramatically accelerate the future of quantum computing. It controls laser frequencies with extreme precision while using far less power than today’s bulky systems. Crucially, it’s made with standard chip manufacturing, meaning it can be mass-produced instead of cu...
Scientists in Japan have confirmed that ultra-thin films of ruthenium dioxide belong to a newly recognized and powerful class of magnetic materials called altermagnets. These materials combine the best of two magnetic worlds: they’re stable against interference yet still allow fast, electrical reado...
A Christmas tree 80 light-years wide appears in space
This Christmas, astronomers are highlighting a spectacular region of space that looks remarkably like a glowing holiday tree. Known as NGC 2264, this distant star-forming region sits about 2,700 light-years away and is filled with newborn stars lighting up clouds of gas and dust. The stars form a tr...
If You’ve Never Broken It, You Don’t Really Know It
The following article originally appeared on Medium and is being republished here with the author’s permission. There’s a fake confidence you can carry around when you’re learning a new technology. You watch a few videos, skim some docs, get a toy example working, and tell yourself, “Yeah, I’ve got ...
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths
Irving Finkel is a scholar of ancient languages and a longtime curator at the British Museum, renowned for his expertise in Mesopotamian history and cuneiform writing. He specializes in reading and interpreting cuneiform inscriptions, including tablets from Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyri...
The following article originally appeared on Medium and is being republished here with the author’s permission. This post is a follow-up to a post from last week on the progress of logging. A colleague pushed back on the idea that we’d soon be running code we don’t fully understand. He was skeptical...
Quantum computing (QC) and AI have one thing in common: They make mistakes. There are two keys to handling mistakes in QC: We’ve made tremendous progress in error correction in the last year. And QC focuses on problems where generating a solution is extremely difficult, but verifying it is easy. Thi...
#486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life
Michael Levin is a biologist at Tufts University working on novel ways to understand and control complex pattern formation in biological systems. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep486-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, sub...
#484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming
Dan Houser is co-founder of Rockstar Games and is a legendary creative mind behind Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and Red Dead Redemption series of video games. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep484-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedba...
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Julia Shaw is a criminal psychologist and author who in her books explores human nature, including psychopathy, violent crime, the psychology of evil, police interrogation, false memory manipulation, deception detection, and human sexuality. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://...