Month: June 2025

Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate,” said Jeffrey Henning, CTO of Perseus Development Corp. and author of the survey. “In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days.” The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months). A surprising 132,000 blogs were abandoned after being maintained a year or more (the oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days).
— Read on www.writerswrite.com/most-blogs-are-never-seen-10312003188

(mostly) abandoned blogs
— Read on www.are.na/lucy-pham/abandoned-blogs

Writing is a shadow of thought. The better the writing, the more clearly the shadow represents the shape of the original thought. Even the best writing can never perfectly capture the original thought. Writing is one of the best tools we have to share thoughts across space and time.
— Read on actsofvolition.com/2025/05/text-is-a-shadow-of-thought/

I’ve spent my entire adult life, it seems to me, in a state of profound culture shock. I wish I were unique in this, but I’m not. You may not be afflicted with my misapprehensions, and I may not be afflicted with yours, but none of this starts “tabula rasa.” We all distort what we see. We all have to struggle to see what’s really going on.

— Read on news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/01/10/joan-didions-lost-commencement-address-revealed

I remember my dad explaining the idea of a kenning in Beowulf. A kenning is a description, usually two words, that stand in for a noun. For example, whale-road means ocean.

When my dad told me about kennings, I immediately understood their magic. Whale and road—these two words don’t have a direct connection, but when brought together, a new relationship can be unlocked. When one word lends meaning to the other, they can shift your perspective.

This is the trick to a kenning: You have to let them work their magic.

— Read on 1000wordsofsummer.substack.com/p/day-10-1000wordsofsummer-2025

Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget.

— Read on machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking

Microsoft is adding text formatting to its Windows Notepad app. The significant Notepad update is available for Canary and Dev Channel testers on Windows 11, and introduces bold and italic styling, alongside hyperlinks and even Markdown support.

— Read on www.theverge.com/news/677474/microsoft-windows-notepad-bold-italic-text-formatting-markdown-support

For the past decade of scaling, we’ve been spoiled by the enormous amount of internet data that was freely available for us to use. This was enough for cracking natural language processing, but not for getting models to become reliable, competent agents. Imagine trying to train GPT-4 on all the text data available in 1980—the data would be nowhere near enough, even if we had the necessary compute. In 2025, our situation when it comes to automating software engineering is no different

— Read on www.mechanize.work/blog/how-to-fully-automate-software-engineering/

But the fundamental problem is that LLMs don’t get better over time the way a human would. The lack of continual learning is a huge huge problem. The LLM baseline at many tasks might be higher than an average human’s. But there’s no way to give a model high level feedback. You’re stuck with the abilities you get out of the box. You can keep messing around with the system prompt. In practice this just doesn’t produce anything even close to the kind of learning and improvement that human employees experience.

The reason humans are so useful is not mainly their raw intelligence. It’s their ability to build up context, interrogate their own failures, and pick up small improvements and efficiencies as they practice a task.

— Read on www.dwarkesh.com/p/timelines-june-2025

Instead of the meticulously reported summer entertainment coverage the Sun-Times staff has published for years, these pages were filled with innocuous general content: hammock instructions, summer recipes, smartphone advice … and a list of 15 books to read this summer.

Of those 15 recommended books by 15 authors, 10 titles and descriptions were false, or invented out of whole cloth. Sixteen hours later, the journalist behind the piece ‘fessed up: rather than a reported recommendation list, this one had been generated by an AI agent.

Lessons (and an apology) from the Sun-Times CEO on that AI-generated book list – Chicago Sun-Times