I’m about to hit 4,000 (since 2006) here, but 10,000 is pretty incredible for sure! I started blogging in 2002 or so and had a few different iterations before I settled in on this place and platform for good.
Congrats, Seth!
Give or take. Itās hard to get the exact count through the sands of time. But itās at least 10,000 blog posts as of today.
Staggering numbers, indeed. 50 tons of new iPhones sold in the US EVERY day. Imagine the manufacturing scale alone, but really imagine the resource acquisition needed to source every bit of material to make these things. Wow.
Daring Fireball: How Many New iPhones Can Fit on a Freight Plane?:
But Apple sells about 50 tons of new iPhones in the US alone every day. We all know that Appleās iPhone business is huge. But when you start to consider it in practical terms like this itās just staggering.
Happy Birthday to my incredible and amazing partner and inspiration, Merianna. I canāt imagine walking through life without her!
The collapse of honeybee populations in the US (even though they were introduced to the continent by Europeans) is a startling development and a cautionary tale for us to wise up about our personal and corporate choices…
āSomething real bad is going on this year,ā said McArt. āWe have been seeing high losses year after year but if anything it is getting worse, which is troubling. Some places are having devastating losses and there was a shortfall in pollination in some almond orchards this year. Whether these impacts will cascade to other crops remains to be seen, itās certainly possible.ā
Can believe this was 3 years ago at TSA! Such great memories with my students there!
Rewatching OG with Ben this morning.
We keep pushing back the clock on this! Iām certain thereās a good deal left to (re)discover about our distant and near past…
Archaeologists have uncovered a collection of bone tools at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, dating back 1.5 million years. This finding has pushed back systematic bone tool production by more than a million years and challenges previous assumptions about the technological capability of early hominins. Crafted from the bones of elephants and hippopotamuses, these tools showcase an advanced level of cognitive ability and craftsmanship, which was thought to have emerged much later in human development.
This research from OpenAI (company behind ChatGPT) is certainly interesting with a large data set, but this part was particularly relevant for me and my work on phenomenology and empathy…
That said, this latest research does chime with what scientists so far have discovered about how emotionally compelling chatbot conversations can be. For example, in 2023 MIT Media Lab researchers found that chatbots tend to mirror the emotional sentiment of a userās messages, suggesting a kind of feedback loop where the happier you act, the happier the AI seems, or if you act sadder, so does the AI.
