BlogFlock

The social media discourse seems to constantly come back to the question of whether Large Language Models are “useful (good)” or “useless (bad).” The responses are a bizarre back and forth in which one group says they use it often and another group says they nobody uses it at all.

Tomorrow, April 24th, is Take Your Child to Work Day, an occasion on which many federal workers would typically bring their kids into the office. This year, any celebratory mood will likely be dampened by the sweeping layoffs ordered by Elon Musk’s DOGE, which has fired tens of thousands…

Greetings all,

Hope everyone’s hanging in. The big news this week: Elon Musk is finally stepping back from DOGE. On an earnings call that revealed Tesla’s net income had fallen 71% in the first quarter of 2025, Musk announced that, starting in May, his “time allocation to DOGE will…

A guided tour of the NCM Melbourne's "Signal to Noise" exhibition.

In the age of computation, the role of noise — or at least, the close-enough approximation through pseudorandom numbers —…

Last weekend at Coachella, the singer of the punk band the Circle Jerks called for “an army of Luigis,” in reference, of course, to Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

The statement, which implied the band would like to see more assassins murdering more CEOs, …

Greetings all — 

I’ve got something a little different today: The first original BITM guest post, from the great writer and editor Mike Pearl. Mike is a former VICE columnist, the author of The Day It Finally Happens, a frequent contributor to the New Republic, and a good…

I’m old enough to remember when Black Mirror first dropped, and the anthology sci-fi show was widely received as transgressive, even shocking. Here was a smart, often legitimately unsettling suite of dark modern Twilight Zone fables, all built around the ways new technologies might be used (typically by faceless corporations…

Our understanding of noise could be traced to a young Einstein, staring at a pond full of pollen 120 years ago. Einstein theorized that the seemingly arbitrary motion of pollen on the surface could be modeled — and in so doing, we confirmed the existence of molecules that moved pollen…

Mental health professionals at the giant consortium Kaiser Permanente started a five-day hunger a strike in Los Angeles on Monday this week, an escalation of a broader strike that has ground on since October 2024. The workers are fighting for more time spent with patients and better pay, and against…

In the summer of 2016, just months before Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, I snuck into what was then the world’s largest iPhone factory. Officially called the Longhua Science and Technology Park, it was better known as Foxconn City, named after the massive subcontractor that handles…