The cell phone of my childhood, still in operation. If you are in Serbia and need to leave the Matrix there are quite a few of them around.

Flighty does not seem to be as up-to-date traveling internationally as it is on domestic flights. The IST airport departures board had our flight listed as delayed as soon as we got there, yet the app thought everything was fine. Trust no one.

Yesterday I learned about talismanic shirts, and now I know what nerds from 500 years ago did for fun and profit.

Day 2 in Istanbul, finding out that the coffee we had been ordering from Amazon for years started out within walking distance of Hagia Sophia.

In what feels like a troll but is in all likelihood completely serious, some parents are deciding to have their children fully immersed in AI LLMs:

We’re declaring bankruptcy on humans. Bring on the AI. In addition to integrating AI into as many facets of our lives as possible (our health, our work, our entertainment, and our personal lives), we’re designing an AI-integrated childhood for our kids—all while feeling like we’re helping them dodge a major bullet.

Did CS Lewis suspect, when he wrote The Abolition of Man, that the anti-human sentiment would be expressed as freely and overtly as the first sentence of this intellectually bankrupt paragraph? A paragraph that would be horrifying even if the AI it touts was actual intelligence, an AGI, but what these families are actually immersing themselves in is industrial-grade bullshit. As useful as bullshit can be — I hear it makes for great fertilizer! — one should not drink it as one would do Kool-Aid.

Casey Handmer on LLMs:

Every time one of the labs releases an updated model I give it a thorough shakedown on physics, in the style of the oral examination that is still used in Europe and a few other places. Claude, Grok, Gemini, and GPT are all advancing by leaps and bounds on a wide variety of evals, some of which include rather advanced or technical questions in both math and science, including Physics Olympiad-style problems, or grad school qualifying exams.

And yet, none of these models would be able to pass the physicist Turing test. It’s not even a matter of knowledge, I know of reasonably talented middle schoolers with no specialized physics training who could reason and infer on some of these basic questions in a much more fluent and intuitive way.

Alexander the Great had Aristotle, some poor kid will have a brain-dead version of Wheatley.

(Casey’s post is deeper than simple LLM-trashing for he gives the actual 8-step process of reasoning through physics problems, so please do read the whole thing.)

📚 Finished reading: In the Beginning… Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson, almost thirty years old and more relevant than ever. Download it for free here, and if you think you don’t have time for all 65 pages Chapter 12 about the Hole Hawg should motivate you to read the entire essay.

Nick Maggiulli on why the upper middle class isn’t special anymore:

Picture it. You’re at one of the nicest resorts in one of the most prized vacation destinations in the world and there are literal millionaires scrambling to get pool chairs at 8AM. What the hell is going on?

I’ll tell you. The upper middle class is getting too big. There are too many people who are millionaires and multi-millionaires and there simply isn’t enough space to accommodate them. Why do you think the Amex lounge is a zoo? Why do you think house prices haven’t come down? Why do you think vacations evolved into cut throat competitions?

Because there are too many people with lots of money.

I think he is onto something, for here is Jennifer Bradley Franklin of the NYT writing about $9,000 jigsaw puzzles:

Christine Murphy thinks she has a problem.

The 42-year-old grant writer and novelist has more than 150 puzzles in her collection at home in Portland, Maine, approximately 50 of which are hand-cut hardwood. She has one in progress at all times, and works on it every day.

“If I don’t get to do it, I get a bit glum,” she said. “I would happily do nothing but massive, thousand-piece hand-cut puzzles.” But, she added, referring to their price: “My God, those are multiple mortgage payments. It’s like a couture puzzle.”

…

A Stave Puzzles 800-piece limited edition costs $8,495 (on sale from $8,995). Orders from the company, founded in 1974, go up from there. A recent order from a single customer was close to $40,000, said Paula Tardie, an owner of Stave. “We have done wedding favors, puzzles for opening night gifts for Broadway shows and some very large puzzles for family reunions.”

“We have a couple of customers who, in the last decade, have spent over $500,000 with us,” said Mr. Danner of Elms.

If $9K can’t even get you a decent resort holiday, blowing it all an puzzles is as good as anything.