All posts tagged: longreads

The Best Read-It-Later Apps for Curating Your Longreads

The Best Read-It-Later Apps for Curating Your Longreads

Published by skeptic

It’s not easy keeping up with everything that’s written on the web, especially not if you’ve got a dozen open browser tabs vying for your attention. This is where read-it-later apps come in. These apps let you siphon off articles you want to get back to later, at a more leisurely pace, when the work of the day is done. You can catch up on your reading in bed, on the subway, over breakfast, or whenever you like. Sadly, we just lost one of the more capable read-it-later apps: Mozilla is shutting down Pocket as it focuses its efforts on its Firefox browser, and Pocket data will be permanently deleted on October 8. If you’re looking for a new home for your archive of articles, or you’re keen to see what read-it-later apps are capable of doing for the first time, you’ll find our pick for the best options below. Instapaper Instapaper offers a clean, calm interface. Courtesy of David Nield Instapaper is one of the oldest and most comprehensive read-it-later apps out there, and …

RISC Architecture Really Did Change Everything

RISC Architecture Really Did Change Everything

Published by skeptic

Yes. We’ve been here before. A second war of the architectures. In Hackers, a group of RISC- obsessed teens must stop a goateed villain from capsizing a fleet of oil tankers with a computer virus. Pictured here, from left: Lord Nikon, Dade, Kate, and Cereal Killer. Photograph: Everett Collection It’s hard to overstate just how topsy-freaking-turvy this gets. To review: Patterson invented RISC in 1980 and went to battle with the established ISAs. He won. Thirty years later, his disciples reinvent RISC for a new age, and he and they go to battle with the very company whose success secured RISC’s legacy in the first place: Arm. In response to Patterson’s paper, Arm fires back with a rebuttal, “The Case for Licensed Instruction Sets.” Nobody wants some random, untested, unsupported ISA, they say. Customers want success, standards, a proven “ecosystem.” The resources it would take to retool and reprogram everything for a new ISA? There’s not enough cash in the world, Arm scoffs. The RISC-V community disagrees. They create their own ecosystem under the auspices …

Meet the Woman Who Showed President Biden ChatGPT—and Helped Set the Course for AI

Meet the Woman Who Showed President Biden ChatGPT—and Helped Set the Course for AI

Published by skeptic

one day in March 2023, Arati Prabhakar brought a laptop into the Oval Office and showed the future to Joe Biden. Six months later, the president issued a sweeping executive order that set a regulatory course for AI. This all happened because ChatGPT had stunned the world. In an instant it became very, very obvious that the United States needed to speed up its efforts to regulate the AI industry—and adopt policies to take advantage of it. While the potential benefits were unlimited (Social Security customer service that works!), so were the potential downsides, like floods of disinformation or even, in the view of some, human extinction. Someone had to demonstrate that to the president. The job fell to Prabhakar, because she is the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and holds cabinet status as the president’s chief science and technology adviser; she’d already been methodically educating top officials about the transformative power of AI. But she also has the experience and bureaucratic savvy to make an impact with the …

The Showdown Over Who Gets to Build the Next DeLorean

The Showdown Over Who Gets to Build the Next DeLorean

Published by skeptic

The news spread, first with an item on Fox News and then in outlets all over the world. Jason was so high on enthusiasm for the new company, and pride in his wife’s ambition, that he dashed off a public promise on the DNG Motors Instagram account. “UNVEILED SEPTEMBER 13, 2023,” read an image of white text on a black background, with Jason’s caption: “DeLorean is back in the Motor City.” He’d just committed them to building a car for the Detroit Auto Show. When Kat saw the post, she flipped out. Soon afterward, the DeLorean Motor Company in Texas sent Kat a cease-and-desist, demanding she stop using the DeLorean name for her planned car. She and Jason had their lawyer send a reply asserting their rights and expressing their willingness to litigate, and kept going. DeLorean Motor Company sits in a squat building off a tangle of highways in suburban Houston—you drive past some shabby lots and fields, and then the 1980s spring up around a curve in the road, where a retro-looking DMC …

They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War

They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War

Published by skeptic

The Allied soldiers who weren’t killed limped back from the defeat. It was clear now, they needed to be able to creep up to the beaches days before a raid to get up-to-date information. They needed to know where the Nazis had tunneled into the land, placed explosives, or built machine gun nests. None of their ships or boats could get close enough to the shore without being detected, so the Allies needed miniature submarines—and divers. And they needed science to make those things happen. By this point, Haldane, Spurway, and the other scientists had already given themselves eight seizures and broken several vertebrae for the cause. That’s because, shortly before the disaster at Dieppe, but not in time to stop it, Haldane and his crew had been asked by the Admiralty to pivot and focus on a new, more specific goal. To help their countrymen and the Allies defeat Hitler, to help end the war, the Allies needed the scientists to use this same work to prepare for missions to scout beaches. Five days …

These Women Came to Antarctica for Science. Then the Predators Emerged

These Women Came to Antarctica for Science. Then the Predators Emerged

Published by skeptic

On April 12, 2019, Boston University finally fired David Marchant for sexually harassing Willenbring. (The university said it could not corroborate her claims of physical and psychological abuse.) Marchant released a statement, which the journal Science quoted as vowing that he had “never” sexually harassed anyone, “not in 1998 or 1999 in Antarctica or at any time since.” But because of Willenbring, the word was out. Reeling in the wake of this scandal, the National Science Foundation commissioned an outside study on sexual assault and sexual harassment at the Antarctic research facilities. The lengthy report, made public in August 2022, had shocking allegations of assault, stalking, and harassment. Britt Barquist, the former fuel foreman, was on contract at McMurdo with a company now called Amentum. She oversaw a crew of about 20 who did the dangerous work of handling and cleaning diesel and gasoline fuel tanks. One day in late November 2017, she tells me, she was sitting at a table alongside a man who held a senior position at Leidos, the company managing the …

He Emptied an Entire Crypto Exchange Onto a Thumb Drive. Then He Disappeared

He Emptied an Entire Crypto Exchange Onto a Thumb Drive. Then He Disappeared

Published by skeptic

He told the court that he grew his beard down to his clavicle, shaved his head. He said that when he learned about the prosecutor’s indictment—that his brother and sister were charged with fraud, that they would stand trial in a month, and that without Özer they would most likely take the blame for Thodex’s fall and spend the rest of their lives in prison—he had a wild idea: If every claimant were paid back, did a crime ever really happen? He did, in fact, have the Thodex cold wallet on him, he told the judges, though he claims to not remember how much was in it. He asked Erarslan to help him pay back the roughly 2,000 plaintiffs who had lost their money. And they did, in part. In total, while on the run, he paid approximately 185 million lira ($10 million at the time) to more than 1,000 claimants. As Özer tells it, when the cold wallet was empty, he threw it into the Ionian Sea. When he addressed his use of other …

The Deaths of Effective Altruism

The Deaths of Effective Altruism

Published by skeptic

The idea of Singer that excited me was that each of us should give a lot of money to help poor people abroad. His “shallow pond” thought experiment shows why. If you saw a child drowning in a shallow pond, you’d feel obliged to rescue her even if that meant ruining your new shoes. But then, Singer said, you can save the life of a starving child overseas by donating to charity what new shoes would cost. And you can save the life of another child by donating instead of buying a new shirt, and another instead of dining out. The logic of your beliefs requires you to send nearly all your money overseas, where it will go farthest to save the most lives. After all, what could we do with our money that’s more important than saving people’s lives? That’s the most famous argument in modern philosophy. It goes well beyond the ideas that lead most decent people to give to charity—that all human lives are valuable, that severe poverty is terrible, and that …

Elie Hassenfeld Q&A: ‘,000 to Save a Life Is a Bargain’

Elie Hassenfeld Q&A: ‘$5,000 to Save a Life Is a Bargain’

Published by skeptic

The organizations we recommend offer the best bang for the buck. That often means saving the lives of children under 5 who would otherwise die from preventable diseases. And look, the thing that motivated me to do this work is thinking about the people I’m closest to. If my children need antibiotics, I go around the corner to CVS. Literally every time I do that, I think how unfair it is that not everyone can. OK, but the people who consult GiveWell’s research are not the needy. They are donors, many of them extremely rich. What do donors turn to GiveWell for? They turn to us for confidence. They need confidence that there is some difference being made with their money. Many of our donors report this feeling: There are so many things I could do out there. How can I ever determine who is trustworthy in making an impact? Sometimes donors expect that they can save a life for much less than $5,000, and they’re surprised to encounter our estimate. But most come to …

The Mayor of London Enters the Bullshit Cinematic Universe

The Mayor of London Enters the Bullshit Cinematic Universe

Published by skeptic

Political violence is returning to the UK, bursting out of the morass of conspiracy and extremism online. There is at times a Blairish elusiveness to the way Khan talks—broadcastable sound bites, reversions to cliché, and a genial caution in the phrasing of his answers. But as we talk about the loss of the rational center, he leans in to interrupt. “Look, I was mates with Jo Cox,” he says. “She was one of my best friends.” In 2016, Cox—a Labour member of parliament for the northern constituency of Batley and Spen—was murdered by a white supremacist who subscribed to the Great Replacement theory. In 2021, Conservative MP David Amess was murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist who had become radicalized online. “I’ve got a protection team. I live it every day, the consequences of this, the violence,” Khan says. “What I will not allow is to be cowed by those threats, because that’s what they want. They want for me to be scared.” Khan insists he’s an optimist. Despite the “hysteria” and the culture wars, he …