Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

In The Argument, Kelsey Piper gives a good description of the ways that AIs are more than just “next-token predictors” or “stochastic parrots” – for example, they also use fine-tuning and RLHF. But commenters, while appreciating the subtleties she introduces, object that they’re still just extra layers on top of a machine that basically runs on next-token prediction.

I want to approach this from a different direction. I think overemphasizing next-token prediction is a confusion of levels. On the levels where AI is a next-token predictor, you are also a next-token (technically: next-sense-datum) predictor. On the levels where you’re not a next-token predictor, AI isn’t one either.

More here.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò in the Boston Review:

The term “identity politics” was first popularized by the 1977 manifesto of the Combahee River Collective, an organization of black feminist activists. In a recent interview with the Root and in an op-ed at the Guardian, Barbara Smith, a founding member of the collective, addresses common misconceptions about the term. The manifesto, she explains, was written by black women claiming the right to set their own political agendas. They weren’t establishing themselves as a moral aristocracy—they were building a political viewpoint out of common experience to work toward “common problems.” As such, they were strongly in favor of diverse people working in coalition, an approach that for Smith was exemplified by the Bernie Sanders campaign’s grassroots approach and its focus on social issues that people of many identities face, especially “basic needs of food, housing and healthcare.” According to Smith, today’s uses of the concept are often “very different than what we intended.” “We absolutely did not mean that we would work with people who were only identical to ourselves,” she insists. “We strongly believed in coalitions and working with people across various identities on common problems.”

But instead of forging alliances across difference, some have chosen to weaponize identity politics, closing ranks—especially on social media—around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests rather than building solidarity.

More here.

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(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)

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(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)

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Carlos Valladaras at Art in America:

“Is this boring?” Peter Hujar asked while narrating a day in his life: December 18, 1974.

“No. It’s not boring to me,” Linda Rosenkrantz—a writer, his friend—replied as she listened to the photographer recount minutiae. In Ira Sachs’s new film, we see her loving all that he is saying, knowing that one day soon he won’t be here, and that all we’ll have then are the photographs, the memories, the traces of what he did.

This one day makes up Peter Hujar’s Day, wherein a great American filmmaker offers one of his strongest films to date—as well as one of the most accurate depictions I know of the internal doubts that plague an artist. On that winter day in 1974, Rosenkrantz recorded Hujar’s quiet but compelling account: He woke up, talked to editors, tried to produce good photographs, worried about not doing enough as an artist. Rosenkrantz went on to type up a transcript of her conversation with Hujar, who died 13 years later, on November 26, 1987, of AIDS-related complications. She left the text untouched for nearly 50 years, until she rediscovered and published it as a book, to wide acclaim, in 2021.

more here.

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As Memory, As Anticipation

Awareness of the passing of time is internal,
integral to the mind as traces left in the brain
by the past.

Augustine’s exposition as such is quite beautiful,
based as it is on our experience of music.
Listening to a hymn the meaning of sound is given
by sounds that came before and after.

Music can occur only in time, but if we are always
in the present moment how can we possibly hear it?

Augustine says, it’s because our consciousness is based
on memory and anticipation. A song is, in some way,
present in our minds in unified form held together by
that which we take time to be.

So, this is what time is: entirely in the present,
in our mind as memory,
as anticipation.

by Carlo Rovelli
from ‘The Order of Time”
Riverhead Books, NY, 2018

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Peter Davidson at Literary Review:

The depiction of ordinary places, and of the changing seasons and skies which shadow or illuminate them, is at the core of Susan Owens’s comprehensive and touching Constable’s Year. Near the beginning she quotes from one of Constable’s letters, proof that everything he saw and painted was based on his native Stour valley in Suffolk, and the intensity of observation developed there in boyhood:

… the sound of water escaping from mill-dams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things … those scenes made me a painter and I am grateful. 

Owens’s book brings alive the degree to which Constable’s apprehension of nature was grounded in his apprenticeship to his father, who was a farmer, miller and barge-owner. Constable had been out in all weathers, watching the skies for signs of rain. He knew the year week by week, the movements of flocks and clouds, the slow ripening of the grain to harvest. When he paints a boy straining to guide a barge under a bridge in Flatford Mill: Scene on a Navigable River, you know that he has set his own feet firmly, and strained his own young shoulders, to fix a pole in the bank of the Stour and heave a great barge forward. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Constable never painted English landscape under generically golden, pseudo-Italian skies.

more here.

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More at NPR here.

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James Woodford at New Scientist:

A parasitic species of ant from Japan is the first ever found to have done away with both males and female workers – instead, every individual is a queen that tries to take over the nests of other species.

Typically, ant colonies consist of a queen, female workers and short-lived males that die after mating.

For more than 40 years, researchers have suspected that the rare parasitic ant Temnothorax kinomurai only produces queens, but until now there has been no definitive proof.

Young queens of this parasitic species take over the nests of a related species, Temnothorax makora, killing the host queen and some workers by stinging them. They then reproduce asexually, producing cloned offspring in a process called parthenogenesis, which is rare in ants but common among some other insects. The T. makora workers are duped into helping raise the young T. kinomurai queens.

More here.

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And more robot videos here.

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Pranab Bardhan at his Substack:

James Robinson is a professor at the University of Chicago and a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024. Jim has been a friend for many decades and was for some time my colleague in Berkeley. This conversation is in 2 parts. Below you’ll find four questions by me and Jim’s response to them. The second part, consisting of four more questions and his answers, will be posted next week. I should mention here that by ‘institutions’ economists generally mean the social rules, conventions and other elements of the structural framework of socio-economic interaction.

More here.  And Part II is here.

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Bayan Atari in The Dig:

Having authored a multitude of fiction and nonfiction works, Howard University alumna and professor Toni Morrison (B.A.’53, H ’95) is one of the most celebrated and controversial modern authors. Her enduringly poignant literary work explores the plurality of Black narratives, particularly through the eyes of Black women and girls, in a stunningly eloquent and versatile literary voice. Troubled by the dominant assumption of a white reader, Morrison made a point of not centering the white gaze. Her revolutionary oeuvre attracted critical acclaim in the United States and around the world, and in 1993 Morrison made history as the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Morrison’s novels continue to be a subject of richly complex scholarship, contemporary relevance, and attempted censorship.

Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18th, 1931, in the small industrial town of Lorain, Ohio. Both of Morrison’s grandparents were sharecroppers from Alabama, and because her grandfather grew up during a time when it was illegal for Black people to read at all, her parents felt strongly about encouraging her to read. Though the Woffords moved to different apartments around Lorain frequently, as they struggled to pay rent, the Lorain Public Library remained an important part of the family’s life. In 1995, she attended the dedication of the Toni Morrison reading room at the Lorain Public Library.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)

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Written for the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani,
Jan 1, 2026, NYC.

Proof

from The Poetry Foundation

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Jeremy Shapiro at The Ideas Letter:

Artificial intelligence has rapidly become a central arena of geopolitical competition. The United States government frames AI as a strategic asset on par with energy or defense and seeks to press its apparent lead in developing the technology. The European Union lags in platform power but seeks influence over AI through regulation, labor protections, and rule-setting. China is racing to catch up and to deploy AI at scale, combining heavy state investment with administrative control and surveillance.

Each of these rivals fears falling behind. Losing the AI race is widely understood to mean slower growth, military disadvantage, technological dependence, and diminished global influence. As a result, governments are pouring money into chips, data centers, and national AI champions, while tightening export controls and treating compute capacity as a strategic resource. But this familiar race narrative obscures a deeper danger. AI is not just another general-purpose technology. It is a force capable of reshaping the very meaning of work, income, and social status. The states that lose control of these social effects may find that technological leadership offers little geopolitical advantage.

History suggests that societies unable to absorb disruptive economic change become politically volatile, strategically erratic, and ultimately weaker competitors. The central question, then, is not only who builds the most powerful AI systems, but who can integrate them into society without triggering a societal backlash or an institutional breakdown.

More here.

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From Big Think:

Hidden inside every swipe, search, and AI prompt is a fingernail-sized slab of silicon — etched with billions of switches — built in $20 billion factories using machines so precise they border on science fiction. And because only a handful of companies (and a few chokepoint countries) can make the most advanced chips, the semiconductor supply chain has become the real front line of the AI race and U.S.–China competition.

In this full length interview, Chip War author Chris Miller explains how microchips are made, why their production is so insanely hard to scale, and why the world’s economic future may hinge on a technology most of us will never see.

More here.

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François Furstenberg at Public Books:

Johns Hopkins is launching its 150th anniversary celebration. When it was founded in 1876, American universities were still mostly finishing schools for children of the nation’s elite. Hopkins introduced the modern research university to the US, importing the model from Germany, helping reshape American higher education in its image.

At the convocation, speakers announce the coming “sesquicentennial”: once, twice, three times, and then again, lest anyone forget. It’s a great word, he thinks. He tries to use it in a sentence.

The incoming chair of the university’s board of trustees is on hand. He looks nervous. He’s younger than most faculty on stage, the managing partner of a private equity firm based in Boston, with offices in London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Menlo Park. Kept, like all faculty, at a safe distance from the trustee, the history professor asks himself what this person can know about running a university.

More here.

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