Researchers are pursuing age-old questions about the nature of thoughts—and learning how to read them.| The New Yorker
At its core was an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity’s richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.| The New Yorker
On podcasts it's pretty common to hear something like this: So Alexander Hamilton has just finished law school, and he's trying to make a name for himself. He's only been in New York a few years. So he takes on this case... The problem with the past tense ("Hamilton had just finished law school, and […]| the jsomers.net blog
The game of Five'Em was invented by two friends of mine, Ben Gross and Rich Berger, to combat Hold'Em fatigue. The rules are simple: You're dealt five hole cards instead of two, and after each round of community cards comes out (starting with the flop), you discard one of these extras. After the river is […]| the jsomers.net blog
In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it meant to know something, and in the Enlightenment, a definition was settled upon: to know something is to have a justified true belief […]| the jsomers.net blog
For years I’ve wanted a writing machine that would combine the best parts of a typewriter and a word processor. After months of tinkering, a friend and I just finished building one. We call it the DocWriter. It’s a typewriter that sends its keystrokes in real time to a Google Doc.| the jsomers.net blog
The standard way to run a book club is to have everybody finish the book before meeting to talk about it. You have one meeting per book. The discussion goes on for one or two hours before it runs out of gas, and then the group picks the next book, and you agree to meet […]| the jsomers.net blog
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.| the jsomers.net blog
The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you've never heard of, or whose sense you're unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word -- like example, or sport, or magic -- because all you'll learn is what it means, and that you already know.| the jsomers.net blog
More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about.| the jsomers.net blog
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more.| the jsomers.net blog
ChatGPT is in the spotlight, but it’s Whisper—OpenAI’s open-source speech-transcription program—that shows us where machine learning is going.| The New Yorker
I want to tell the story of a beautiful phenomenon in biology. In some| jsomers.net
Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.| The New Yorker
Coding together at the same computer, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat changed the course of the company—and the Internet.| The New Yorker