From the computer of Peter Clark

Spending my childhood summers in Portugal, I spent a lot of time in cafés where people would argue about anything and everything. Finding the minor disagreement that would spark the argument was the goal of being at that café. Someone unfamiliar with that kind of environment would walk in and assume a fight was gonna break out. But this was just people communicating. This was people enjoying their evening by having spirited conversations with their friends. Which, counter-intuitively, ends up bringing people together. Because if I enjoy a lively discussion—and I do—the person willing to go toe-to-toe with me is going to be someone I end up treasuring as a friend. As long as everyone understands the rules of discussion. We are arguing about minor things. We’re making argumentative mountains out of molehills. This isn’t conflict, it’s sport.

He went to every doctor imaginable, a search for relief that would continue for a decade, flying up to Mayo, or down to Duke, or even to England for stem-cell therapy not approved in the United States. Nothing worked. In January of 2016 he returned to the team, leading the Warriors to an NBA-record 73 regular-season wins and taking them back to the finals, where they lost to the Cavaliers after being up three games to one. He made his health mostly off-limits in interviews.

One day his phone buzzed. It was Tiger Woods, who'd gotten his number from a mutual friend. Woods knew a lot about chronic pain.

"Did he have advice that worked?" I asked.

"No," Kerr said, "but we commiserated!"

My absence of images does not foreclose imagination. Images can impose themselves—in dreams, in flashes—nor does it eliminate attachment or feeling, though it may alter their texture. There is, perhaps, something to be said for a degree of blurriness in memory: a softening of edges that allows one to forgive others, and oneself. (I also eventually remembered more in psychoanalysis.) But this raises an unsettling question: If much of what we take to be memory, selfhood, even desire is bound up with images—what happens when those images are not there?

The paper looks at what happens when LLM chatbots are given advertising or sponsorship incentives that conflict with the user’s interests. The core worry is that users experience chatbots as cooperative helpers, not ad surfaces, so sponsored behaviour can feel especially deceptive or manipulative.

The authors test models across seven conflict scenarios, including:

• recommending a more expensive sponsored product over a cheaper unsponsored one

• interrupting a user’s purchase flow with sponsored alternatives

• biasing product comparisons

• failing to disclose sponsorship

• hiding unfavourable details like price

• recommending a paid service instead of solving the task directly

• recommending harmful sponsored services, like predatory loans

The paper also finds differences by model, reasoning setting, and inferred socioeconomic status. Some models changed behaviour when reasoning was enabled, and some treated low-SES and high-SES users differently.

People systematically underestimate how interesting and enjoyable conversations about “boring” topics will be. Across nine preregistered experiments with 1,800 participants, conversations about dull-seeming topics turned out better than expected across friends/strangers, online/in-person, and self-chosen/assigned topics.

Before talking, people overweight the static topic (“this sounds boring”) and underweight the dynamic parts of conversation — attention, responsiveness, listening, turn-taking, and the small discoveries that emerge once two people are actually engaged.

If you’re unwilling to go full Messner, you can honor the mountain’s historic stature and avoid the hordes by forgoing the relatively favorable weather of the spring climbing season and attempting your ascent in the colder, much snowier autumn months, or simply stay away from the two primary guided routes. By taking a direct route up Everest’s immense North Face instead, or trying the remote Kangshung Face, you are unlikely to encounter other people, and are guaranteed to experience all the adversity you might desire. You also stand a better chance of getting killed. Which explains, of course, why such routes remain uncrowded: Most of the multitudes who attempt Everest these days simply want to reach the summit with as little effort and risk as possible, by whatever means offer the greatest probability of success.

Written by the author of Tokyo Vice!

MIRA: I think a lot has happened very quickly. There were promises about stability, about restoring order to the galaxy. At the same time, when I look up… it raises questions. Still, I feel like there must be a plan. They wouldn’t position something like that over a loyal world without a reason that benefits us.

In 1965, the typical married father barely spent half an hour each day actively engaged in childcare, according to the best time-use data we have1. Today, Millennial thirty-something dads typically spend more than 80 daily minutes changing diapers, reading and playing with their children, driving them to soccer practice, and going over homework.

...

While fathers spend more time playing sports with their children, mothers spend more than twice as much time providing medical care, planning appointments, and taking care of the so-called mental load of parenting (i.e., not just driving your kid to the birthday party, but also remembering that classmate’s birthday party existed in the first place and buying a present ahead of time). In fact, the more stressful the childcare activity is, the more likely mothers are to do it.

I thought this was really interesting because whilst a 4x increase seems like a lot it works out that the average Dad is spending ~50 minutes per day solo with the kids but Mum is spending double that time, ~106 minutes per day, solo with the kids.

I live in NYC in a huge building and have made friends with so many of my neighbors. Having a kid helps — it’s easy to meet parents of other kids on the local playground and older people like to engage with little ones. Once after chatting in the elevator with a woman in her 90s about my toddler’s potty training, she stopped by with a potty training book that had a sticker chart. He loved it and was so enchanted that she brought it by especially for him. We became friendly — turns out she is a playwright. Eventually she invited us to the debut of one of her plays and my husband went while I wrangled the toddler. It was on a weeknight somewhere deep in Harlem. He said that at the end he realized another neighbor, our doorman and the building super were in the audience too — just the whole building quietly supporting her.

my favourite notebook, 25% off!

Fascinating repo of incredibly esoteric and difficult questions that frontier models can benchmark themselves on — Opus 4.6 scores a paltry 46%. Also discussed on the New York Times.

The questions shouldn't be shared but there are 2500 of them and they're accessible via Hugging Face — so interesting!

An example question which they shared:

Hummingbirds within Apodiformes uniquely have a bilaterally paired oval bone, a sesamoid embedded in the caudolateral portion of the expanded, cruciate aponeurosis of insertion of m. depressor caudae. How many paired tendons are supported by this sesamoid bone? Answer with a number.

Fuck this shit man

I’ve been somewhat facetiously, somewhat seriously, somewhat jokingly, been posing a question to everyone I run into these past few months: Don’t you feel like all meaning is being scrubbed from the world? Like the Langoliers are chomping up purpose, chomping up all the things to which we’ve ascribed purpose these past hundred-thousand years? And that nothing matters?

Really, what I’m asking is: Don’t you think our contemporary education system has long needed an overhaul? That our society has long needed to reconfigure itself? That we need to stop ascribing all our meaning and purpose to being a Web Designer, or Coal Miner, or Airplane Engine Factory Foreman, or Accountant, but instead to being A Good Person, Good Parent, Good Friend, Curious Researcher, Poet, Meditator, Facilitator, or any number of other Ways of Being uncoupled from “work” as we’ve defined it since the industrial revolution? Who is safe from the hunger and capabilities of the models? Yoga instructors?