This essay first appeared in my newsletter. Sign up here if interested in F'ing up the status quo and fixing education. Here's a puzzle: how do you create a trillion-dollar debt bubble that can't be popped? Answer: make student loans non-dischargeable in…

We got our first look at a Geekbench result from the iPhone 16 earlier this week, with somewhat disappointing results....

I have played a little bit with OpenAI's new iteration of #GPT, GPT-o1, which performs an initial reasoning step before running the LLM. It is certainly a more capable tool than previous iterations, though still struggling with the most advanced research…

Copyright law was key to disputing fraudster’s claim to be cryptocurrency’s founder Satoshi Nakamoto

As Large Language Models become more ubiquitous across domains, it becomes important to examine their inherent limitations critically. This work argues that hallucinations in language models are...

A world that has tossed out the print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in favor of Wikipedia is not necessarily a richer one.

Kevin Hall’s research at the NIH presents an existential challenge to the food industry, but he's asking the food industry to work with him.

Let’s try LibreWolf, Floorp and Zen until Mozilla decides they want to make a browser again

Autoformatting in Microsoft Excel has caused many a headache—but now, a new study shows that one in five genetics papers in top scientific journals contains errors from the program, The Washington Post reports. The errors often arose when gene names in a…

Long time Birchtree readers know I love data, and love data even more when I can throw it into a graph. I’m also a fan of testing things that everyone generally agrees are true, but no one seems to have any data to back up.

That brings us to

Time series databases are essential tools in any software engineer’s toolbelt. Their development has been shaped by user needs and countless open source contributors, leading to the healthy ecosystem of options we see today. In this article, you’ll see how…

The country is miles ahead of any other nation in its transition to electric vehicles.

How I got rid of Windows and never looked back

A friend of mine stopped by the USV office the other morning and asked me about startup mortality rates. Her business sells to startups a...