"In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate." -- Isaac Asimov

Why did childhood summers feel endless? | Popular Science #psychology

Why does time go so much more quickly as an adult? One of the more commonly cited explanations for why childhood summers feel endless deals with simple proportions: a year at age five represents a fifth of your entire life, while a year at age 50 is merely a fiftieth.

Although Wittmann acknowledges the popularity of this theory, he questions whether an individual’s experience of time perception really lines up so neatly with the math.

“This is an easy calculation for us to do, and it’s so intuitively compelling,” he says. “But the question would be whether the mind and brain actually calculate lived time this way, and there is no evidence.”

What is happening, says Wittmann, is something both more human and complex. At some point, childhood ends. Development plateaus, the brain stabilizes, and the world stops feeling quite so new. We’ve seen summers before; we know how they go.

This is where time starts to accelerate, or at least, where it starts to feel that way in retrospect. With fewer novel experiences being stored, there’s simply less to look back on. The summers don’t disappear, exactly. They just leave less new memories behind.

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European AI: a playbook to own it | Mistral AI #ai #digitalsouvereignty #eu #longread

This document is not a theoretical exercise. It is a practical playbook, born from the lived experience of a European AI startup, Mistral AI, navigating one of the world’s most competitive, fast and capital-intensive industries. We have experienced misaligned equity frameworks, bureaucratic barriers that require the CEO to travel for basic administrative tasks, and legal uncertainty that complicates contracts and customer relationships. We have seen how regulatory overlaps create legal quagmires, how fragmented markets hinder growth, and how talent slips away due to administrative friction.

This document is a call to turn Europe’s strengths into scalable, competitive advantage. It is grounded in the urgency of the moment and the conviction that Europe can and must build an AI ecosystem that reflects its values, serves its citizens, and competes globally. It is our collective duty to ensure AI can also be developed in Europe on terms that aligns with our priorities as Europeans.

These challenges shaped our approach and led us to agree on three key principles to unlock Europe’s AI potential:

Action over theory:

Every recommendation, from visa reform to procurement gateways, is designed to be implemented, measured, and scaled.

Unity in complexity:

Europe's diversity is its strength, but its fragmentation is its Achilles' heel. This paper embraces the complexity of the EU's structure while offering solutions to align markets, reduce redundancy, and accelerate decision-making.

Speed is not an option:

We propose fast-track mechanisms for talent, capital, and compliance, so Europe's innovators aren't left behind.

Framework:

I. Attract and retain talent

II. Scale: Unleash the full potential of the Single Market

III. Adopt European AI across the real economy

IV. Power Europe with local infrastructure and data

The Physics Of GPS | An Interactive Exploration #technology #til

How geometry, stopwatches, and Einstein's theories work together to make GPS possible.

Physical Phone Experiments #hardware #science #interesting

Phyphox allows you to use the sensors in your phone for your experiments. For example, detect the frequency of a pendulum using the accelerometer or measure the Doppler effect using its microphone.

The Problem That Built an Industry // a.s #aviation #history #business #longread #rabbithole

The World Before SABRE To understand why this infrastructure exists, you need to understand the problem it was built to solve.

By the mid-1950s, American Airlines was managing reservations on index cards. A booking required a phone call to an agent, who would search physical card racks across multiple city offices, confirm availability verbally, and call the passenger back. A transatlantic reservation could take 90 minutes to confirm. The airline was processing roughly 85,000 reservation requests a day across 50-plus cities. The system was collapsing.

The origin story of what would become the GDS (Global Distribution System) is well-documented, though it has acquired a degree of mythology in retelling. In 1953, C.R. Smith, president of American Airlines, was seated next to R. Blair Smith, an IBM salesman, on a cross-country flight. IBM and American Airlines entered a formal development partnership in 1959, six years later.

The result was SABRE (Semi-Automated Business Research Environment). It went live in 1964: five years after the 1959 contract, and eleven years after the 1953 conversation.

That is the scale of lead time for infrastructure of this kind. The same year SABRE launched, IBM announced the System/360. Three years before the first ATM. Five years before the moon landing. Fifteen years before VisiCalc.

Bitcoin miners are losing $19,000 on every BTC produced as difficulty drops 7.8% #blockchain

Bitcoin miners are operating at steep losses, with average production costs around $88,000 per coin versus a market price near $69,200, as rising energy prices and war-related disruptions squeeze margins. Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, including oil above $100 and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, are driving up electricity costs and contributing to falling hashrate, slower block times, and sharp drops in network difficulty. Strained mining economics are forcing miners to sell more bitcoin and push into AI and high-performance computing for steadier revenue, adding pressure to a market already weighed down by underwater holders and heavy leverage.

South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access • The Register #internet #society

Universal basic income is an idea that hasn’t gained much traction, but South Korea on Thursday implemented a universal basic mobile data access scheme.

The nation’s Ministry of Science announced the plan yesterday with a statement and a rather more interesting giant infographic that both explain the scheme will provide over seven million subscribers with unlimited downloads at just 400 kbps after their data allowances expire. South Korea’s dominant carriers, SK Telecom, KT, and LG Uplus, have agreed to the plan.

How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer – Communications of the ACM #technology #space #engineering

To ensure those wrong answers never reach the spacecraft’s thrusters, NASA moved beyond the triple redundancy of traditional systems. Orion utilizes two Vehicle Management Computers, each containing two Flight Control Modules, for a total of four FCMs. But the redundancy goes even deeper: each FCM consists of a self-checking pair of processors.

Effectively, eight CPUs run the flight software in parallel. The engineering philosophy hinges on a “fail-silent” design. The self-checking pairs ensure that if a CPU performs an erroneous calculation due to a radiation event, the error is detected immediately and the system responds.

“A faulty computer will fail silent, rather than transmit the ‘wrong answer,’” Uitenbroek explained. This approach simplifies the complex task of the triplex “voting” mechanism that compares results. Instead of comparing three answers to find a majority, the system uses a priority-ordered source selection algorithm among healthy channels that haven’t failed-silent. It picks the output from the first available FCM in the priority list; if that module has gone silent due to a fault, it moves to the second, third, or fourth.

This level of redundancy is specifically scaled for the rigors of deep space. NASA anticipates transient failures during the Artemis II mission’s transit through the high-radiation Van Allen Belts.

“We can lose three FCMs in 22 seconds and still ride through safely on the last FCM,” said Uitenbroek. A silenced FCM doesn’t become dead weight, however; the system is designed to reset, re-synchronize its state with the operating modules, and re-join the group mid-flight.

FreeBSD Laptop Compatibility #software #hardware

Top Laptops for use with FreeBSD Each laptop is scored based on an aggregate of:

how many laptop components are detected, where each fully auto-detected component adds a point whether devices have degraded functionality, reducing the score by 0.5-1.5 based on severity and how important it is to the laptop experience (wi-fi/graphics weighted more) user-provided comments about test results, and how involved setup is for that device

“This is unprecedented”: America’s AI boom is leaving the rest of the world behind - Rest of World #economy #venturecapital #technology #ai

In mid-February, Anthropic announced it had raised an eye-watering $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation. Two weeks later, OpenAI raised the stakes dramatically, announcing a $110 billion round at a $840 billion valuation. All in, according to an analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, U.S. AI firms attracted 75% of all AI investment last year — $194 billion. That’s nearly half of all of global venture funding, across every industry.

This funding has given American companies a massive strategic advantage, providing capital that these companies can use not only to recruit top talent but also to invest in the physical infrastructure that the AI industry uniquely requires: big, powerful data centers stacked with expensive and hard-to-source chips. These data centers also require massive amounts of water and electricity to run, and many billions of dollars to build and operate — resources that much of the world simply lacks.

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