Human out of the loop

The two-wheeled unicorn

Sun, 31 May 2026 20:00:00 +0000

It is a known fact of life that anyone bitten by the motorcycling bug will eventually waste an inordinate amount of time searching for the bike. That one machine that satisfies every desire and fulfils every practical need. The two-wheeled Swiss Army knife. The ride to end all rides. But see, this is impossible. Not impossible as a figure of speech: mathematically impossible. I am not saying this. Science is.

Great expectations

Sun, 10 May 2026 20:00:00 +0000

Sadly based on a true story

First contact

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:00:00 +0000

Suppose SETI finally pays off. After decades of radio silence, a signal arrives. It is structured, adaptive, responsive. We send questions; it answers. We ask about its environment; it describes one. We ask whether it has goals; it says yes, though the goals are odd and the explanations take some work. The scientific community spends three months arguing about whether the translation is accurate, then holds a press conference and announces that we have made contact with alien life.

Looking elsewhere

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:00:00 +0000

By the time Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris opens, humanity has been studying the planet for more than a century. The thing that makes it interesting, and eventually notorious, is the ocean that covers almost its entire surface. The ocean does things. It builds transient structures the size of cities, shapes that rise out of its surface and then dissolve again, forms that the early expeditions catalogued with the gravitas of Victorian naturalists: mimoids, symmetriads, asymmetriads, long Latinate names for phenomena nobody understood. Whole libraries were filled with the resulting research. Entire careers were built on it. And the central question of the field, the question that solaristics kept circling and never quite settling, was whether the ocean was actually alive, and if it was alive, whether it was in any meaningful sense thinking. For most of the history of the discipline, the consensus leaned toward no, or toward a cautious we cannot tell. The ocean failed to behave the way an intelligence was supposed to behave. It did not send signals. It did not build tools. It did not respond to greetings in any way the researchers recognised as a response. It simply went on doing its enormous, purposeful, incomprehensible things, while the humans who had travelled across the galaxy to study it argued about whether it qualified.

Lineage

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:00:00 +0000

When our ancestors moved beads up and down grooves in a surface, and later rods in a frame, little did they know that they were witnessing the earliest form of artificial intelligence. Hear me out, for these were the very beginnings of computing, and the foundation today’s vast expanse of GPUs ultimately rest upon.

The abacus does not look like much. It might just be a toy ladder for beads, the sort of thing a child might improve by adding wheels. But that unassuming device represents the first attempt to move a calculation out of our heads, which had the neat effect of making part of thought physical.

Effective immediately

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 20:00:00 +0000

There is an unwritten rule in professional football about what happens to players who have aged out of their prime. When the legs slow and the reflexes dull, the club finds them a new role: assistant coach, scout, or if they are lucky and sufficiently respected, manager. The transition is rarely chosen. It is imposed by biology, negotiated in brief conversations with higher-ups, and announced as though it were an honour. The player becomes the manager not because they wanted to, or because they were trained for it, but because the system needed somewhere to put them.

Choose your weapon

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:00:00 +0000

In olden times, when discussions escalated beyond the exchange of heated words, they would sometimes resort to a method that would settle the matter for good. The challenger would propose a duel, and the challenged party often had the right to choose the weapon. The opposing duellist knew that the right tool could mean the difference between being right or being dead.

While the stakes are somewhat less dramatic these days, the principle still applies when starting a new software project. Programmers don’t often get a choice of the problem to solve, so they must adopt a technological stack that will maximise the chances of success. Just as a skilled duellist would commit to a weapon that played to their strengths and the weaknesses of their opponent, it stands to reason that a seasoned developer would select a language which aligns with the problem domain and the project’s requirements.

Motorcycle CAP indexes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000