Jacob Aron

Valve says it still plans to ship the Steam Machine in 2026 A revised blog post is firm: the hardware is coming “this year.”

I would rather have an affordable Steam Machine than more AI www.theverge.com/games/890986...

Revisiting my original story on DeepMind's AlphaGo (over a decade later!) and I am amused by my description of "beefy hardware", which is now basically a standard server rack in AI terms www.newscientist.com/article/2075...

The secret to guessing more accurately with maths What do a 20th-century physicist, an 18th-century statistician and an ancient Greek philosopher have in common? They all knew how to extrapolate with incredible accuracy. Columnist Jacob Aron explains...

My latest maths column is about how you can get better at guessing - and why that's an important skill to have in the modern world www.newscientist.com/article/2518...

This says so much about our modern media ecosystem. It's a screenshot of a tweet from Polymarket that is repackaging a line from a 3-week old New Yorker article as "breaking", while the line itself ("may or may not") contains literally no actual information

i don’t think the goal of fiction is to fix as many people as possible

This is (obviously!) an incredibly hard question. But I don't think I can ever accept consciousness from something that requires prompting. Of course, an LLM could be set up to self-prompt and left running, but I suspect its output would quickly degenerate. I don't if this experiment has been done..

The chatbot creeps have mindfreaked themselves into a sort of irrecoverable epistemic disease where the distinction between words and reality is inconvenient for their self-conception so they've completely excised it. Literally cannot distinguish between reading about something and it happening.

AI research:

Researcher: Claude, please eat ten hamburgers.

Claude: Done! I have eaten ten hamburgers. The first two were delicious, but after that I began to experience bloating and the meat sweats.

Headline: Anthropic Says Claude has "A Fully Developed Digestive System"

This will probably get me dunked, but this is a reasonable, well-argued piece that everyone is hating on. This is just true

How is this legal

iPlayer app on Xbox is properly rubbish, find myself constantly having to restart it to avoid stuttering

When graphs are the news, we all lose

I'm watching Dirty Business and it's very well made, but it's also frustrating that TV dramas like this and Mr Bates even need to exist, given how extensively all of this has been reported on

Skylon (spacecraft) - Wikipedia

The most unrealistic part of this book is not the sun disappearing, but that Skylon spaceplanes are operational en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_...

Embarrassingly uncritical article

This says so much about our modern media ecosystem. It's a screenshot of a tweet from Polymarket that is repackaging a line from a 3-week old New Yorker article as "breaking", while the line itself ("may or may not") contains literally no actual information

Fantastic book

I'd go further. I read (and quickly give up) so many nonfiction books that should just be like 3 articles instead. But then my general position is that publishers should produce fewer books

Exclusive: Greens to ditch "normal" childbirth policy The party understands that the caesarean-reduction policy must go

Good - this was a clear anti-science position that should be reversed www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

Why Yuri Gagarin wasn’t the first in space – and who beat him to it Everyone knows Yuri Gagarin as the first person to go to space. But was he? Physicist Vladimir Brljak tells the tale of the intrepid balloonists who first flew beyond the blue terrestrial sky, challen...

As a Kármán line supporter I thought I would strongly disagree with this, but actually I think the argument - that the first people to see a black sky above the blue were the first in space - is pretty solid! www.newscientist.com/article/2517...

And yeah, you better believe my boy Bayes is in there

The secret to guessing more accurately with maths What do a 20th-century physicist, an 18th-century statistician and an ancient Greek philosopher have in common? They all knew how to extrapolate with incredible accuracy. Columnist Jacob Aron explains...

My latest maths column is about how you can get better at guessing - and why that's an important skill to have in the modern world www.newscientist.com/article/2518...

Great piece

We then had to do an awkward dance where some of the Go organisations already knew about AlphaGo, but couldn't tell me anything directly without breaking the embargo, so it was a lot of "well, if there *had* been an AI breakthrough..."

Also, a fun anecdote from reporting this: Nature and DeepMind had put a very vague embargo notice out, only saying it was a breakthrough with details to follow later. Given DeepMind's research at the time, I figured out it must be to do with Go and starting calling a bunch of Go organisations 1/2

Revisiting my original story on DeepMind's AlphaGo (over a decade later!) and I am amused by my description of "beefy hardware", which is now basically a standard server rack in AI terms www.newscientist.com/article/2075...

The government already has a process in place, right now. It's called, and I've looked the technical term up for this, "copyright law."

UK to delay difficult decisions on AI copyright rules Government goes back to drawing board after its proposals triggered backlash from creative industries

When you have a 97% consensus against your preferred outcome, I don't think the answer is "consult harder" www.ft.com/content/e759...

From byelections to regime change: how gambling on any event fuelled the rise of prediction markets What are Polymarket and Kalshi? What are the odds on US-style exchanges taking off in the UK? Here’s the lowdown

Surely the causation here is wrong, it's prediction markets that gave rise to gambling on every event www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

This joke is so good that I'm not even going to pedantically explain why it's wrong