S. Abbas Raza

Brixen

Founder and Editor at 3 Quarks Daily

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Articles

The Most Beautiful Words in the English Language, According to Linguists

2 days ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Bennett Kleinman at Word Smarts:If you were to ask 100 different people to pick the most beautiful word in the English language, you'd probably get 100 different answers. There's a seemingly endless list to choose from, as some words evoke pleasant memories, while others sound mellifluous to the ear. While there's no way to reach a universal consensus, many esteemed linguists have favorites of their own. These are a few of them.
Why Have Birds Never Gotten as Big as T. Rex?

3 days ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Riley Black in Smithsonian Magazine:The repeated evolution of huge birds is part of the dinosaurian legacy. Beaked birds were the only dinosaurs to have survived the asteroid-triggered mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.
How intelligence can emerge from pattern prediction

3 days ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza
Robust, reliable uncertainties in AI development and applications make the pursuit of global dominance risky, creating pressures toward cooperative stability - 3 Quarks Daily

3 days ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Eric Drexler at AI Prospects:Even experts disagree about current and near-term AI capabilities. Research proceeds along multiple lines, sometimes in secrecy. New algorithmic approaches are reducing or bypassing previously anticipated compute requirements, undermining predictions based on hardware constraints.
Bill Gates: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

5 days ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Bill Gates at Gates Notes:One of the best things I read was an 1889 essay by Andrew Carnegie called The Gospel of Wealth. It makes the case that the wealthy have a responsibility to return their resources to society, a radical idea at the time that laid the groundwork for philanthropy as we know it today. In the essay's most famous line, Carnegie argues that "the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." I have spent a lot of time thinking about that quote lately.
Announcing the Golden Gate Institute for AI

6 days ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Steve Newman at Second Thoughts:Do you feel like you're able to keep up with developments in AI? I don't. The impossibility is a running joke among insiders. If you're following events, you'll have seen the launch of AI 2027, a detailed scenario of how AI may unfold. As you might guess from the title, the analysis projects the arrival of ASI - artificial superintelligence - in as little as three years.
After surviving a crash, Nick becomes a stranger to himself: Diary of a Head Injury

6 days ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza
"Terrorist": Two short-short stories

6 days ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Amitava Kumar at his Substack:Here's the first short short-story I have for you about boys. When I was working on my book Husband of a Fanatic, and traveling in Kashmir, several people told me about a story by Akhtar Mohiuddin's entitled "Terrorist." The story's popularity might be explained by the fact that it outlines a situation where the loss of innocence is represented not through the expected assault but, instead, by the seductive power of violence.
The Opposite of Déjà Vu Can Happen, And It's Even More Uncanny

6 days ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Akira O'Connor & Christopher Moulin at Science Alert:The opposite of déjà vu is "jamais vu", when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way. In our recent research, which has won an Ig Nobel award for literature, we investigated the mechanism behind the phenomenon. Jamais vu may involve looking at a familiar face and finding it suddenly unusual or unknown. Musicians have it momentarily - losing their way in a very familiar passage of music.
Maybe AI Slop Is Killing the Internet, After All

1 week ago | 3quarksdaily.com | S. Abbas Raza

Issie Lapowsky at Bloomberg:Fil Menczer caught his first whiff of what he calls "social bots" in the early 2010s. He was mapping how information travels on Twitter when he stumbled onto a few clusters of accounts that looked a little suspicious. Some of them shared the same post thousands of times. Others reshared thousands of posts from each account. "These are not human," he remembers thinking. So began an extensive career in bot watching.