“To choose Inuit wayfinding,” the ethnographers conclude, “becomes increasingly heroic in the face of wayfinding that depends on an advanced technological system.”

It may be a losing battle to demand that basic acts of competence require heroism. But I still think it’s worth noticing what assumptions that Silicon Valley steam engine metaphor is trying to force us to accept.

Tim Requarth's essay on AI as steam engine, instead of a bicycle.

Most people believe that their personal learning goals will be obvious and easily remembered. But in practice, people often fail to achieve learning goals not for lack of desire to achieve them, but because the goals themselves are underspecified.

Because of this, when we encounter real obstacles in our lives, we often lack concrete plans that cue us how to work toward our goals when things get hard. This pattern can undermine learning progress and sap our motivation.

Learning Goal Claude Code skill uses psychology-backed goal-setting to maintain learning while coding with AI - by Dr. Cat Hicks.

Andes virus is simply not that contagious and infection comes nearly entirely from those who are symptomatic.I built a probabilistic model decomposing this question into exposure pools — the widow’s KLM boarding, the Airlink flight from St Helena, the JNB hospital, household contacts of disembarked passengers — applying Andes-specific transmission and incubation parameters, then conditioning on the observation that zero non-passenger cases have surfaced as of today. Running this, I get a 4% chance that there will be more than 5 cases from people outside those on the Hondius cruise, with a 70% chance of at least one non-passenger case by August, and about a 17% chance of three or more.

Peter Wildeford's analysis on hantavirus - and why we don't need to worry about a COVID style pandemic.

The morning session focuses on emerging research and academic perspectives, offering a glimpse into the ideas and experiments that will define the next wave of design.

NYCxDESIGN AI Summit - Tuesday, May 19th.