2026

If you’re thinking about applying for a Swedish island, first of all, I’m jealous (as a Swede, I’m not eligible), and second, I highly recommend going for island #1: Tjuvholmen. It’s a charming little island, not far from the cabin where I spent my summers as a kid. I’ll come visit if you win! Also, I love this bit from the FAQ: Is the initiative open to everyone? The competition is open to all international travellers (except billionaires) aged 18 and above.

Here’s Don Knuth: Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 […] ! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.

Viktig samhällsinformation: snåla inte med isen i drinken. 🧊

I’ve seen the movie more than once, but this is my first time reading Carl Sagan’s Contact. 📚 For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population has abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless.

I still write my own code, because I enjoy it. I have never been a normal programmer, and maybe you aren’t, either. So, let’s just do things the way we want — the way we like. 😌 Robin Sloan Public service announcement

I enjoyed this conversation between Margaret Atwood and Katie Drummond. Here’s Margaret on large language models: That is a subject about which I know very little, except that it’s a crap poet and a pretty bad imitator of me. […] It’s like absolutely every other human tool that we have ever come up with, including fire and language. So it has good news, it has bad news. It’s got stupid consequences that nobody was thinking about and they’re all like that.