PEREGRINE PULP

Researchers at Apple recently showed frontier AI models, the newer specialized variants explicitly designed for more complex reasoning tasks (from OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, Meta, Anthropic, etc) are unable to do basic math — and the way they demonstrated this would look devastating if I was someone arguing for the coming tech revolution and the utopia it promises to usher in. What the team did was use a set of grade-school math problems called GSM8K, a favoured AI math bench

Parasitism has to be one of the most interesting aspects of biology. You may have come across the better known fungal , worm , or single-celled protist parasites who control the minds of their host for their own purposes. Lesser known are the parasitoid wasps . But with them, if you don't know, you can mostly erase from your mind what you think of when you think of "wasp". Many of these are no bigger than a grain of sand and others are only about the size of a sesame seed. T

I don’t really want to discuss the current conflict in Iran. That’s being beaten to death by the uninformed and otherwise by those who’ve only ever failed to make any accurate predictions about any conflict in my lifetime. Alas. What has been entertaining, however, has been taking note of how contradictory the accounting seems, and from every vantage point on nearly every aspect: from what is happening and to whom, why, and what the inevitable outcome will be. Every bit of it

I was just checking in on the flooding in Hawai'i when I thought to look up how bad the last hurricane season was in the US. To my surprise, there were zero landfalls in the United States or its territories in 2025. Doesn't that seem weird? Well, what's actually strange is if you, like myself, thought that was unusual. Based on my total ignorance and misperceptions, I assumed this was a radical departure from the norm. Nope. Happens all the time. About one year in four sees

Dr Paul Ehrlich, the American biologist (an entomologist specializing in butterflies) and Stanford professor, just died at age 93. As expected, through social and traditional medias folks are all a twitter with condemnations and demonizations , most of which read to me as some kind of weird revisionist history. As we love doing, people look back with hindsight and proclaim the future was simple and obvious and, as a result, perfectly predictable. And to get there they preten

I was just writing about a new study looking at problems with and universality of AI sycophancy. Another similar study was posted last week to the Computer Science section of arXiv, looking at AI hallucinations. The results are just as staggering. With the persistent problem of large language models fabricating their own facts, the researcher was considering the reality that "the most common and critical applications of LLMs in the enterprise is answering questions grounded

People love bees. Most folks are particularly enamoured with those colony bees who gift us honey but who make up just 5% of bee species and tend to neglect the far more numerous solitary variety comprising the overwhelming majority of bee diversity . But how many bee species are there? Of course it is very difficult to estimate the number of unknown organisms. What we do know is that to date we've identified something like 2.1 million total species. And somewhere on the orde

In their ongoing attempt at self-immolation, the once-relevant press is at it again. WHAT HAPPENED On March 7th, aspiring killers (two young men, US citizens living at home with their parents in the leafy suburbs of Pennsylvania) deployed a pair of IEDs (containing materials that would have them designated as weapons of mass destruction) at a public gathering on the street in front of the home of the New York City mayor. The gathering was overwhelmingly attended not by protes