From Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross’ newsletter:
“The data center is becoming civilization’s dominant building type. US construction spending on data centers surpassed offices for the first time in December, $3.57 billion to $3.49 billion, a shift that will accelerate as AI automates the jobs that once filled those offices.”
For all those workers who resisted attempts to get them to come back to the office…
“NVIDIA recently announced a suite of physical AI tools designed to let developers train surgical and service robots inside virtual hospital environments before they ever touch a patient. The centerpiece is a developer blueprint called Rheo which generates physically accurate simulations of hospital settings — modeling medical device interactions, human movements and logistics — so that robotic systems can be safely developed and tested in digital twins.” More »
Last October I had a robotic colectomy during which my surgeon used the Da Vinci Robotic Surgical System. No AI was involved but using AI tools to train surgical robots sounds like a good idea.
How good are these AI tools? A prototype (GR00T-H) has demonstrated the ability to execute a complete, end-to-end suture in the SutureBot benchmark, highlighting robust long-horizon dexterity.
My most interesting conversations with Claude tend to be long. Certainly longer than most people would ever read. I’ve been saving the “keepers” as PDFs and archiving them here. I’ve long thought these “chats” might make good audio conversations. Still long but something that could be listened to while commuting. I assume people are already doing this. In the ever-more-frantic feature race, I keep thinking some frontier lab will add this as a feature. I ran the idea by Claude (my comments in bold): Continue reading
Is “motherhood regret” the last great taboo? Every couple of years I come across an article about the phenomenon. From the BBC:
A 2023 study conducted in Poland estimated 5–14% of parents regret their decision to have children and would opt to be childfree if they had their time again.
Parents may not speak openly about regret, but they are finding community online. The Facebook group I Regret Having Children, which has 96,000 members.
I guess you could say l’ve been collecting(?) these stories: Nikol Lohr on pregnancy; “He’d never wanted kids”; I Don’t Want Kids. While I’m more interested in the personal aspect of this trend, the global implications are… ominous? From Perplexity:
Global fertility has fallen from about 5 children per woman in the 1960s to roughly 2.2 today, and it is projected to drop to around replacement level (2.1) by mid‑century and below thereafter. This means population growth is slowing sharply, and the world is expected to peak at about 10.3 billion people in the mid‑2080s before starting a gradual decline.
Most countries in Europe, North America, East Asia, and parts of Latin America already have fertility well below replacement, with some (like South Korea, Italy, Spain, and China) near or below 1.2 children per woman. As their populations age and, in some cases, begin to shrink, they face pressure on pension systems, health care, and economic growth, and are debating pro‑natalist policies versus adapting to long‑term demographic contraction. Meanwhile, Africa still has higher fertility but is also on a downward trajectory, so the global long‑run trend is toward older, slower‑growing or even declining populations.
I prompted Claude.ai to analyze 107 blog posts on the topic of CONSCIOUSNESS
“The arc isn’t what you might think it is. The surface narrative is: Steve gets interested in consciousness around 2008–2010, reads voraciously through the early 2010s, and gradually moves toward nonduality and the illusory self. That’s true but it misses something more interesting.”
Mr. Wolf will be using the Bring A Trailer website to find a new home for the Land Rover. Scheduled to leave Jefferson City on March 18. Mr. Wolf will then do his magic and list the truck along with lots of photos, videos (see comment below) and information that will get the best price possible. I’ll wager nobody does this better than Mr. Wolf. By way of example, this Rally-Style, 390 FE-Powered 1949 Lincoln 9EL Club Coupe 5-Speed. I first saw this car while visiting Mr. Wolf in 2018. Continue reading
Claude.ai: Given that you’ve written 6,400 posts, you’ve clearly been at this a long time — that’s a substantial body of thought. Here are the possibilities I find most genuinely compelling:
Intellectual archaeology
Tracing how your thinking has actually evolved over time — not how you remember it evolving. Most prolific writers are surprised when an outside reader identifies the real turning points, the ideas you quietly abandoned, the obsessions that recur in disguise. An AI could map this with precision a human editor never could, simply because of the volume.
Finding your strongest work
Long-form bloggers almost always have brilliant posts buried under the sheer weight of output. An AI could identify which pieces are most original, most internally coherent, or most likely to resonate — not by traffic metrics, but by the quality of the thinking itself. That’s a different and arguably more honest filter.
The book you haven’t written
6,400 posts almost certainly contain one or more books worth of coherent argument that you’ve never assembled into a single form. An AI could identify the connective tissue — the thesis that runs underneath years of posts — and propose a structure you couldn’t see because you were too close to it.
Contradiction and tension mapping
Where have you argued both sides of something over the years? Not as a gotcha, but as a genuine map of your intellectual uncertainty — the questions you keep returning to because you haven’t resolved them. Those unresolved tensions are often where the most interesting thinking lives.
A “second brain” interface
Rather than one-time analysis, an ongoing conversational layer over your entire archive — so you could ask things like “have I written about this before?” or “what’s my actual position on X when I look across everything I’ve written?” Your blog becomes a queryable extension of your own memory.
Your readers’ experience
Surfacing unexpected connections for new readers — showing someone who just found one post, the three other posts from 2014 and 2019 that are in genuine dialogue with it, even though you never linked them.
The thread connecting all of these is that the real value isn’t in the individual posts — it’s in the patterns across all of them that nobody, including you, has ever been able to see all at once.
I haven’t owned every Apple gismo, but a lot of them: airpods (23); Apple Music (10); Apple Watch (8); iPad (45); iPhone (131); iPod (64)
Ron Bandelier served during the Vietnam War and shared some of his memorabilia yesterday. This beret was worn by the Ron’s unit. I asked Claude.ai if could tell me anything about the beret.
Claude.ai: What you have here is a really interesting piece of Vietnam War-era militaria. Here’s what I can identify: The maroon/wine color is most associated with airborne/parachute units. In the US Army context during Vietnam, maroon berets were worn by members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which served extensively in Vietnam from 1965 onward.
The gold bullion embroidered badge — featuring a laurel wreath and what appears to be a torch or fasces at the base — is characteristic of a senior NCO or officer’s flash/badge. The heavy gold wire (bullion) embroidery was typically used on dress or parade versions rather than field wear.
The vintage photo shows a soldier wearing what appears to be the same or very similar beret with a shoulder sleeve insignia (SSI) patch visible, which could help narrow down the specific unit significantly if that patch could be identified more clearly. Do you have any other items from the same box that might help identify the specific unit?
Excellent Find — This Identifies Everything! This box lid is a goldmine of information. Here’s what I can read:
Unit Identified: 1st Vietnamese Ranger Group
The Beret Explained
This now makes perfect sense. US Army advisors assigned to Vietnamese Ranger (Biệt Động Quân) units wore the maroon beret alongside their South Vietnamese counterparts. The gold bullion badge would have been the Vietnamese Ranger insignia, not a US unit badge. This was a point of pride — American advisors wore the same beret as the elite Vietnamese unit they served with.
The War Trophy Documents
The papers at the top appear to be War Trophy Registration/Authorization forms — official US Army documents permitting soldiers to bring captured enemy weapons or equipment home. The name Hambeline, Ronald G. and rank SP4 (Specialist 4th Class) is partially visible, along with what appears to be an Artillery Team (MACT) assignment and a Missouri home address.
Significance
This is a cohesive advisor’s grouping. MACV advisors to Vietnamese Ranger units are well-documented but their personal memorabilia is relatively rare. This deserves careful preservation and possibly research into the soldier’s service record.