GoKawiil
Tech News
A commentary piece examines whether universal basic income (UBI) programs create durable shifts in recipients' behavior and motivation, rather than just short-term financial relief. The piece opens with an Einstein quote questioning whether people act well only out of fear or reward, framing the discussion of UBI's psychological effects.
A researcher pushes back on the popular claim—voiced by commentators like Scott Alexander and Holden Karnofsky and researcher Dean Keith Simonton—that scientific low-hanging fruit has been exhausted and discovery is inevitably slowing. The author, prompted by a discouraged research assistant, argues this view is mistaken and discourages people from pursuing original research.
A research team has released Einstein, an exploitation pipeline that automatically builds data-only attacks by tracking attacker-controllable data flowing into security-sensitive syscall arguments, such as execve or write. Rather than modeling application-specific logic, Einstein works generically against any program's syscall interface, and the team reports it can generate a surprisingly large number of working exploits against real-world software.
A writer recounts memorizing the first 100 digits of pi three years ago after reading Joshua Foer's 'Moonwalking with Einstein.' They used a person-action-object (PAO) system, a memorization method that pairs pairs of digits with vivid mental images of people performing actions on objects, building on the classical method of loci or memory palace technique.
A new piece traces how Copernicus's heliocentric model, despite its own flaws, replaced a patchwork geocentric system by offering a simpler explanation for planetary retrograde motion. The author uses this history as a lens to explore why the universe expands, suggesting that today's cosmological models may face a similar shift once a deeper underlying framework is found. The discussion draws parallels between Copernicus's incomplete but directionally correct theory and the current search for a fuller explanation of cosmic expansion.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science fabricated nanoscale optical structures based on the Smith hat monotile, the shape that solved the Einstein aperiodic tiling problem in 2023. When laser light hit these silicon nitride structures, it produced pinwheel-shaped diffraction patterns showing chirality not seen in typical quasicrystals.
Apple has revealed its first foldable smartphone, called the iPhone Duo, marking the company's entry into the foldable device category long occupied by rivals like Samsung. Details on pricing, release date, and full specifications were not disclosed in the announcement.
An essay dissects the common sci-fi trope of depicting wormholes as flat, circular portals with tunnel-like interiors resembling a hole dug by a worm. The author explains that this image stems from misreading two-dimensional diagrams of Einstein-Rosen bridges, which were never meant to represent how a real three-dimensional wormhole would actually appear to an observer.