Ponderings
The incompleteness of ethics
... moral reasoning, like mathematics, is always open-ended, always reaching beyond what can be formally derived. The challenge, then, is not only how to encode ethical reasoning into AI but also how to ensure that its evolving moral framework remains aligned with human values and societal norms. For all its speed, precision and computational power, AI remains incapable of the one thing that makes moral reasoning truly possible: the ability to question not only what is right, but why. Ethics, therefore, must remain a human endeavour, an ongoing and imperfect struggle that no machine will ever fully master.
By Elad Uzan
Aeon Magazine, 08 August 2025
Cybernetics
Weiner, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
In general, non-linear systems of equations are hard to solve. There is, however, a specially tractable case, in which the system differs only slightly from a linear system, and the terms which distinguish it change so slowly that they may be considered substantially constant over a period of oscillation. In this case, we may study the non-linear system as if it were a linear system with slowly varying parameters. Systems which may be studied this way are said to be perturbed secularly, and the theory of secularly perturbed systems plays a most important role in gravitational astronomy.
read Chapter 4, pp. 129-157
Economist
Schools brief | Artificial intelligence: AI firms will soon exhaust most of the internet's data
It is clear that access to more data—whether culled from specialist sources, generated synthetically or provided by human experts—is key to maintaining rapid progress in AI. Like oilfields, the most accessible data reserves have been depleted. The challenge now is to find new ones—or sustainable alternatives.
Something else
Sodade
Cesária Évora and a quote about her from Songbar
The song, meaning 'longing', is inspired by emigrant workers who leave Cape Verde to look back at their homeland with nostalgia, and with yearning for loved one, but as well as the melody, it is the perfect pace, and the, gradually falling, lilting beauty of Evora's voice that truly brings out such emotions.
Almost two-thirds of the million Cape Verdeans alive live abroad.