Benjamin Dougherty

it always drove me crazy in school that 1) I wast allowed to leave standardized testing early 2) I wasn’t allowed to read a book while I waited for the testing period to end I should have rebelled harder against this but my parents (god bless them) had trained me to follow the rules too strongly. I don’t think it occurred to them that sometimes rule following can be a detriment. I would have lost my mind being subjected to this.

While he was writing ULYSSES, Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen that he’d spent eight hours working on a single sentence. The sentence: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid, nightblue fruit.”

Since when did Millennials have Walkmans and land lines?

🚨 SAM ALTMAN: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”

The clunk of the librarian's stamp as one borrowed a new book is another tiny joy that we have lost to digitisation.

If I offered you $3k every week and all you had to do was read a book for at least 4 hours a day, would you take it?

The signal strength hitting Earth from Voyager 1 is less than one trillionth of a watt. To put that in perspective, your phone’s WiFi signal is roughly 100 billion times stronger, and it drops a connection walking between rooms. NASA picks up Voyager’s whisper using arrays of 70-meter antennas, then reconstructs coherent data from it at 160 bits per second. That’s slower than a 1990s modem. Downloading a single photograph at that rate would take weeks. The spacecraft itself runs on 8.8 kg of decaying plutonium-238 that generated 470 watts at launch in 1977. Today it produces roughly 200 watts, losing about 4 watts per year. NASA has been shutting down instruments one by one since the 1980s to keep the math working. They turned off the cosmic ray sensor just this year. And here’s the part nobody’s talking about: there is exactly one antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager. Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra. It went offline for major upgrades from May 2025 through early 2026. During that window, if Voyager had a critical fault, the team would have had to wait months to respond. A 48-year-old spacecraft built on 1970s computing, running on a plutonium battery that’s lost 60% of its output, transmitting at a power level that barely qualifies as existing, from a distance where light itself takes 23 hours to arrive. And a German observatory just casually picked up its carrier signal on a live stream. The engineering margin NASA built into this mission was designed for 4 years to Saturn. Everything after that is borrowed time the engineers keep extending by doing math with 200 watts.