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A Color beyond the Ordinary Palette

Human color vision seems broad, but it is constrained by the way light reaches the eye. The retina contains three kinds of cone cells: S cones respond most strongly to shorter wavelengths associated with blue, M cones to medium wavelengths associated with green, and L cones to longer wavelengths associated with red. The brain combines their signals into the colors people consciously experience.

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Techmeme surfaced OpenAI’s August 1 publication, “Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science,” which says an internal version of its next major model, Astra, produced ten new results across fields ranging from sphere packing and group theory to quantum complexity and lattice cryptography. OpenAI describes the underlying problems as having seen no progress on their main result for at least a decade, and often much longer.

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Oil markets are sending a misleadingly calm signal. Even after renewed fighting around the Strait of Hormuz, Brent crude remains well below its April peak. Yet the fuels people and businesses actually use - petrol, diesel and jet fuel - are scarce and expensive. The reason is that the global energy shock has shifted from oil wells to refineries: the world has enough crude, but too little capacity to turn it into usable products.

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Knowing How the Image Was Made

People often discuss AI art as though dislike of it were mainly aesthetic: perhaps viewers find it bland, derivative or emotionally hollow. “The Ethics of AI Art,” by neuroaesthetics researcher Ionela Bara, points to a different source of resistance. In her experiments, learning more about how an image generator works changed people’s moral judgments without changing how much they liked the resulting pictures.

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TBPN surfaced the piece through its July 30 standalone interview, Martin Shkreli Breaks Down the Collapse of Situational Awareness. The episode uses the abrupt unwinding of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI-focused hedge fund to explain a durable financial lesson: an investment thesis can remain broadly right while the trade built around it fails.

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The contest over global finance is shifting from currencies to the infrastructure that moves money. America still dominates that infrastructure through the dollar, its banks and firms such as Visa and Mastercard. Yet governments increasingly see dependence on American payment rails as a strategic vulnerability. Their response is to build national and regional alternatives - a trend that could weaken American financial power while making the global system more costly and fragmented.

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Epstein, 46 others linked to decades of sex assaults at Interlochen, over 70 victims (r/news)

• Matookie: “Epstein, who was a regular visitor to Interlochen, contributed nearly a half million dollars from 1990 to 2003. He and Maxwell often stayed in the Jeffrey E. Epstein Scholarship Lodge, which he had paid to have constructed. The two were also known to have paid for scholarships of several children.” Well damn.
• Hell-Yea-Brother: This is the longest high-profile no-convictions case ever.
• DomLite: We already know about Epstein. Name the other 46.

Red Cross declares crisis over blood supply shortage in US for second time its history (r/news)

• RWingsNYer: They just laid off all the blood donation team at my local hospital. You know, the ones that go to different places so people can donate blood so you don’t have to go to the hospital to do it? Yeah, them.
• baksdad: I’m doing what I can. Pretty much every two months since I was 17. I’m now 68.
• Random_Person_246810: Unfortunately, they need to start paying cash if they want heads in beds (like they do with plasma).

Women of Reddit: What did a guy do on the first date that instantly made you decide there wouldn’t be a second? (r/AskReddit)

• ColdCaseKim: Told me I was pretty cute, “but there’s a big difference between cute and beautiful,” and proceeded to explain it to me.
• IcyFine419: Give me an ‘expert’ lecture about my own job, even though he knew nothing about it
• DogHorror1184: I invited him over to my apartment and he brought all of his belongings. like pots and pans and everything. I had to have my landlord make him leave lmao.

What is a hobby that requires little to no money? (r/AskReddit)

• DrHugh: Birdwatching. You can easily get free apps, or check out a book from the library. And you can just look out your window to notice what birds there are.
• Imaginary-Fly-2160: Needle felting! You can use old thrift shop sweaters and you get to be all STABBITY!
• AceMcVeer: Well it sure as fuck isn’t miniature wargaming

Atheists, how do you deal with the fear of death? (r/AskReddit)

• b_vitamin: I like how Alan Watts describes it: what was it like before you were born?
• mvndanke: Find beauty in the day to day.
• Impossible_Gap3338: Everyone dies. When your time comes it comes, no need to be in constant fear

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MSFT up 8% AH. What happened? Did Satya resign? (Blind)

• luptnfb (Salesforce): It is because they DID NOT increase capital expenditure for AI scam. First hyperscaler to not increase. This indicates that AI bubble is finally in the bursting zone. Everyone probably knew this was coming which is why the chip stocks are getting destroyed on the same day. Amazon reports tomorrow. Won’t shock me if they reduce capital expenditure tomorrow. If they do, then AI is done and OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA etc. are all SCREWED
• Salesplay (Salesforce): Yes, he has been replaced by Satire Nutella as CEO
• Dr.Ai.ML (Broadcom): Hope that would lead to Green Day tomorrow and ai momentum will be back

Make sure you exceed expectations at Meta! (Blind)

• bk1876 (Meta): Such a shit company.
• Avf31sd (Microsoft): My head hurt from reading this, I can’t understand corporate texts, it’s like they’re made to make your head hurt. Wtf does that even mean? In plain words?
• chat2 (Meta): Yes? Same as any job or business outside of maybe the post office where performance management is minimal? People seem to forget why they got into tech and top companies…

Three of Meta’s worst directors are now at Google (Blind)

• obama2 (Asana): Lingjuan?
• 3xPlusOne (AMD): I personally know a research scientist who left Google Brain to join Meta only to deeply regret the move, so much so that he left Meta shortly to found his own startup
• poppy12 (Oracle): That’s how it works in this industry. Failing upwards.

“Clapping Is a First Amendment Right:” An Interview With the Person Arrested for Clapping at a Data Center Meeting (r/technology)

• Pickel_Bucket_317: I’m immediately doing a records request for all meeting minutes/videos and see if anyone clapped for things the council approved and if they were kicked out for it. If not , then a lawsuit for viewpoint discrimination and free speech violations
• thaiberius_kirk: All these tech bros and the people who are pro-tech bros have the thinnest fucking skin.
• GWstudent1: Cops need to be prosecuted for flagrant violations of civil rights. Qualified immunity should not cover the most obvious incidents of violations of civil rights.

Innocent man spends 18 months in prison after Skyrim username mixup (r/technology)

• Cypher2: This man’s lawyers need a new job
• KikoSoujirou: So they found no other evidence connecting him to the conversations in question nor could they verify he even was logged in/using the app at the time yet they still convicted him. Scary
• ThrownAway17Years: This could have been avoided if they just copy and pasted.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: HARD
• Problem: Custom LeetCode-style prompt: Count Nodes in a Distributed Tree
• Topics: Distributed Systems, Tree, Asynchronous Programming, State Machine, Idempotency

Problem gist

Every tree node runs in a separate process or on a separate machine. A node knows only its parent and its direct children, and it can communicate with them only by sending asynchronous messages.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Construct Binary Tree from Preorder and Inorder Traversal
• Topics: Array, Hash Table, Divide and Conquer, Tree, Binary Tree

Problem gist

Two arrays describe the same binary tree:

• Preorder visits each node before its children: root, left subtree, right subtree.
• Inorder visits each node between its children: left subtree, root, right subtree.

The task is to rebuild and return the tree. Every value is unique, and the two arrays are guaranteed to describe the same tree.