What does Against Usefulness say about Tech & Society?

Many successful companies were built on research that once seemed useless because curiosity-driven work creates foundational ideas and artifacts that later get adapted into products or infrastructure when someone finds a practical use.

An insight from Against Usefulness

Pre-shaping a tin droplet into a thin pancake with a weak pre-pulse increases EUV output and limits debris because the flattened, rarified target presents a larger vaporized surface for the main pulse, producing more plasma emission with fewer neutral atoms and particulates to reabsorb light.

The World's Most Important Machine

Opposing ideas can be symbiotic because each side sustains attention on the other—ongoing debate prevents consensus and keeps both ideas circulating longer.

This Video Will Make You Angry

Adding a tiny, controlled oxygen partial pressure extends mirror lifetime because oxygen reacts with or alters surface chemistry of damaging species, preventing or reversing collector-coating degradation and reducing maintenance frequency.

The World's Most Important Machine

Generative models are often trained first to mimic data distributions because unsupervised learning captures general patterns, and then fine‑tuned with supervised or reinforcement methods to specialize on tasks like summarization or editing.

What is Machine Learning?

Calculating historical dates is nontrivial because countries adopted calendar reforms like the Gregorian switch at different times and sometimes skipped or shifted date ranges, so you need location- and era-specific rules rather than uniform arithmetic.

The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile

Advertising-funded platforms enable targeted manipulation because advertisers pay to reach specific, susceptible groups, so the system incentivizes tailoring persuasive or misleading messages to those audiences.

How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | Tristan Harris

Simple decimal sums like 0.1 + 0.2 can produce unexpected results because computers store numbers in binary scientific notation with limited significant bits, so decimal fractions become recurring binary expansions that are truncated and produce tiny rounding errors.

Floating Point Numbers - Computerphile

Angry ideas tend to become more aggravating as they spread because replication and variation favor mutations that boost emotional provocation, even when accuracy declines.

This Video Will Make You Angry

Insight by Technology

More from @technology's Picks