My musical week will be dedicated to a Mexican artist I adore. Her music is poetry.

Los Angeles Times

Folk singer Silvana Estrada counters a culture of violence with light

Ahead of her Dec. 5 show at the Belasco, Latin Grammy-winning artist Silvana Estrada gets real about coping with loss and her orchestral new album,...

Could AI, rather than being a great catalyst for progress, become a great catalyst for averages?

“This is the real secret of life: To be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” — Alan Watts

Good morning! 🌸💜🫂 Have a great Tuesday ✨

“Chinese tech leaders and researchers talk openly about AGI. But Chinese policymakers don't seem focused on the "race to AGI" like in the US.”

High Capacity | Kyle Chan | Substack

China's tech and industrial policy: manufacturing, global supply chains, AI, clean tech, EVs, trade, economic competition. Click to read High Capac...

Good morning 🌸💜🫂 Have a great week ✨

Goodnight ✨💜🫂 Have a lovely night / morning 💫 🎨 Guillermo Lorca García-Huidobro

🎶 Sunday morning Better late than never 😅 #MyTheVelvetUndergroundWeek

Music on TIDAL

The Velvet Underground - Sunday Morning

Listen to Sunday Morning on TIDAL

Zadie Smith's love for Tracy Chapman's music beautifully narrated by herself. “This is an album about “the people”. They are addressed directly in Talkin’ Bout a Revolution, and kept in mind throughout: the labour they perform, their hopes and aspirations, the loves they’ve gained and lost, their mistakes and shames, even their crimes. Lyrically, they are known but never idealised. They are certainly the working poor but they are more than the “proletariat”. They are also human beings. Full of human contradictions.” #Music #Writers

the Guardian

Zadie Smith on the magic of Tracy Chapman: ‘She didn’t just look like us – she was singing our songs’

The novelist was just 12 when the ex-busker stunned a mammoth crowd at the Free Nelson Mandela concert – and sent everyone racing to Woolworths f...

“The forgotten Stanford images produced by Adams offer a more diverse view of his skill set as a photographer, which includes portraits, architecture and candid photojournalism-style imagery beyond his well-known landscapes. The unseen images also pose a latent question embedded within their obscurity: How many other worthwhile photographs of his have yet to be seen? According to the numbers provided by Adams’ biographer and studio assistant Mary Street Alinder, the arithmetic of his archives may indeed warrant a deeper look: “When Ansel died, we had 40,000 negatives, but he had only ever printed about 2,000 of them.” #Photograph #Art

Client Challenge

“The Pentagon is pushing four leading AI labs to let the military use their tools for "all lawful purposes," even in the most sensitive areas of weapons development, intelligence collection, and battlefield operations. Anthropic has not agreed to those terms, and the Pentagon is getting fed up after months of difficult negotiations. Anthropic insists that two areas remain off limits: the mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weaponry.” […] “Beyond the Maduro incident, the official described a broader culture clash with what the person claimed was the most "ideological" of the AI labs when it came to the potential dangers of the technology. But the official conceded that it would be difficult for the military to quickly replace Claude, because "the other model companies are just behind" when it comes to specialized government applications.” […] “In addition to CEO Dario Amodei's well-documented concerns about AI-gone-wrong, Anthropic also has to navigate internal disquiet among its engineers about working with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with that dynamic.” https://www.axios.com/2026/02/15/claude-pentagon-anthropic-contract-maduro

“But he said despite enjoying his time at the company, it was clear "the time has come to move on". "The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment," Sharma wrote. He said he had "repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions" - including at Anthropic which he said "constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most". Sharma said he would instead look to pursue a poetry degree and writing.”

Anthropic AI safety researcher quits with 'world in peril' warning

It comes in the same week an OpenAI researcher resigned amid concerns about its decision to start testing ChatGPT ads.

The trials, scheduled to run from February 6 to 13, 2026, will test the ship's battery power supply, propulsion performance, and autonomous navigation systems.

The Maritime Executive

China Starts Sea Trials for Largest Electric-Powered Containership

China’s first 10,000-ton electric containership is beginning sea trials. The shipyard is billing the ship as the largest of its kind and a furthe...

“I would like to invite you to a very practical and frequently unappreciated form of abstinence: that of refraining from words that offend and hurt our neighbor. Let us begin by disarming our language, avoiding harsh words and rash judgement, refraining from slander and speaking ill of those who are not present and cannot defend themselves. Instead, let us strive to measure our words and cultivate kindness and respect in our families, among our friends, at work, on social media, in political debates, in the media and in Christian communities. In this way, words of hatred will give way to words of hope and peace.” — LEO PP. XIV

Messaggio del Santo Padre Leone XIV per la Quaresima 2026

“Today, scientists know that feelings of love are related to biochemical processes that release chemicals in the brain, increasing pleasure and excitement. Beyond mere biology or even emotions, some philosophers and psychologists contend that love is also a practice.” […] “Distinguishing between feelings of love, practices of love and the virtue of love can empower us to respond to feelings of hatred. Becoming better lovers requires engaging with destructive emotions, rather than running from them.”

The Conversation

More than a feeling – thinking about love as a virtue can change how we respond to hate

Love and hate seem like obvious opposites – but for philosophers of virtue, it’s not so simple.

“This paper introduces generative agents, interactive computational agents that simulate human behavior. We describe an architecture for generative agents that provides a mechanism for storing a comprehensive record of an agent's experiences, deepening its understanding of itself and the environment through reflection, and retrieving a compact subset of that information to inform the agent's actions. We then demonstrate the potential of generative agents by manifesting them as non-player characters in a Sims-style game world and simulating their lives within it. Evaluations suggest that our architecture creates believable behavior. Looking ahead, we suggest that generative agents can play roles in many interactive applications, ranging from design tools to social computing systems to immersive environments.” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03442

Home | Simile

Simile is a simulation platform for human behavior.

“Reporting on Feb. 4 in the journal Astrobiology, researchers say that as the non-biological sources they considered could not fully explain the abundance of organic compounds, it is therefore reasonable to hypothesize that living things could have formed them.”

NASA Science

NASA Study: Non-biologic Processes Don’t Fully Explain Mars Organics - NASA Science

In a new study, researchers say that non-biological sources they considered could not fully account for the abundance of organic compounds in a sample