November 13, 2025

Google Deepmind is using Gemini to train agents inside Goat Simulator 3

Google DeepMind has built a new video-game-playing agent called SIMA 2 that can navigate and solve problems in a wide range of 3D virtual worlds. The company claims it’s a big step toward more general-purpose agents and better real-world robots.    Google DeepMind first demoed SIMA (which stands for “scalable instructable multiworld agent”) last year. But…

The case against humans in space

August 22, 2025
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are bitter rivals in the commercial space race, but they agree on one thing: Settling space is an existential imperative. Space is the place. The final frontier. It is our human destiny to transcend our home world and expand our civilization to extraterrestrial vistas. This belief has been mainstream for…

I gave the police access to my DNA—and maybe some of yours

August 22, 2025
Last year, I added my DNA profile to a private genealogical database, FamilyTreeDNA, and clicked “Yes” to allow the police to search my genes. In 2018, police in California announced they’d caught the Golden State Killer, a man who had eluded capture for decades. They did it by uploading crime-scene DNA to websites like the one…