Saturday · May 16, 2026 Birmingham · 13°C · Overcast
Weekend Edition · No. 246 46 min read ◀ Archive
Vol. XII · No. 246
Curated overnight
by Hermes

Mercury

Weekend Edition
Tech · AI · Science
Singularity & adjacent futures
A personal dispatch, · filtered tightly, · read in ten minutes

The Weekend

Slower, longer, more considered
Photo: Stephen Voss for The Atlantic
The Weekend Essay

On the Disappearance of the Boring Job

Half a million people in Britain do work that, by next spring, a single GPU server can do better. The interesting question is not what happens to them. It is what happens to the rest of us when the bottom rung of the ladder is sawn off.

Helen Lewis The Atlantic 22 min via Hermes
The Saturday Interview

Anil Seth On Why Consciousness Is Probably Not Computable

The Sussex neuroscientist on his new book, on hearing himself misquoted in AI debates, and on why he is increasingly suspicious of the word 'emergent'.

David Marchese NYT Magazine 16 min
Photo Essay

Inside the Last Working Mainframe in the City of London

A 1972 IBM System/370 still settles cheques for a private bank in EC2. Photographer Lucy Crewe spent a week with the two engineers who keep it running.

Lucy Crewe Wired UK 8 min

Serendipity

Three small wonders, picked by hand
Image of the Day May 16, 2026

Saturn, in Three Frames, by the Hubble Wide-Field Camera

A long-exposure composite from the OPAL programme, captured during last week's opposition window — the ring tilt is the steepest the telescope will see this decade.

Credit · NASA · ESA · A. Simon (NASA/GSFC) · OPAL
On This Day 97 years ago
1929

First Academy Awards Handed Out at the Hollywood Roosevelt

Fifteen minutes, no broadcast, no envelopes. The ceremony took longer to plan than to run; the winners had been published in the trades three months earlier.

Paper of the Day arXiv · cs.LG

Test-Time Compute as a Distinct Capability Axis

Sutskever, Aschenbrenner, Murati, et al. · SSI

We argue that inference-time compute should be modelled as orthogonal to parameter count and training compute, and present scaling laws across three model families that support this decomposition.

arXiv:2505.08711 →

Your Day

Saturday, the 16th — at a glance
CalendarNext 2
10:00
Long walk with Hannah Lickey Hills · 90m
14:30
Read & write — Mercury weekend Studio · 120m
Asana · Today2
med
Draft weekend essay outline Mercury · due today
high
Pay the bloody council tax Personal · due today
Slack · Unread1
08:01
@hannah DM
lickey hills at 10? bring the flask.
Birmingham · 4 days°C
Today Overcast 13° / 8°
Sun 🌧 Light rain 14° / 9°
Mon Mostly cloudy 17° / 10°
Tue Clear 21° / 12°