Tootfinder

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
media puzzle:
🎵 Knowledge
#mediapuzzle
https://mediapuzzle.bandcamp.com/track/knowledge
https://open.spotify.com/track/5YZ5PRX0Wuyxwo9PSRKpN7

A starter pack of questions to help think about "discovery" and "knowledge":
1. When was X discovered?
2. Once it was discovered, who knew X?
3. 1000 years later, who knew/knows/will know X?
4. Is X true?
5. Which groups of people would say it's true vs. false?
When X is "a² b² = c² in a right triangle" we think there are nice clean answers to these questions. But when X is "COVID-19 transmits via small airborne aerosols and a mask is needed to reduce the risk of infection" things get more interesting, particularly the answer to question 1. Does something count as "discovered" if many/most people would say it's false?
People love to answer this question by appeal to "scientific consensus" but the scientific consensus on aerosol transmission is still shaky if you consider certain big institutions, and even if it's mostly settled now, there was definitely a period between "experts on transmission know it" and "there's a scientific consensus." So which counts as discovery? What if knowledge is held secret, like many military technologies? What about historical facts that become censored?

Indigenous Australians were the world's first astronomers. But their knowledge is now at risk
https://phys.org/news/2026-05-indigenous-australians-world-astronomers-knowledge.html

There’s also knowledge that is not derived from scientific experiments or observation.
For example, the very fundamentals of mathematics are literally just agreed upon statements taken to be true.
(This is referred to as an axiomatic system, a type of deductive logical structure; also very popular in computer science!).

ChatGPT Images 2.0 is available globally to ChatGPT and Codex users, with a more powerful version for paying subscribers; its knowledge cutoff is December 2025 (Reece Rogers/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-beefs-up-chatgpts-image-generation-model/

OpenAI Beefs Up ChatGPT's Image Generation Model
The ChatGPT Images 2.0 model is here. Our testing shows it's better at creating more detailed images and rendering text, but it still struggles with languages other than English.

"The Pentagon’s cyber-warfighting arm is launching a task force to speed up the adoption of cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools with powerful hacking capabilities, according to three people with knowledge of the effort."
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/20/n

Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.) on Sunday said Trump is “not well”
following a Wall Street Journal report that said his advisers limited his knowledge of rescue operations for two pilots downed in Iran due to the leader’s “impatience.”
“The commander-in-chief was excluded from commanding a military operation because he was acting so crazy.
Think about that,”
Goldman wrote in a post on X. 
“Trump is not well.
We need the 25th amendment before something really …

Interesting discourse elsewhere (not really important what) is showing that people do not know the difference between science and the scientific method.
So as a PSA, science is a systematic endeavor to gain knowledge.
The scientific method (as the name implies), is a practical way to pursue science; with observation, theories and experiments. (There’s other ways, too.)

Sources: SpaceX has agreed to buy Cursor for $50B ; SpaceX says it is working with Cursor to "create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI" (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/business/spacex-cursor-deal.html

SpaceX Strikes Deal With Cursor for $60 Billion
The potential acquisition comes as Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite maker, which has been emphasizing artificial intelligence, is preparing to go public.

Sources: Google has created strike team to improve its coding models; Sergey Brin told DeepMind staffers that they must aggressively pivot to catch up on agents (Erin Woo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-creates-strike-t…

Google Creates Strike Team to Improve Coding Models
Google has assembled a strike team of researchers and engineers to improve its AI coding models, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation, as it looks to automate more of its own coding and ultimately its AI research. The push was prompted in part by Anthropic’s recent AI ...