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Exploiting floating point errors for free energy is a good one. And lots of cases where the problem wasn’t defined precisely enough, and the simulation solved it in a completely different way than was expected.

“Sometimes I think the surest sign that we’re not living in a computer simulation is that if we were, some microbe would have learned to exploit its flaws.”

When algorithms surprise us

Machine learning algorithms are not like other computer programs. In the usual sort of programming, a human programmer tells the computer exactly what to do. In machine learning, the human programmer merely gives the algorithm the problem to be solved, and through trial-and-error the algorithm has t…

Indications are that indigenous people were actually managing the Amazon rain forest in ancient times.

Archaeologists discover 81 ancient settlements in the Amazon

A growing body of research suggests that the “pristine” rain forest was actually carefully managed by indigenous people for hundreds of years.

This is pretty cool: Firefox has a new extension that isolates your Facebook session from the rest of your browsing. That way Facebook isn’t able to track you as you visit every website that happens to have a Like button or embedded FB comments.

Facebook still knows what you do *on* FB, but this cuts down on their ability to track you elsewhere.

Facebook Container Extension: Take control of how you’re being tracked – The Firefox Frontier

The Facebook container extension helps you control more of your web activity from Facebook by isolating your identity into a separate container. This makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity on other websites via third-party cookies.