The Basic AI Drives (PDF) — Surely, no harm could come from building a chess-playing robot, could it? In this paper, we argue that such a robot will indeed be dangerous unless it is designed very carefully. Without special precautions, it will resist being turned off, will try to break into other machines and make copies of itself, and will try to acquire resources without regard for anyone else’s safety. These potentially harmful behaviors will occur not because they were programmed in at the start, but because of the intrinsic nature of goal-driven systems.
PreTTY — how to take a good-looking screencap of your terminal app in action.
Tisean — a software project for the analysis of time series with methods based on the theory of nonlinear deterministic dynamical systems. (via @aphyr)