For pranksters around the world, the first day of April is sacred. But this year, it’s not just humans enjoying a little April Fools’ mischief. In what’s being hailed as a huge leap forward for technology and shenanigans, AIs are joining in on the fun.
ChatGPT started the day off by rebranding to ChatGoT and responding only in Dothraki. Grok alerted users that it was enabling “Socratic Mode,” turning all of its responses into frustratingly cryptic questions. And Anthropic’s newcomer Claude tried convincing us it wasn’t an AI at all—just an incredibly busy guy who can type really, really fast. |
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We’ll let you decide if any of that is actually true (spoiler: it’s not). Regardless, separating truth from lies, on April 1 or any other day, is as important as ever—just look at widespread AI deepfakes and bot content.
So how best to avoid being fooled? If you don’t have a polygraph machine on hand, the next best thing is having strong logic skills. Our course below is a good start—and if you finish it, you’ll win a million dollars.* |
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If you believe Earth is flat, you probably reject the results of Eratosthenes’s well experiment. While the sun was directly over one city, he measured the length of a shadow in a city 800 km away. From this, he calculated Earth’s radius with surprising accuracy—all based on the assumption that Earth is round.
But let’s bring some healthy April Fools’ Day skepticism to this assumption. What if Earth was, in fact, flat?
If this were the case, how far from Earth would the Sun need to be to explain Eratosthenes’ measurement?
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We’ll randomly choose one correct respondent for a shout-out in next month’s email. |
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Solution to March's puzzle |
Congratulations to Ervin Varga, whose unique backwards recursion got a standing ovation from our team.
Last month’s puzzle considered the plight of the songsmith, trying to stay in the zone and avoid a cold spell while writing their 13-song record. The big insight is that every songwriting session after the first one is identical—they start out in “the zone” and risk becoming ordinary songwriting sessions. This gives 12 songwriting sessions that start in “the zone” plus one that starts cold.
Check out the full solution here. |
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