i’ve been in a work hole these two months thinking about kernels and numerics.

vitalik on techno-optimism, he’s amazing and this is well reasoned and written but also i am mildly annoyed that everyone stopped to look at it when nothing in it is that novel. why you’ve never been in a plane crash. there’s this, which i obsessed about for days — i don’t want to say anything more because i couldn’t possibly do it justice. incredible combination of funny, beautiful and educational. the vesuvius prize has winners but also future plans.

the openai press release about a lawsuit, which is weirdly entertaining? perhaps a bias of my occupation. sleeper agents paper! i’ve been waiting for that one to drop for a while.

short story that really straddles eerie and cute. this excerpt from “surely you’re joking mr. feynman” (brilliant scientist makes pithy quote). want insight? check out this article by ricky about how mistakes are made, particularly how multi-billion dollar crypto exchange mistakes (and their surrounding mistakes, because with one mistake always comes another) occur. coconut deaths! my friend with the most insane journalist name wrote a great article about ai. a scientific cure for suffering? solution for wireheading? a 500M typo from my favourite federal organisation.

i only studied one paper meaningfully, but was mamba, so that’s fine. here’s a mamba accessory!

it’s elon season? it started with Elon Musk is Misunderstood, then there was Elon Musk is Overpaid (and the rest of the ongoing matt levine saga). the handmer-levine pairing (unrelated: the mars helicopter) was incredible. i’m so sick of “if you liked x, try y”! i’m now into things to enjoy simultaneously. 1984 x brave new world. atlas shrugged x progress and poverty. making of the atomic bomb x american prometheus.

Room for Thought

i am a fan of the boot boyz biz, and the douglas englebart brick pencil shirt i have from them. problem: their apparel has becoming increasingly text-dense over the years. solution: a four-hundred page philosophy picture book. it’s beautiful and thought provoking and overall an enjoyable read. my favourite quote — though much of the bits were contained in the visual — was: There Will Be People Who Will Say “You Don’t Mix This with That.” And You Will Say: “Watch Me (Watch Me)”.

imagine everything one might enjoy about a naval tweet and manifest it into full-thoughts represented in beautiful imagery and typography. this is it!

More qntm shorts and The Metamorphisis of Prime Intellect

for my entire life i didn’t read scifi out a notion that it’s disrespectful to the beauty of the science of our universe, either existing or prospective (that’s a lie, it’s because it’d take up too much time). i don’t believe that less at all, but alas i was bullied into reading scifi, and expectedly enjoyed it.

it started with shorts — my last blog post had a few qntm, i read five more this year. honestly some were underwhelming but not boring because they were making me think a lot. some (some) were quant, as if the slice-of-life equivalent of scifi. some were creative and exciting in a traditional way. i loved them all.

metamorphisis of prime intellect was technically my first full-feature and it is perfect. it does an incredible job capturing all the nuances of immortality and how human desires would respond to it without wasting time on things i’ve already thought about (cries in the first two thirds of permutation city). the world it created was compelling and the pornography was nothing but the finest.