Can’t believe I’ve never read the Scott Alexander’s Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco it’s so good. Vast majority of posts about working somewhere aren’t insightful or even meaningful signal about anything because companies are big and time elapses but I rather liked this one about Palantir. Rest in peace, FHI. Gwern on cats,,, flunfies! I spent December living in Bowery, a rather funky part of the city.
DigitalOcean, never change. OpenAI had a good, open post-mortem for an outage caused by Kube API overload. Jane Street continues to win on culture. Debugging stories; 500-mile email limit and the magic position. I’ve always complained about the inability of AIs to write well, AI ensloppification is a weaker claim but Gwern makes it, which is nice. Claude on being a simulator. OpenAI published alignment research which isn’t particularly exciting but so little research is published that it’s worth a read.
Extremely long, sometimes really opinionated but still fun-and-informative post about Nigeria. I was thinking about coups because of the wildly incompetent Korean coup. How do successful coups look? 2021 in Myanmar and Sudan. 2009 in Honduras which barely counts it was more of a Napoleon situation. 2013 in Egypt. Also all the Nigerian coups which seem like they were all led by this guy Abacha. I followed that into reading about the Igbo Jews, confusingly not recognized by the Israeli Supreme Court despite immigration to Israel, plausible historical ties and circumcision practice. The Bnei Menashe (India) did officially get declared one of the lost tribes of Israel, which they figured out due to Christian missionaries.
The Seventh-Day Adventists are protestants who do Saturday, and there are supposedly more of them than there are Jews and they funded a bunch of veganism and cereal stuff which involved a sanitarium? Poster House in NYC is a great museum, I really liked the Lester Beall works (too young to be a New Dealer). A snapshot into Chinese slang and culture.
Cryptic Crosswords
I did the last two weeks of London Times Quick Cryptics! These crosswords are really really beautiful to do because;
- the exploration space is really high
- unlike concise crosswords, there’s only one correct answer and you can tell when you have the correct answer
- you can solve one clue collaboratively, ie someone can parse the wordplay and someone else can do the definition, or you can even have someone parse it correctly and the other person actually solve it
- anagrams are really fun
- you can know you have the correct answer without understanding why
- arcane Britishism
There are much gentler cryptics at minutecryptic, or the New York(er| Times) ones or even Guardian, but the Times serves as a particularly violent place. I hope to be able to do the Quick Cryptics in under half an hour, and maybe eventually get to some regular size Times Cryptics. The Times also publishes a Mephisto (extra hard crossie) which is so arcance that Claude assumes that it has simply stopped being.
It’s also really funny to watch the Times report on American affairs, and to visit the crossword blogs which seem mostly full of sixty year old British men who do their crosswords on paper but log onto a computer to talk to people about it.