Links

March 2024

• Untangling Religion From Our AI Debates by Thomas Moynihan

August 2023

• A book review of Against the Grain by James Scott.
• A book review of The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka.

The review asks some really important questions about what it means to be conscious and when exactly do we, or rather bees, go from being “programmed” to actually being “conscious”.

For instance:

Honey bees also build their combs vertically, so that honey doesn’t leak out. But they don’t build them purely vertically - they keep it at an angle so that the honey’s viscosity and adhesion keep it inside the vessel. The cells are tilted slightly downwards.

However:

Bees can also do it in space. There were bees on a Challenger mission in 1984 (two years before the tragedy), and zero-g-bees constructed honeycombs with cells of normal dimensions, combining that with other trivial details like learning to fly in space. The difference between space ‘combs and earth ‘combs? The bees got rid of the slight angle downwards - there’s no gravity in space, and thus no need for the angle.

• This 2018 piece from gwern on commodotizing one’s complement
• Samo Burja’s Great Founder Theory
• Tyler Cowen’s conversation with Paul Graham
• Max Levchin on a Shamir Secret Sharing implementation gone wrong
  • Having learnt a similar lesson before, I’ll take some pride in having at least one thing commong with Levchin.

July 2023

• A compilation of known LK-99 replication attempts
  • See also LK-99: The Live Online Race for a Room-Temperature Superconductor (Summary)
• This New Yorker profile of Larry Gagosian
• James Somers on the importance of working quickly

June 2023

• World Capitals Voronoi

World territories have been redrawn so that a region is determined by the closest capital city. This is calculated using a spherical Voronoi diagram, which takes into account the curvature of the Earth when computing distances.

Jason has an entire section dedicated to maps on his website. Something mildly interesting I noticed while looking at World Airports Voronoi is that the cells for Lester B Pearson (YYZ) and Billy Bishop (YTZ) airports in Toronto have nearly similar areas.

• The Canal Papers by Scott Alexander.

  • The review, especially the part about using information processing technologies (telephone switchboard, computers, neural nets) as a metaphor for the brain reminded me of one of my favourite electives in uni - PHIL-2160, taughy by the wonderful Dr. Kevin Lande.
    • Alison Gopnik, author of one of the assigned readings for the course, was recently on the Ezra Klein Show.

• The Fast section on Patrick Collison’s website.

P-80 Shooting Star. Kelly Johnson and his team designed and delivered the P-80 Shooting Star, the first jet fighter used by the USAF, in 143 days.