Fun and Thought-Provoking

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What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images | Quanta Magazine
What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images | Quanta Magazine
Turns out most people actually see pictures in their mind when they imagine something! Not me -- I have no "mind's eye." But language is so full of visual metaphors that I never knew phrases like 'mind's eye' or 'picture this' were literal.
·quantamagazine.org·
What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images | Quanta Magazine
The Deep Research problem — Benedict Evans
The Deep Research problem — Benedict Evans
Part 2 of the previous article.
we don’t know if the error rate will go away, and so we don’t know whether we should be building products that presume the model will sometimes be wrong or whether in a year or two we will be building products that presume we can rely on the model by itself. That’s quite different to the limitations of other important technologies, from PCs to the web to smartphones, where we knew in principle what could change and what couldn’t.
·ben-evans.com·
The Deep Research problem — Benedict Evans
Are better models better? — Benedict Evans
Are better models better? — Benedict Evans
The AI boom has raised deep questions left and right, but my favorite is "what are LLMs for?" I see a surprising number of people using them for tasks that require a right answer, but LLMs don't do "right." What applications will we find for magic that might be wrong?
·ben-evans.com·
Are better models better? — Benedict Evans
What if absolutely everything is conscious?
What if absolutely everything is conscious?
"So many little buddies everywhere!" This article may have changed my mind about panpsychism. It sounds crazy at first, but the idea that there's a tiny component of consciousness in all matter might make more sense than alternative theories about what consciousness is made of.
·vox.com·
What if absolutely everything is conscious?
What's expected of us - Nature
What's expected of us - Nature
Love that Nature published a Ted Chiang micro-story, and the way it plays with the format
·nature.com·
What's expected of us - Nature
Harvard Researchers on Speaking to Whales | Harvard Magazine
Harvard Researchers on Speaking to Whales | Harvard Magazine
My old lab is attached to much cooler projects now -- robots to tag whales with whale-speech decoders!
How do we gently say ‘Hello,’” he wonders, “in whale-ish?”
·harvardmagazine.com·
Harvard Researchers on Speaking to Whales | Harvard Magazine
Why do Cars Suddenly Look Like Putty??
Why do Cars Suddenly Look Like Putty??
Car paint has started looking funny -- and it reveals something about our brains in our environment.
·youtube.com·
Why do Cars Suddenly Look Like Putty??
Comet Encke - Wikipedia
Comet Encke - Wikipedia
A crazy - but fun - theory that a spinning comet created a spiral in the sky, leading to the independent emphasis on spirals at certain points across human history.
·en.wikipedia.org·
Comet Encke - Wikipedia
Disposable America
Disposable America
A history of modern capitalism from the perspective of the straw
·theatlantic.com·
Disposable America
Why everything might have taken so long
Why everything might have taken so long
My favorite example is that we had the tech for the bicycle in ancient Rome, but didn't think of it until the late 1800s. Why?
·meteuphoric.com·
Why everything might have taken so long
Carboniferous
Carboniferous
Did you know that America's big coal deposits exist because it took 60 million years after trees evolved bark for fungi and bacteria to evolve to decompose it, so wood just got buried for 60 million years, forming coal at a faster rate than now?
·en.wikipedia.org·
Carboniferous
Considerations On Cost Disease
Considerations On Cost Disease
"I don’t know why more people don’t just come out and say “LOOK, REALLY OUR MAIN PROBLEM IS THAT ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS COST TEN TIMES AS MUCH AS THEY USED TO FOR NO REASON, PLUS THEY SEEM TO BE GOING DOWN IN QUALITY, AND NOBODY KNOWS WHY, AND WE’RE MOSTLY JUST DESPERATELY FLAILING AROUND LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS HERE.” State that clearly, and a lot of political debates take on a different light."
·slatestarcodex.com·
Considerations On Cost Disease
Dropbox: the first dead decacorn
Dropbox: the first dead decacorn
"When billion dollar tech companies die, it usually isn’t at the hands of their direct competitors. It’s simply because they go from one day being the best at what they do, to the next day being still the best at what they do except it doesn’t matter."
·alexdanco.com·
Dropbox: the first dead decacorn
Finding the Way Back
Finding the Way Back
It looks like the research bears out my suspicion that relying GPS every time you drive is bad for your brain. And there's something that just feels calming about knowing your position relative to the earth, the sun and the stars - it lets you zoom out a bit from our everyday human-focused trivialities.
·newyorker.com·
Finding the Way Back
Making the Grade: Why the Cheapest Maple Syrup Tastes Best
Making the Grade: Why the Cheapest Maple Syrup Tastes Best
"After the Revolution, Americans looked at the maple tree in a new light. To the eminent Philadelphia patriot and physician Benjamin Rush, maple sugar seemed perfectly tailored to the new republic. Here was a commodity that could compete in a global market, bolstering the independence of yeoman farmers, and demonstrating the superiority of free labor. It tapped an abundant resource, required only a small amount of labor, and used supplies most farmers already owned. Best of all, it would destroy the market for Caribbean sugar cane, produced by slaves laboring in horrifying conditions. Rush set down his reflections in the form of a letter to his friend Thomas Jefferson..."
·theatlantic.com·
Making the Grade: Why the Cheapest Maple Syrup Tastes Best
Aptronym
Aptronym
So fun - An aptronym, aptonym, or euonym is a personal name aptly or peculiarly suited to its owner. See also the 'nominative determinism' subreddit
·en.wikipedia.org·
Aptronym
Orion Magazine - State of the Species
Orion Magazine - State of the Species

"Changes must be planned and executed decades in advance of the usual signals of crisis, but that’s like asking healthy, happy sixteen-year-olds to write living wills.

Not only is the task daunting, it’s strange. In the name of nature, we are asking human beings to do something deeply unnatural, something no other species has ever done or could ever do: constrain its own growth."

·orionmagazine.org·
Orion Magazine - State of the Species
So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class ... (Published 2014)
So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class ... (Published 2014)
Currently this stuff -- no big deal, just humanity's actual best answers to "where are we, how did we get here, where did the world come from, where are we all going" -- isn't taught all together. What a tragic missed opportunity!
·nytimes.com·
So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class ... (Published 2014)