π The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (2011; via Shalev NessAiver). Sequel to The Name of the Wind. Patrick Rothfuss joins the ranks of several other fantasy authors in having an unfinished series. I ended up reading the rants of his fans and editors as well as counter points that authors don't owe readers books. This book was a fine sequel; not as great and a bit graphic at times.
π The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (2007; via Shalev NessAiver). It's got stories-within-stories, sympathetic magic-as-physics, and a prodigy for a main character. What more could you want?
π The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9β5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss (2009). Took me 16 years to finally read the book that bootstrapped Tim's takeoff. Turns out all of his books are in the same action-packed-encyclopedia style.
π Side project advice (Ned Batchelder). This reads like short & simple advice, but it is clearly hard-won and I should re-read this several times a year.
π Three tough truths about climate (Bill Gates). One of the more grounded perspectives on cost-benefit analysis as applied to climate change.
π AI isn't replacing radiologists (Deena Mousa / Works in Progress; via Benj Azose). How long do we think the islands of automation will last?
π You already have a git server (maurycyz; via Changelog News). I'm so tempted to do this, but it feels wrong.
π Battling Infectious Diseases in the 20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines (Tynan DeBold & Dov Friedman / WSJ). Some of my favorite graphics depicting the impact of vaccines on mortality after being introduced. These are about a decade old and, unfortunately, vaccine hesitancy / avoidance is going to make mortality go up again.
π Will AI displace humans in the economy and culture? (Andrew Mayne). A thoughtful take, although I don't know how to rate the predictions.
π¦ Simon Maechling on microplastics (Simon Maechling).
Youβve been told microplastics are everywhere.
In your food. In your blood. Even in your brain.
You should panic. You should rage.
But what if most of it was junk science?
Worth reading the whole thread.
π You Arenβt In The DSM (Awais Aftab / Asterisk). From record-keeping to people's self-concept.
π Memorization, Trivia and Atomic Units for Creativity (Edward Nevraumont). Edwards is the second-place winner of the Astral Codex Ten Non-Book Review Contest for his review of Alpha School.
π Late Night is Dying Because of the Format Not The Hosts (thinkinganddata). Goes back to vaudeville to describe changes in entertainment formats.
π I Am Out Of Data Hell (Nikhil Suresh; via Josh Vogel). Agency does a body good.
π The Continual Learning Problem (Jessy Lin). Interesting take.
π What Went Wrong with Math Instruction in New York? (Benjamin Solomon / Center for Educational Progress). Quite a bit it would seem.
π Rearchitecting GitHub Pages (Hailey Somerville / GitHub Blog; via Sam Lambert). Sam's tweet says it all:
Until ~2015, GitHub Pages hosted over 2 million websites on 2 servers with a multi-million-line nginx.conf, edited and reloaded per deploy. This worked incredibly well, with github.io ranking as the 140th most visited domain on the web at the time.
π How the Worldβs Most Famous Code Was Cracked (Jack Murtagh & Jeanna Bryner / Scientific American). Reminds me of the relevant XKCD.
π When is it better to think without words? (Henrik Karlsson / Escaping Flatland). I think I only do this rarely.
π I Figured Out How to Engineer Emergence (Erik Hoel / The Intrinsic Perspective). This is a follow-up to Erik's concept of how high-level features emerge from lower-level descriptions.
π Languaging: The Software of Belief (Mike Maples / Pattern Breakers; via Kevin Munnelly). Pairs well with Peter Thiel's Zero-to-One concept.
π Unseeable prompt injections in screenshots (Shivan Kaul Sahib & Artem Chaikin / Brave; via Simon Willison). Solving AI browser security feels so much harder than solving secure credit card processing.
π Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis & Steven Kotler (2012). Lots of predictions, some of which may already have come true.
π Cues versus Content: Hyrum Lewis Replies to Marlen-Starr's Proposal (Bryan Caplan). This is part of a conversation on how to understand the nature of ideologies.
π Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader by Michael Dell & James Kaplan (2021). I remember being totally confused by the EMC + Dell story when it was happening. Lots of oh-so-that's-what-that was behind-the-scenes stories.
π Nine Lives: My time as the MI6's top spy inside al-Qaeda by Aimen Dean, Paul Cruickshank, and Tim Lister (2018). Wild story.
π Days of Deliverance: Essays on Purim and Hanukkah by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (2007).
π A window into modern loan origination (Patrick McKenzie / Bits about Money). How the sausage gets made.
π The VR Hype Cycle: Lessons for the Age of AI (Caleb Sponheim / NN/g).
Hype cycles occur when expectations, narratives, and messaging outpace technological capability.
π How well can large language models predict the future? (Houtan Bastani, Simas KuΔinskas, and Ezra Karger / Forecasting Research Institute). A continuous approach to test forecasting models. They do mention a potential hiccup:
When provided market forecasts in their prompts, multiple LLMsβincluding GPT-4.5βsimply copy them.