1: A very good 1hr introduction to LLMs , a talk by Andrej Karpathy. It helps to know a little bit before jumping in, but this is a clear and information dense explainer that gets you pretty much caught up to what’s public knowledge.
2: Podcast with Claire Hughes Johnson , a 2hr interview with one of the top operators in Silicon Valley on The Logan Bartlett Show. I highly recommend her book Scaling People
3: LM Studio - an incredibly easy wrapper to find, download, and run local LLMs. Probably not immediately useful without a powerful machine (>16GB RAM) but great for learning. And some notes from what I learned Tinkering with local LLMs.
4: 4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour a fun “to-scale” background video from Kurzgesagt.
5: Fun fact from The History of the Electric Car : In 1910 30% of vehicles in the US had electric engines. I heard this listening to Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara, which I do recommend.
6: The Collapse of Rational Certainty - an essay arguing that some tension of contemporary culture are downstream from the end of rationalist certainty, which collapsed due to a series of surprise discoveries in the twentieth century (e.g., non-Euclidean geometry, Einstein’s general relativity, quantum theory, and crises in mathematics illustrated by Goedel’s Incompleteness theorems) (nb unfortunately the site appears down as of 2023-12-02)
7: Kelvin Kiptum to run 2024 Rotterdam Marathon, and fast: “I’ll try at least to beat my world record here. I know I’m capable of doing that, if my preparation works out well and the conditions are OK. And in that case, I will get close to the two-hour barrier, so why not aim to break it? That might look ambitious, but I’m not afraid of setting this kind of goals. There’s no limit to human energy.”
8: About the Library of Babel. A couple times a year I find myself back in the Library of Babel, which contains every piece of text that could ever be written (in English).
9: Startup advice from levels.io. I’ve been trying to avoid it, but TikTok does seem to be the first platform that will distribute your content to at least a handful of people and show it to a ton of people if it performs well. Other platforms seem to rely much more on a creator’s past performance.
10: Perhaps intergenerational mobility has not declined in the United States after all. A new paper finding a different trend than Chetty et al 2016. I’ve read the latter but would like to read this new one and write up some thoughts on the difference.
11: The Purple Leash Project - 17% of domestic violence shelters accept pets; 48% of domestic abuse survivors report delaying leaving because they can’t bring their pets. This feels like a no brainer to fix? Is there more to it? Perhaps the first Spotify ad I’ve actually clicked on. The women’s shelter near us is not able to accommodate pets.
12: Stratechery on OpenAI chaos, which is sense… resolved?
13: xkcd: Tasks - how times have changed.
14: Text is the universal interface, another essay I find myself sharing more than once. What problems do I deal with that are only or mostly about text?
15: Paul Graham on nonprofits, and the intrinsic accountability and constraints of profit motivation.
16: The Maintenance Race - Works in Progress by Stewart Brand on the around-the-world solo sailboat race of 1968. “Its drama continues to echo half a century later because three of the nine competitors became legendary – the one who won, the one who didn’t bother to win, and the one who cheated.”
17: Opinion | This Is Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers - Multiple papers showing large-scale, “light touch” mental health interventions have backfired.
18: The state of next-generation geothermal energy and Is Geothermal Really Going to be a Thing? — two contrasting views on the future of geothermal energy.
19: The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral - a talk from 2015 in which the speaker argues that the predominant form of the social web — the Stream — is an impoverished model for learning and research. Instead, the integrative and iterative approach of the Garden is more suited for building a deep pool of knowledge.
20: Yes, The world has enough minerals for low-carbon electricity. I intend to read Hannah Ritchie’s upcoming book
Disclaimer: Something something sharing a link is a recommendation but not necessarily an endorsement or a sign of agreement something something.