Science

The value of real skills is going up day by day for those of us who have them.

Psychedelics being responsible for humans developing quicker and smarter than other species is a delightful notion. The proof isn’t very solid, but that’s fine for a “notion”.

For the many people who may not be intimately familiar with the workings of Turing machines, this visual and interactive guide should get them up to speed really nicely.

A twofer on software estimation that also tallies with my intuition. People are really great at estimating the median which is impossible to communicate to people without deep intuition for software engineering and statistics.

The Return To Office debate has been very contentious and hardly productive. Here in HBR is an ethics based approach to create solutions here that work for everybody. A lot of it is common sense but this is coherent and a useful lens.

We use reservoir sampling a lot day to day and here’s a great visual explanation of how this algorithm does this seemingly impossible task.

A dive into Stafford Beer’s systems thinking that uncovers the ANT-style depth that’s often glossed over. That notwithstanding, I still think the glib and reductive POSIWID has its uses.

Lots of people are going to have a problem with the truth going forward, so get those Wikipedia backups handy and start thinking about how to host it in a more distributed and resilient way.

Quanta’s write-ups of math discoveries are always enjoyable to read. In this case an undergraduate (!) figured out something new about hash tables and how fast they can be. Not sure yet when this will be shipped in code, but still it’s a pretty amazing discovery.

LLMs are fundamentally matching the patterns they’ve seen, and their abilities are constrained by mathematical boundaries. Embedding tricks and chain-of-thought prompting simply extends their ability to do more sophisticated pattern matching. The mathematical results imply that you can always find compositional tasks whose complexity lies beyond a given system’s abilities.

The scientists are all on Bluesky which is understandable given the war on science and truth taking place on Twitter.

The Agents chapter from Chip Huyen’s book “AI Engineering” is clear and enjoyable to read. She’s right that “the concept of an agent is fairly simple” but building something functional still looks like a massive lift.

Let’s see how this develops but good to see a positive healthcare story for AIs.

A very useful thought experiment whenever anybody tries to pretend LLMs are ‘human’ because they sound human.

RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement for Large Language Models

Adapting While Learning: Grounding LLMs for Scientific Problems with Intelligent Tool Usage Adaptation

Monolith: Real Time Recommendation System With Collisionless Embedding Table

Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models

From the Grothendieck biography, funny to see that the legend would express himself in German.

Attention Is All You Need

Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models

I don’t really know where to find a Honeycrisp apple locally, but since moving to Germany I have been eating tons of amazing juicy, sweet, crisp apples. It turns out that this is deliberate and these are not the apples of my childhood.

I refer to this piece of writing regularly:

The hype train around AI now should be very familiar if you paid any attention during the previous crypto cycle. It’s the same people pushing this technology in the world in the same overblown and damaging way.

Everything we continue to learn about the very earliest people is completely fascinating.

Machine learning looks like a very challenging field to keep up with let alone to study it. This guide by Vicki Boykis gives a bunch of pointers around reading, mapping and learning that can be applied to any large field you want to get into.

Even a cursory dip into the subreddits and other social media posts, whitepapers, and other documentation and community discussions surrounding generative AI, makes it hard to miss the spite and negativity directed at human creativity. They are almost necessary preconditions to be part of the development community. Ironically, of course, the developers celebrate their own creativity in building these software tools, despite the fact that they implicitly rebuke the work and lives of everyone who creates or thinks meaning is confined to living things.

Any kind of workshop that you do virtually is going to be more difficult but in my experience a skilled facilitator and a motivated group can overcome these challenges.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari

Lovely bit about the broodje kroket and about Dutch colonial history.

On old but interesting article about a study that indicates that people will use their cars a lot more once we get fully autonomous vehicles.

https://parisinstitute.org/the-real-academy-in-exile/#ref1

I had no idea that most of Tesla’s FSD videos were fake. Huh.

I see lots of people still struggle with the German adjectives and especially the fact that there are three tables, one for each of definite articles, indefinite articles and when there’s no article, for 48 separate inflections.

When I still did photography, I read everything I could find about how cameras work and this is the mental model I built up back then.

An uncannily thorough treatment of why DARPA works and how you might go about replicating it. Maybe people at the European policy level should read this instead of trying all these initiatives where everything good dies in a committee.

I’ve always felt that programming is more similar to languages than to mathematics. The number of hard maths problems that we solve as part of this work are really limited, the number of language problems on the other hand is immense.

Turns out large parts of science and popular science are all contaminated by Epstein. Evgeny Morozov reveals his part and extricates himself.

“the resilience of a system corresponds to its adaptive capacity tuned to the future.”

Not surprising that those things at the MIT Media Lab that looked too good to be true, were in fact fake.

I’ve heard “if you’re so smart, then why aren’t you rich”more than a couple of times in my life. The answer it turns out is: unluckiness.

I was arguing against Systems Theory today (a necessary evil when you live in Germany) which prompted the thought of searching for the conjunction of Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann. That led me to this gem.

Fijn zo’n land onder de zeespiegel dat wordt beheerst door klimaatontkenners. En gezien het Nederlandse asielbeleid is het niet heel waarschijnlijk dat klimaatvluchtelingen elders op een warm welkom zullen kunnen rekenen.

This article about forecasting dovetails nicely with the book about measuring risk that I just read. It makes the case for foxlike thinking, something of which I don’t need to be persuaded.

As you’ll see, everything is slightly approximate, slightly exaggerated — so that each step in the argument takes you further from what you’re prepared to agree to.

Theranos employees are suffering some adverse consequences for participating in that scam (and rightly so).