Incoming links and notes
March 5, 2020 — January 8, 2025
Assumed audience:
Me
Things that I think should be noted and filed in an orderly fashion, but which I lack time to address right now. Content will change incessantly.
1 Quotes
“If the Russians want to slow down negotiations they demand we agree upon a taxonomy.”
2 To subscribe to
- https://homosabiens.substack.com/
- Subscribe to Public
- Inside Clouds | wolkchen | Substack
- Rough Diamonds | Sarah Constantin | Substack
- The Popehat Report
- Quiet Activism - Bryant Research
- Patrick McKenzie, Bits about Money
- Is Deep Learning Actually Hitting a Wall?
- In The Context Of Long Context - by Steven Johnson
- (49) Knowingless | Aella | Substack
- One Useful Thing (And Also Some Other Things) | Ethan Mollick
3 To post to team chat
Duncan Sabien, Social Dark Matter
Moon – Bartosz Ciechanowski — incredible explorable
The Math Academy Way: Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning
Adam Mastroianni, Underrated ways to change the world
Gordon Brander, The Zombocom Problem
The data engineering lifecycle is not going anywhere | Yanir Seroussi
Wheal’s Homegrown Humans Newsletter is interesting.
Make better documents. - Anil Dash
Even very smart, capable communicators routinely send important documents that distract from, or even undermine, their goals.
Ten Hard Problems in and around AI
We finally published our big 90-page intro to AI. Its likely effects, from ten perspectives, ten camps. The whole gamut: ML, scientific applications, social applications, access, safety and alignment, economics, AI ethics, governance, and classical philosophy of life. Intended audience: technical people without any ML experience.
2023’s best global tech stories we wish we’d written—Rest of World
Second-Generation Americans: What to Do When Loved Ones Are Sharing Misinformation
Mapping Australia’s groundwater | Ministers for the Department of Industry, Science and Resources
Stable Fiddusion — Acko.net fascinating hacker approach to noise generation via intuitive FFT
Experiment metascience grant
Eight Graphs That Explain Software Engineering Salaries in 2023
4 Links
The Rising Sea is Dan Murfett’s blog
Beyond Message Passing: a Physics-Inspired Paradigm for Graph Neural Networks
Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization / altera-al/project-sid
jhuggins/viabel: Efficient, lightweight variational inference and approximation bounds
An Overview of “Obvious” Approaches to Training Wise AI Advisors – AI Impacts
Death by a thousand roundtables
The cheap coffee, the untouched orange juice, the collection of half-stale pastries, the same two people hijacking the discussion, and the dawning sense that the Earth is rotating on its axis. These are the hallmarks of the dreaded Westminster roundtable. As friends who have routinely suffered through these events, obtaining nothing from the experience, we’ve often struggled to work out what’s in it for their conveners or sponsors.
We believe that this speaks to a wider malaise in the world of policy. Fuelled by a flood of money from technology companies with vast budgets, we believe that the quality of policy work has been negatively correlated with quantity. As well as being wasteful, it leads to an impoverished standard of debate on issues that matter.
Free Anagram Sentence Generator for English, German, French, and Spanish
Reflections on 2020 as an independent researcher | Andy Matuschak
cloud functions
Kate Wagner’s piece Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain was taken down shortly after publication
The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems – The Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Blog
Interesting synth: Vital
Ask a Neoliberal: An Interview with J. Bradford DeLong - Dissent Magazine
Mary Harrington, Prison Pod Cities and Killer Robots
GitHub - ml-explore/mlx: MLX: An array framework for Apple silicon
-
Argues that for a given limited event budget, closed captioning is more inclusive than hiring a signer to interpret, since many deaf people do not sign, plus captions assist autistic and non-native English speakers.
Science communicators need to stop telling everybody the universe is a meaningless void
Accelerating Natural Gradient with Higher-Order Invariance | Yang Song
How to Find the Taylor Series of an Inverse Function - Randorithms
Remix - Build Better Websites — distributed, rather than static, site rendering. backed by Shopify.
f-DM: A Multi-stage Diffusion Model via Progressive Signal Transformation | OpenReview
[2309.10068] A Unifying Perspective on Non-Stationary Kernels for Deeper Gaussian Processes
Monitoring, Streamlining and Reorganising Work with Digital Technology
[2302.02947] GPS++: Reviving the Art of Message Passing for Molecular Property Prediction
CodaLab Competitions: An Open Source Platform to Organize Scientific Challenges
Pushover: Simple Notifications for Android, iPhone, iPad, and Desktop
Half-Truths (at Best) about Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control
Louis Tiao, Spherical Inducing Features for Orthogonally-Decoupled Gaussian Processes
“VC qanon” and the radicalization of the tech tycoons - Anil Dash
A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place Y-Combinator back stories
Smart Countdown Timer is a good timer.
Smart Countdown Timer allows you to use natural language to set, modify and start a countdown on your Mac. Our simple and easy to use UI just requires you to enter your countdown time using plain English, such as ‘1 hour and 35 mins’ or ‘add 25 mins’
BookML: automated LaTeX to bookdown-style HTML and SCORM, powered by LaTeXML
Matt Bruenig, Equality and Equity
“Equity” is not used to promote any particular unit of equality — whether outcomes, opportunities, boxes, sightlines, luck-adjusted outcomes, primary goods, income, wealth, or capabilities — but is instead a word that you invoke any time you object to the unit of equality someone else is using, regardless of what, if any, your preferred alternative unit of equality is.
-
Agenda’s unique approach of organising notes into a timeline helps to drive your projects forward. While other apps focus specifically on the past, present, or future, Agenda is the only note-taking app that tracks them all at once, giving you the complete picture.
The first AI model based on Yann LeCun’s vision for more human-like AI / [2301.08243] Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture
BIMLOGIQ is where Amir Dezfouli went to work.
SPIGM @ ICML ICML 2023 Workshop on Structured Probabilistic Inference & Generative Modeling
Flyte: An Open Source Orchestrator for ML/AI Workflows - The New Stack / Build production-grade data and ML workflows, hassle-free with Flyte
Sam Kriss, All the nerds are dead, conflates geeks and nerds but is funny anyway.
The reasonable(?) effectiveness of data analysis
Why is it that we can be thrown into the work of other people, in a field we have zero experience in, and have any expectation of making any useful impact at all? When stated objectively, it sounds utterly ridiculous. But in my experience, a data team can find something to improve, even if the impact is sometimes small.
Annie Lowrey, We Haven’t Been Measuring How the Economy Really Works
TIL Apophenia vs Pareidolia
Matthew Feeney, Markets in fact-checking
Étienne Fortier-Dubois, The elements of scientific style
But compounding these issues is a simple truth that has made science less impactful than it could otherwise be: Scientific papers are poorly written. And they’ve been getting worse.
Jason Collins, We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model
factorization_machine Something something kernels, something regression something interaction effects. 🚧TODO🚧 clarify
Making Friends with Machine Learning is Cassie Kozyrkov’s lecture series.
Prof Steve Keen | Creating realistic economics for the post-crash world
-
Kolibri is an open-source educational platform specially designed to provide offline access to a wide range of quality, openly licensed educational resources in low-resource contexts like rural schools, refugee camps, orphanages, and non-formal school programs.
Cult Classic ‘Fight Club’ Gets a Very Different Ending in China
A Turkish Farmer Tests Out VR Goggles on Cows To Get More Milk
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
In Which Long-Time Netizen & Programmer-at-Arms Dave Winer Records a Podcast for Me, Personally
A global analysis of matches and mismatches between human genetic and linguistic histories—PNAS
Desmos—Let’s learn together. graphing calculator online
Nicholas Gruen, Democracy: forking the project
Ethan Epperly, Low-Rank Approximation Toolbox: Nyström Approximation
The Australian academic STEMM workplace post-COVID: a picture of disarray
Merve Emre, Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?
Tom Stafford, Microarguments and macrodecisions
Kevin Munger, Why I am (Still) a Conservative (For Now)
Randy Au, in Data science has a tool obsession, talks about Gear Acquisition Syndrome for data scientists.
danah boyd, What if failure is the plan?
Adam Mastroianni, The great myths of political hatred
Big correlations and big interactions ([2105.13445] The piranha problem: Large effects swimming in a small pond)
How to keep cakes moist and cause the greatest tragedies of the 20th century
Microsoft CSR’s Law Enforcement Request Report is disconcerting transparency
Marc ten Bosch, Let’s remove Quaternions from every 3D Engine (An Interactive Introduction to Rotors from Geometric Algebra)
Ti John’s Publications
Riemannian Score-Based Generative Modelling/ oxcsml/riemannian-score-sde: Score-based generative models for compact manifolds
Zoomers Co-Working Community (co-working for accountability)
GPflow/GeometricKernels: Geometric kernels on manifolds, meshes, and graphs
pyg-team/pytorch_geometric: Graph Neural Network Library for PyTorch
Peter Woit, Symmetry and Physics
It’s getting late, but I can’t help myself. Reading too many wrong things about symmetry and physics on Twitter has forced me to do this. And, John Baez says I don’t explain things. So, here’s what the relationship between symmetry and physics really is.
Oshan Jarow, Markets Underinvest In Vitality
Spirals of Delusion: How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous (not convinced tbh)
Darren Wilkinson’s Bayesian inference for a logistic regression model 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
https://www.patreon.com/posts/taylor-modeling-70131808
Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
Census is a tool that links all the weird different data storage systems and CRM stuff.
Nemanja Rakicevic, NeurIPS Conference: Historical Data Analysis
Samuel Moore, Why open science is primarily a labour issue
Machine Learning Trick of the Day (1): Replica Trick— Shakir Mohammed
What’s the difference between a tutorial and how-to guide? - Diátaxis
Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks/ Distill version
https://cbergmeir.com/
http://i.giwebb.com/
Francis Bach Going beyond least-squares – II : Self-concordant analysis for logistic regression
On the Generalization Ability of Online Strongly Convex Programming Algorithms
5 Illustrations
6 Homeless links
Bookmarked but where will they ever go?
Dispel your justification-monkey with a “HWA!” - Malcolm Ocean
Roger’s Bacon, Living and Dying with a Mad God
Washable & breathable flexiOH cast adapts to the patient’s skin
-
Today I took a desk lamp whose Halogen light had burned out, whose crappy transformer always made those bulbs sputter, and whose mildly art-deco appearance I’d always liked, and swapped it out to run an LED bulb off USB power. It took about an hour’s work to replace the light with an LED, the switch with a nice heavy clicky one, and now the whole thing runs off USB-C instead of wall voltage. It emits no appreciable heat, and if these calculations are to be believed, will run for decades for a few cents per year, assuming I leave it on all the time.
I hadn’t really appreciated how big a deal USB-PD voltage negotiation was until I found out that the little chips that handle that negotiation are about the size of the end of a pencil, and that if you include the USB-C port, you can replace basically any low-voltage transformer with something smaller than a quarter.
The magic search string, if you want to try this yourself, is “usb-pd trigger module.”
vscode-paste-image/README.md at master · mushanshitiancai/vscode-paste-image
mhoye/awesome-falsehood: 😱 Falsehoods Programmers Believe in
Communications’ digital initiative and its first digital event
Playable Half Earth Socialism simulator
flatmax/vector-synth: Old 2002 era vector synth code based on XFig
Nick Chater, Would you Stand Up to An Oppressive Regime
Lambda School’s Job Placement Rate May Be Far Worse Than Advertised
I would like to read the diaries of Usama ibn Munqidh
The latest target of China’s tech regulation blitz: algorithms
State Power and the Power Law, State Power and the Power Law 2
Liquid Information Flow Control, a confidential computing DSL
Kostas Kiriakakis, A Day At The Park
-
Absci is a generative AI drug creation company. Our mission is simple: create better biologics for patients, faster.
-
By analysing medical text and extracting biomedical entities and relations from the entire history of published medical science, Xyla can facilitate better real-world evidence-based clinical decision support and help make clinical research—such as research into new treatments, including de novo drug design as well as the repurposing of existing drugs—smarter and faster. In so doing, Xyla is fulfilling its mission of organising the world’s medical knowledge and making it more useful.
-
pyribs is the official implementation of Covariance Matrix Adaptation MAP-Elites (CMA-ME) and other quality diversity optimisation algorithms.[…]
Quality diversity (QD) optimisation is a subfield of optimisation where solutions generated cover every point in a measure space while simultaneously maximising (or minimising) a single objective. QD algorithms within the MAP-Elites family of QD algorithms produce heatmaps (archives) as output where each cell contains the best discovered representative of a region in measure space.
Is Pandemic Stress to Blame for the Rise in Traffic Deaths? Nope, apparently it is decreased congestion making drivers drive faster on shit roads.
Black Americans are pessimistic about their position in U.S. society
A study of lights at night suggests dictators lie about economic growth
DIY Collective Embeds Abortion Pill Onto Business Cards, Distributes Them At Hacker Conference
Elizabeth Van Nostrand, A Quick Look At 20% Time
Chalk is a non-terrible calculator for macOS, incorporating useful things like matrices and bitwise ops.
Clive Thompson, The Power of Indulging Your Weird, Offbeat Obsessions
Victoria Falconer is incredible to watch.
-
River is a visual connection engine. Clear your mind and surf laterally through image space. May contain NSFW content. Right-click any image to open it on Are.na for the source, full resolution, and human-curated connections.
SoSha | Social Media Engagement for Communities, Employees, and Partners
He Fought for Freedom. Then He Chose Prison.; on Jimmy Lai
Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink - Google Docs
The Artist Who Trained Rats to Trade in Foreign-Exchange Markets
Specific Suggestions: Simple Sabotage for the 21st Century (Posting this link is… not advice)
A ‘Second Tree of Life’ Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn - The New York Times
-
A project called CETI — Cetacean Translation Initiative — was initiated to help scientists study and understand the language of sperm whales.
ClearerThinking.org’s courses, e.g.
- Introduction to Decision Academy: The Science of Better Decisions
- Rhetorical Fallacies: Dodging Argument Traps
- Learning from Mistakes: A Systematic Approach
- Probabilistic Fallacies: Gauging the Strength of Evidence
- Explanation Freeze: Interpreting Uncertain Events
- The Sunk Cost Fallacy: Focusing on the Future
- When to Stop Exploring | The explore-exploit trade-off
2023’s best global tech stories we wish we’d written - Rest of World
Christian Lawson-Perfect’s Interesting Esoterica is a collection of weird papers in math.
Office for the Preservation of Normalcy - I feel confident enough to post these now. Cosmic horror warning posters.