I’m making an effort to mindfully consume content and play around with ideas rather than mindlessly consume. This is a place to record my summaries and reflections on the books, lectures, movies, papers, blog posts, and general content that I am consuming. I make no promises that these will be useful to anyone.
I solved the fifth day of Advent of Code
I solved the fourth day of Advent of Code
I solved the third day of Advent of Code
I solved the second day of Advent of Code
I solved the first day of Advent of Code
I’m replacing the joy of Advent of Code with GenAI (sorta)
Cal Newport provides a fun example of causal inference in the wild
Last night we went to a Long Now Talk “What is Intelligence”
We recently moved up to the city. I was dubious that it would significantly improve our quality of life: how different could it be? Then we saw a flyer on a traffic pole advertising a scavanger hunt! We catiously texted and got a cryptic countdown until our first clue: go underground and make a call to a certain number from a honest-to-god payphone! After one busted payphone in Embarcadero Station we eventually succeeded in Civic Center and from there we were hooked. ...
Post As a consummate Neal Stephenson fanboy I subscribe to his sparsely active Substack 1. Do read the whole thing. Stephenson proposes a challenge: we eventually will find ourselves in competition with AI in much the same way as I found it quite interesting when he mentions a McLuhan’s quote: “all augmentations are amputations”. In that he posits that “We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down.” ...