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.
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.” ...
Youtube I loved watching the Corridor Digital guys back when they were working with RocketJump on videos. So naturally when I saw them on my feed discussing generative AI I had to watch. The start is fairly generic video effects guys laying out common ways of detecting generative content: incorrect placement of real locations like the Hollywood sign (and mispelled), inconsistent details, unnatural dynamic features like water, fire, and smoke, lack of true action. And above all just a general style or vibe. ...
I attended a talk by Nathan Kallus
Last night we went to see Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s Abundance book tour.
I did a three-day adventure racing stage race
I attended a nice lunch today with some CMU stats alumni and read an Unofficial Data Science post.
My shower thought for today revolved around dollar auctions.