author: niplav, created: 2019-04-02, modified: 2023-11-13, language: english, status: in progress, importance: 3, confidence: log
A monthly review of changes on this website.
Mein Unternehmen ist im Grund nicht schwierig, ich brauche nur
unsterblich zu sein, um es zu vollenden.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Autor des Quijote”, 1962
it’s Good that just mutates and twists, and it’s Evil that teems
with fecundity.
—Scott Alexander, “The Goddess of Everything Else”, 2015
Monthly updates are sent out via substack.
- Wild knot (English Wikipedia, 2023)
- The Subjective Experience of Time: Welfare Implications (Jason Schukraft, 2020)
- On Bloom's two sigma problem: A systematic review of the effectiveness of mastery learning, tutoring, and direct instruction (José Luis Ricón, 2020): Oldie but goodie. Computer-based tutoring is still under-rated! Maybe I will use language models more intensely for study.
- Dangers of deference (Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, 2022): It's nice to have a comprehensive list about this kind of to-me-obviously-flawed epistemic practice.
- Snake detection theory (William Buckner, 2022): Are primates genetically programmed to be afraid of snakes? Apparently, ophidiophobia is one of the most common phobias, which I can't really understand (snakes were for quite a while my favorite type of animal). Related question: Is the common and apparently instinctive fear that cats display towards long green objects (e.g. cucumbers) that appear suddenly in their field of view slight evidence for snake detection theory, since those cats had never seen a snake in their life? Also, if snakes are accessible to the genome, what else could be?
- Perfecting the Art of Sensible Nonsense (Erica Klarreich, 2014): I had not heard to indistinguishability obfuscation before! It turns out you can (in theory) build a program that only runs if you give it the correct password, even if you have access to the binary, and this leads to being able to construct a whole zoo of cryptographic operations, including fully homomorphic encryption and many others I don't even recognize. Curiously, in Russell Impagliazzo's five worlds, indistinguishability obfuscation only exists in two. Quanta magazine continues to deliver, as the researcher mentioned in the article, Amit Sahai, shows up in the comments to correct the misunderstanding of another commenter.
Meditation.
- Core Transformation (Romeo Stevens, 2019)
- What should Julia users know about? (Muireall Prase, 2022)
- Implications of evidential cooperation in large worlds (Lukas Finnveden, 2023): Glad people at OpenPhil are thinking about this.
- Adapting Land Value Taxation to Space (Sam Harsimony, 2023)
- In the Lab Oppenheimer Built, the U.S. Is Building Nuclear Bomb Cores Again (W. J. Hennigan, 2023)
- A New Physics Theory of Life (Natalie Wolchover, 2014): Made me want to learn out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics, plus an impromptu reconaissance with Crooks fluctuation theorem.
- Scheduled procrastination (Brian Hayes, 2006): I'd always wondered about optimal solutions to the problem of starting optimally with problems that become easier, apparently we don't (didn't?) even know whether this is in NP. Dangit.
- Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models (Yutao Sun/Li Dong/Shaohan Haung/Shuming Ma/Yuqing Xia/Jilong Xue/Jianyong Wang/Furu Wei, 2023)
- Accidental Nuclear War: a Timeline of Close Calls (Ariel Conn, 2016)
- Meditation acutely improves psychomotor vigilance, and may decrease sleep need (Bruce F. O'Hara/Craig R. Sargent/Jason Passafiume/Prashand Kaul, 2010): Very big if true: One might be able to get all the benefits from meditation, at none of the costs in terms of time, additionally increasing one's effective subjective lifespan through more waking hours.
- A New Tool to Help Mathematicians Pack (Natalie Wolchover, 2013): Optimal packing is related to error correction codes. Curious!
- In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (Cosma Shalizi, 2012): Combining my two favorite things: Computational complexity theory and speculative economic systems.
- Black Hole Civilizations (Sam Harsimony, 2022): Black holes are unusually flexible: Possible to be used as currency, weapons, mass-energy converters (& therefore as drives for travel), randomness generators…
Read a large number of blog posts.
I often ignored my other obligations this month.
Read most of the posts from the 2021 LessWrong
Review,
the Invertebrate
Welfare
sequence and Moral Weight Project
Sequence.
Meditation.
Meditation.
I also worked on the library iqisa,
which I hope to bring into a presentable shape by the end of the year
(any faster and I'd lose the forecasting community, I fear).
- New pages:
- Playing with Language. Collecting linguistic weirdnesses, rants about improper terminology, idioms for paper titles, quines, umeshisms, missing symmetries, types of guy, …
- Microfiction. Portmanteaus, interesting & nice words, short poems, haikus, Davisian dialogue fragments, misattributed & invented quotes, …
- Recommendation-Worthy Websites
- Discord Servers for Textbooks
- Additions to old pages:
I now sort-of disavow Life Improvements in
2030: It completely missed the premise
of thinking how regular people might perceive the future to be better
in everyday life, instead turning into another average "How might the
future be like?" post by focusing on big-picture developments. Boring.
Updated the Texts List. I finished
reading the AI alignment articles in the corresponding Arbital
domain.
Nothing.
Again updated the Texts List with a large number
of texts. I continue to read a lot, and write relatively little.
Updated the Texts List with a large number of
texts. I read a bunch this month.
Updated the Texts List.
Updated the Now page and the Texts
List.
Renamed the Haikus page to Senryūs.
Rebuilt the website, the chronological blog archives now contain the
newest posts from the respective blogs.
Updated the Now page.
Due to personal commitments, I didn't work on this website very much
in June.
Imported existing lists I maintained on past Media
Consumption, specifically:
Due to other personal commitments, I didn't work on this website very
much in May.
- Added table support in the CSS
- Tooltips for images and links (to increase accessibility)
- Updated CSS to highlight quotes & code
- Added a favicon
- Made sections anchor-links to themselves
Structurally supporting pages (like this changelog, the home page and the
about page) are also new, but not even near being finished.
At the beginning of the month, I set up the code to generate this website
and imported some existing projects of mine.