Things that I think should be noted and file in an orderly fashion but I have no time for. This will change incessantly; I would advise against linking to it.
Links
I would like to have a link on the difficulties of coordinating on justice via mob rule, public shaming and petitions, wherein we look at the coordination problems here, and separate the problem of identifying injustice/inefficiency/existential threat, and the problem of calibrating a political response. Sideline in altruistic punishment and feedback loops. TBD.
Nixos needs filing somewhere. It is a packaging system that builds unique combinations of dependencies for particular software ina a functional language style (i.e. no side-effects, but for installation). Works on linux or OSX. There is a whole linux distribution built on it which sounds like it is wonderful when it works, but it might occasionally be a crusade. The pills are a series of essays in how the system works.
calndr.link creates calendar links.
I built calndr.link after I had multiple clients request the exact same thing - a simple and easy way to generate calendar links, for adding to their website or in email newsletters.
There’s a few existing providers out there, but they're extremely pricey for what they do - take some basic data (title/date/etc) and reformat it into a url for a calendar provider (be it google or apple).
Jan Turowski on Schrebergärten.
Meaningnesss, on wonder.
Substack is rebranding blog/newsletter/audience building.
Henry Farrell, “Public” choice. Also Robin Hanson’s redjoiner.
A collection of links advocating for learning a new language.
Instant site publishing from a folder of files: Netlify drop.
Browser-DAW soundation now has live collaboration.
Danny Dorling, Slowdown:The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives..
Open AI Jukebox is the latest hot generative music thing that I should be across. I would take a rather different approach to them to solve this problem, but they are the current benchmark.
Philip Moriarty, Will Fermi and Dirac save us? Probably not.
A paper recently appeared on the arXiv with the ever-so-intriguing title of “Attacking Covid-19 with the Ising-model and the Fermi-Dirac Distribution Function”. […]I'm a big fan of the Ising model --- not least because we have extensively used a variant to simulate pattern formation in nanoparticle assemblies for many* years […] Having now read the paper, it’s a little, um, underwhelming, given the rather overstated premise of the title. That’s not to say that it’s not worth reading as an example of how modelling and simulation strategies from condensed matter physics can be translated to social and epidemiological settings.
rufus is a boot drive maker which is free and open source and maintained and thus possibly less suspect than some competitors.
Terry Tao’s course in Modern real-variable harmonic analysis.
I keep meaning to bookmark entertaining contrarian Cory Clark.
Another free/libre Microsoft Office clone: FreeOffice. Looks less bloated than OpenOffice maybe?
Parsing text tags into Boolean feature vectors for tensorflow
I would like to read the Kernelized Stein Discrepancy tutorial.
China launches national blockchain.
Overengineered shopping list grocy probably won’t replace my just-right-engineered-but-deprecated shopping list Wunderlist.
Online experiment power calculator tells you how many data points you need to have and thus whether it is likely you can (dis) prove the thing with the budget you have.
bitcoin during financial crisis.
This guide to pruning multihead attention NN should probably go somewhere useful if i actually end up doing NLP like all the recruiters seem to want.
Vlad Alex (Merzmensch) 12 Colab Notebooks that matter StyleGAN, GPT-2, StyleTransfer, DeOldify, Magenta etc. to try out.
Escape pod is an auditory science fiction magazine. (Which means podcast.)
Nick Chater, Would you Stand Up to An Oppressive Regime
Conjugate functions illustrated.
I should lobby citation styles for URL support to prevent the entire project being quaintly mired in woodpulp. Here is where to do it.
Francis Bach on the use of geometric sums and a different take by Julyan Arbel.
Tutorial to approximating differentiable control problems. An extension of this is universal differential equations.
Andreessen Horowitz critique AI startup hype that claims we have a unicorn factory.
Glitter nail polish for laptop security.
Social change fun pack
- The Best Books on the Politics of Information recommended by Henry Farrell. e
- Measurement and power in organisations (which mentions the Hubbard book on measurement).
- Moral mazes
- Minimum viable superorganism is a famed introduction to the prestige economy.
- Business model and politics of polarisation
- Elkus on infromation/science/media dynamics in the age of crisis
Illustrations
