Links

• Select Star SQL: Great, interactive introduction to SQL.
• Beautiful Racket: Language-oriented Programming in Racket. Beautiful book on the web.
• Bartosz Ciechanowski: Explorable explanations. Did you ever wonder how a bike really works? Or what about a mechanical watch?
• Engineering Management Checklist: a lot of common sense distilled into a page's worth of bullet points.
• What the Hell is Water?
• Hunter S. Thompson's letter to a friend. A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitable have his choice made for him by circumstance.

• Brian Eno on Confirmation Bias:

  The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway. – Brian Eno

• https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/
• https://guzey.com/personal/why-have-a-blog/
• https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
• https://paulgraham.com/talk.html

• Reinvesting when Terrified: Worth a read these days.
• The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism: A very interesting analysis into the how AI companies depend on each other. I wasn't very familiar with Coreweave familar, but it it definitely looks like we are getting into financial euphoria territory.
• Is there Life after Banking?: Some musings on retirement from an investment banker

• European Alternatives for different software services
• Radio Free Europe and how democracies can respond to information warfare and propaganda from non-democratic states
• Do Firms Need Juniors? The article challenged my idea that the future of software engineering is validation and specification.

• The Short Case for Nvidia

• Burning Out and purchasing power. Weird, funny little blogpost about burning out.
• Alone Time and Loneliness in America
• Journey to the End of Time: Really well-made youtube video
• The Vatican on AI

• What Happened to the Glamour of Tomorrow?: I've been thinking a lot about this lately. Why is it, that despite the relative comfort of modern life compared to almost any other time, it doesn't feel comfortable? Why does the future inspire a feeling of dread for the younger generations instead of optimism?

• The Tragedy of the Commons is an [urban myth](https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth)

• The CEO of Anthropic muses on the possibilities of AI. Unlike most of the garbage in this genre, this essay actually tries to get a bit more into the nitty-gritty details and adresses some common arguments against AI as a good.

• Is this the Civilization We Want?: Bret Victor is always worth reading. He is one of the few researchers out there who is really doing pursuing his own thing. Here he is replying to Michael Nielsen, another interesting guy in this space, and Shan Carter about what a good tool is and what role AI can play in creating tools that augment our intelligence.

• Repair and Remain: Interesting article about not falling for the temptation of the new. He uses an analogy between houses and relationships. What is the real underlying problem?
• How I Use AI by Nicolas Carlini
• American Vulcan: profile on Palmer Luckey of Oculus Rift and Anduril. A good example of what thinking outside the box and not being bothered by societetal expectations and constraints can look like. He lived in a trailer where he removed the kitchen and the toilet to have more space for hacking together Oculus prototypes.
• The Hacker Mindset: Some nice ideas in here. I especially liked the part about calling out the cynics and what she calls low agency behaviour. Don't be the little guy fighting against the evil bigcos or the man; start a company (or a movement) and try to change it! Bit cheesy, but a good read.
• From Python to Numpy: Not only is Nicolas P. Rougier an emacs master, but turns out he also wrote a great book about numpy. He also has a set of 100 small exercises to test what you learn. Great resource!

• A Philosophy Professor's Last Class about Richard Bernstein, who I was not familiar with before. It sounds like he had an interesting life and there is something inspiring about someone who is so passionate about their work as well as capable to do their work until death takes them.

• The Big Here and The Long Now by Brian Eno. Interesting and inspiring thoughts about how to think about the future and our descendants.
• Bill Watterson's commencement speech
• A paper about Peter Wessel Zapffes anti-natalist views and how objective meaninglessness is a bad reason for anti-natalism. In particular, that it leads to certain paradoxes. For example, if death is a loss that implies life has value. If death isn't a loss, it implies life has negative value, but then why keep on living (from a purely rational point of view)

• Such a cool site: https://friendsofattention.net/attention_trove#welcome
• Nice, brief lesson into financial history: https://www.ft.com/content/52f06fb9-ef15-498f-9a98-39673c960de4

• https://www.ft.com/content/9108f393-6a45-41a3-bd76-20581b19288e: Prediction Markets

• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/23/the-great-cash-for-carbon-hustle

• https://www.wired.com/story/what-openai-really-wants/: Interesting profile on OpenAI.
• https://longnow.org/essays/omega-glory/
• https://ig.ft.com/rare-earths/: Data journalism at its best. I especially liked the graphic where it shows China's share in the different parts of the supply chain, i.e., 70% of mining, 87% of processing, 91% of refinement, 94% of permanent magnet production, and how much of the output goes into European wind turbine production and EV production. A masterclass in data visualization and storytelling.

• https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/posts/web-books.html

• https://brettscott.substack.com/p/casino-chip-cashless-society
• https://samf.ku.dk/presse/kronikker-og-debat/2023/spaend-sikkerhedsselen-intimitetskapitalismen-er-paa-vej/

• Ted Chiang on AI, management consulting and capitalism. It is a critical take on the optimistic view that AI will lead to universal basic income or new, better jobs for everyone rather than accelerating the concentration of power and wealth.

This is just a collection of noteworthy articles and other content that made me think or struck me in some way or other. All-time favorites are found in here.

• Interesting take on how generative models will affect literature and writing. It is quite long, but there are some interesting thoughts in there.
• Collection of Steve Jobs anecdotes, interviews etc. I enjoyed scrolling through this. There are some interesting bits in there, such as the 180 degree turn-around on sharing IP with Intel. That ability to
• Stop calling everything AI. I re-discovered this classic article from Michael Jordan about how ML is in the phase of becoming an engineering discipline, moving on from being something closer to sorcery.