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

• 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.