Links
4 stars
The Open-Air Prison for ISIS Supporters—and Victims | New Yorker
In 2006, the Syrian government settled a few hundred Palestinian refugee families on a dusty, scorpion-infested stretch of brushland near the Iraqi border, south of the town of Al-Hol, which means, among other things, “the horror.” The Palestinians had been living in Iraq but fled the violence unleashed by the U.S. occupation; they had already been expelled from their ancestral lands by Israel in 1948. The U.N. built cinder-block houses for the refugees. During the Syrian civil war, the camp filled with more displaced families. In March, 2019, when the caliphate fell, thousands of its residents were corralled into Al-Hol, and the camp was abruptly converted into one of the world’s largest prisons. Today, Al-Hol’s fifty thousand residents are grouped into sectors divided by barbed wire; to walk from one to the next can take half an hour. Most sectors hold Syrians and Iraqis, but the so-called Annex is home to about six thousand Europeans, Asians, and Africans, some of whom have been denied repatriation by their home governments. Horticulture is evident here and there around the camp, with squash and bean plants peeking over tents. A few non-governmental organizations operate health clinics, but detainees complain that malnutrition and water-borne disease are pervasive. Crowds jostle around bathrooms whose pipes are often clogged. Many inmates receive money from relatives—hawala networks, informal cash-transfer systems, are sometimes allowed to relay funds to prisoners. Detainees can use their remittances to buy smuggled goods, including drugs. The chief diversion is the souk, which was built by inmates, and in which you’ll find small grocers next to carts selling makeup next to smoothie stands. A few lucky prisoners own shops, but most stalls are run by outsiders with permits to enter the camp. A mass of black-clad women drifts among the stalls, examining bras, haggling over cigarettes. You can guess who the true believers are: the women who cover not only their faces but also their eyes tend to be loyal to isis.
When Jihan and Mahmoud moved to their assigned tent, Jihan was surprised to find many detainees with stories like hers. The common denominator appeared to be guilt by association. There was a woman from central Syria named Fatima; her husband had joined the democracy protests and then, through the twists and turns of the war, had ended up in ISIS. Her family insisted that she divorce him, but they had a child, and, according to local custom, custody goes to the man, so she refused—and was disowned. Eventually, Fatima’s husband died in battle, and she was transferred against her will to a “guest house” for ISIS widows. There she rebuffed ISIS suitors, wanting only to be reunited with her family. During America’s bombing campaign, she was moved from village to village by ISIS, and she ended up living in a ditch as ordnance exploded around her. Now she and her child were in Al-Hol, surviving on camp rations, as she waited for a sign from her family. She hadn’t spoken to them in four years.
3 stars
Among the A.I. Doomsayers | New Yorker
I asked how they knew each other, and he responded, “Oh, we’ve crossed paths for years, as part of the scene.”
It was understood that “the scene” meant a few intertwined subcultures known for their exhaustive debates about recondite issues (secure DNA synthesis, shrimp welfare) that members consider essential, but that most normal people know nothing about. For two decades or so, one of these issues has been whether artificial intelligence will elevate or exterminate humanity. Pessimists are called A.I. safetyists, or decelerationists—or, when they’re feeling especially panicky, A.I. doomers. They find one another online and often end up living together in group houses in the Bay Area, sometimes even co-parenting and co-homeschooling their kids. Before the dot-com boom, the neighborhoods of Alamo Square and Hayes Valley, with their pastel Victorian row houses, were associated with staid domesticity. Last year, referring to A.I. “hacker houses,” the San Francisco Standard semi-ironically called the area Cerebral Valley.
A camp of techno-optimists rebuffs A.I. doomerism with old-fashioned libertarian boomerism, insisting that all the hand-wringing about existential risk is a kind of mass hysteria. They call themselves “effective accelerationists,” or e/accs (pronounced “e-acks”), and they believe A.I. will usher in a utopian future—interstellar travel, the end of disease—as long as the worriers get out of the way. On social media, they troll doomsayers as “decels,” “psyops,” “basically terrorists,” or, worst of all, “regulation-loving bureaucrats.” “We must steal the fire of intelligence from the gods [and] use it to propel humanity towards the stars,” a leading e/acc recently tweeted. (And then there are the normies, based anywhere other than the Bay Area or the Internet, who have mostly tuned out the debate, attributing it to sci-fi fume-huffing or corporate hot air.)
8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story | WIRED
Approaching its seventh anniversary, the “Attention” paper has attained legendary status. The authors started with a thriving and improving technology—a variety of AI called neural networks—and made it into something else: a digital system so powerful that its output can feel like the product of an alien intelligence. Called transformers, this architecture is the not-so-secret sauce behind all those mind-blowing AI products, including ChatGPT and graphic generators such as Dall-E and Midjourney. Shazeer now jokes that if he knew how famous the paper would become, he “might have worried more about the author order.” All eight of the signers are now microcelebrities. “I have people asking me for selfies—because I’m on a paper!” says Llion Jones, who is (randomly, of course) name number five.
“Without transformers I don’t think we’d be here now,” says Geoffrey Hinton, who is not one of the authors but is perhaps the world’s most prominent AI scientist. He’s referring to the ground-shifting times we live in, as OpenAI and other companies build systems that rival and in some cases surpass human output.
All eight authors have since left Google. Like millions of others, they are now working in some way with systems powered by what they created in 2017. I talked to the Transformer Eight to piece together the anatomy of a breakthrough, a gathering of human minds to create a machine that might well save the last word for itself.
2 stars
The Squatters of Beverly Hills | Curbed
After a fugitive doctor abandoned his mansion, an enterprising group of party throwers slid in the front door.
Inside Ukraine’s Wartime Salons | Allure
On January 2, like many Kyiv residents that morning, salon owner Ludmila Chepizhko woke up to the terrifying sounds of missiles and drones overhead. Russia rang in 2024 by launching its largest air attack on Ukraine since the start of its full-scale invasion two years ago, killing at least five people and injuring 127 others. Residential buildings in the Solomianskyi district of the capital were hit, including one near Chepizhko’s LuChe Beauty Salon. The blast — early enough in the morning that staff hadn’t arrived yet — blew out the glass facade of the salon at a time when temperatures in Kyiv dipped far below freezing.
Chepizhko was back in business the next day. “We started to work behind wooden panels; there was light, heating, and water in the salon. However, the situation was different in the building hit,” she says, keen to highlight who was more severely affected in the aftermath of the strike. A photo of her storefront with “WE ARE OPEN, BEAUTY SALON” spray-painted in black across the boarded-up windows went viral on social media among Ukrainians and the Ukrainian diaspora, proud to show off yet another example of the country’s unfathomable strength. “We have to support each other,” says Chepizhko. “Our salon gives people a feeling of beauty and of calm for just a bit.”
Color Wheels are wrong? How color vision actually works | A Smart Bear
Artists say all colors are a mixture of red, yellow, and blue. But physics and TV screens and printers disagree. How does color really work? […]
To do this “wheel” thing properly, you should represent the red/green and blue/yellow opposites. It’s not at all difficult, so it amazes me how rarely it’s seen or taught. […]
Four primary colors? Yes, why not? It’s the closest thing to the physiology without getting complex.
How Not To Predict The Future | Asterisk
Predicting the future is difficult, but not impossible — and some people are much better at it than others. This insight has spawned a community dedicated to developing better and better methods of forecasting. But while our techniques have become increasingly sophisticated, even the best forecasters still make mistakes.
In my work as an analyst for the Forecasting Research Institute, and as a member of the forecasting collective Samotsvety, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to see how forecasters err. By and large, these mistakes fall into two categories. The first mistake is in trusting our preconceptions too much. The more we know — and the more confident we are in our knowledge — the easier it is to dismiss information that doesn’t conform to the opinions we already have. But there’s a more insidious second kind of error that bites forecasters — putting too much store in clever models that minimize the role of judgment. Just because there’s math doesn’t make it right.
A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive | New York Times [gift article]
It took humans 134 years to discover Norn cells. Last summer, computers in California discovered them on their own in just six weeks.
The discovery came about when researchers at Stanford programmed the computers to teach themselves biology. The computers ran an artificial intelligence program similar to ChatGPT, the popular bot that became fluent with language after training on billions of pieces of text from the internet. But the Stanford researchers trained their computers on raw data about millions of real cells and their chemical and genetic makeup.
The researchers did not tell the computers what these measurements meant. They did not explain that different kinds of cells have different biochemical profiles. They did not define which cells catch light in our eyes, for example, or which ones make antibodies.
The computers crunched the data on their own, creating a model of all the cells based on their similarity to each other in a vast, multidimensional space. When the machines were done, they had learned an astonishing amount. They could classify a cell they had never seen before as one of over 1,000 different types. One of those was the Norn cell.
The Rise of Western Individualism | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
You’ve probably heard about The WEIRDest People in the World; this is one of the better reviews I’ve read of the book:
Pinker, describing the power of familial bonds, wrote, “every political and religious movement in history has sought to undermine the family. The reasons are obvious. Not only is the family a rival coalition competing for a person’s loyalties, but it is a rival with an unfair advantage: relatives innately care for one another more than comrades do.”
Joseph Henrich, professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, explores the consequences of this idea at length in his recent book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. The book contains a dazzling array of evidence to support Henrich’s thesis for why variation exists among societies, and, in particular, why Europe has played such an outsized role in human history. The word “WEIRD,” stands for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.” It is also a convenient way to communicate that people from such societies are psychologically different from most of the rest of the world and from most humans throughout history. […]Henrich shows that the percentage of cousin marriages across countries predicts levels of individualism. The U.S. is famously individualistic, and indeed it scores the highest on the individualism scale and among the lowest on prevalence of cousin marriage. In contrast, countries with a higher prevalence of cousin marriage such as Malaysia and Indonesia score lower on individualism. Prevalence of cousin marriage is also associated with lower rates of trust for strangers, higher willingness to lie for a friend, and lower rates of blood donations.
When researchers invited university students in various countries to play economic games in which they could easily cheat to win more money, students from countries with more cousin marriage were more likely to do so relative to students from countries with fewer intrafamilial marriages. Such differences exist within European countries as well. For example, southern Italians have higher rates of cousin marriage, along with lower trust of strangers and lower blood donations compared with northern Italians.
DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest | The Atlantic
People are discovering the truth about their biological parents with DNA—and learning that incest is far more common than many think.
Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI | Noahpinion
I hang out with a lot of people in the AI world, and if there’s one thing they’re certain of, it’s that the technology they’re making is going to put a lot of people out of a job. Maybe not all people — they argue back and forth about that — but certainly a lot of people. […]
Now let’s think about AI. Is there a producer-specific constraint on the amount of AI we can produce? Of course there’s the constraint on energy, but that’s not specific to AI — humans also take energy to run. A much more likely constraint involves computing power (“compute”). AI requires some amount of compute each time you use it. Although the amount of compute is increasing every day, it’s simply true that at any given point in time, and over any given time interval, there is a finite amount of compute available in the world. Human brain power and muscle power, in contrast, do not use any compute.
So compute is a producer-specific constraint on AI, similar to constraints on Marc’s time in the example above. It doesn’t matter how much compute we get, or how fast we build new compute; there will always be a limited amount of it in the world, and that will always put some limit on the amount of AI in the world.
So as AI gets better and better, and gets used for more and more different tasks, the limited global supply of compute will eventually force us to make hard choices about where to allocate AI’s awesome power. We will have to decide where to apply our limited amount of AI, and all the various applications will be competing with each other. Some applications will win that competition, and some will lose.
What (Some) College Administrators Understand That (A Lot of) Wonks Don't | Freddie deBoer
“These majors get great financial outcomes, so we should push more and more students into them” is very understandable reasoning but misguided. Setting aside the implausibility of having an all-engineering, coding, or finance labor economy…. I have a big network of people who work at colleges that I interact with regularly, and I think this is something that frustrates them. Commentators often ask why colleges don’t do more to push students into the fields where the jobs and money are. Tell more kids they should go into engineering! But people who do the advising in colleges have perspective on this question that others lack: they have to help pick up the pieces when students start majors they’re not equipped for in terms of talent and temperament. If a pundit says that everyone should go into computer science, there’s no stakes for them. When someone providing formal professional advising to a student tells them to go into computer science, only for that student to find (as so many do) that they can’t match the rigor of that discipline, that advisor has to deal with the back end as the student chooses a new major and tries to cobble together the credits to complete it, which takes time and money. And if you think that’s unfortunate, remember that it’s still more humane than graduating someone into a field where they can’t excel.
Why did Shohei Ohtani allegedly wire $4.5m to a bookmaker? | Silver Bulletin
Let me be explicit about the value I think I can add here. I know a lot of high-stakes gamblers — in fact, I just finished writing a book about gambling and risk, which is in part a character study of exactly the sort of person who might wire a lot of money to settle a poker or sports betting debt. I don’t know a lot of current or former professional athletes (although I do know some). But I do know a lot of men who became wealthy at a young age, through finance, gambling or founding a business. And I’ve been around my share of degeneracy — in fact, the term “degen” is often used affectionately in the gambling world that I inhabit.
And knowing that world, I think all possibilities are on the table, including that Mizuhara, a former employee of the Angels and Dodgers, bet on baseball (something he has “100 percent” denied). Or that Ohtani was betting on sports himself. I also think it’s possible, however, that Ohtani was sloppy with his money and with his relationship with Mizuhara. Young men who become extremely rich and famous are not always known for their caution in financial matters, exactly. And knowing some of them personally, I’d say they’re even less cautious than is generally assumed.
#36. Survival of the Friendliest | Play Makes Us Human
My goal here is to describe what I see as the most plausible theory about how our ancestors changed at that time. It’s the self-domestication theory, which, as one pair of researchers (Hare & Woods, 2020) put it, involved a shift toward “survival of the friendliest.” I start with a summary of human-induced domestication of animals, then describe a theory about the self-domestication of bonobos, and finally a theory about our own self-domestication.
Vancouver’s new mega-development is big, ambitious and undeniably Indigenous | MacLeans
Sen̓áḵw is big, ambitious and undeniably urban—and undeniably Indigenous. It’s being built on reserve land owned by the Squamish First Nation, and it’s spearheaded by the Squamish Nation itself, in partnership with the private real estate developer Westbank. Because the project is on First Nations land, not city land, it’s under Squamish authority, free of Vancouver’s zoning rules. And the Nation has chosen to build bigger, denser and taller than any development on city property would be allowed.
Predictably, not everyone has been happy about it. Critics have included local planners, politicians and, especially, residents of Kitsilano Point, a rarified beachfront neighbourhood bordering the reserve. And there’s been an extra edge to their critiques that’s gone beyond standard-issue NIMBYism about too-tall buildings and preserving neighbourhood character. There’s also been a persistent sense of disbelief that Indigenous people could be responsible for this futuristic version of urban living. In 2022, Gordon Price, a prominent Vancouver urban planner and a former city councillor, told Gitxsan reporter Angela Sterritt, “When you’re building 30, 40-storey high rises out of concrete, there’s a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building.”
Democrats are hemorrhaging support with voters of color | Silver Bulletin
The trend is real in polls, and in at least some election results.
Social Conservatism as 4D Chess | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands allow doctors to commit the final act, so have become as permissive as realistically possible. If euthanasia leads to a Nazi-like devaluing of human life, you would find some indication of this in those countries. Do they have higher murder rates? Do parents abandon their sick children at orphanages more often? Cross-country comparisons can be problematic when the relationships one is looking for are small, but social conservatives are the ones who believe that higher-order effects are relevant enough to be part of the policy discourse, so the burden of proof is on them. Yet they either don’t exist, or are so small that they can’t be found. And you would think if there was one situation where you would find higher-order effects, it would be here, where the policy space stretches from euthanasia being completely legal to totally forbidden. I’m unaware of any attempt having been made to argue that there’s any measurable way that euthanasia has made the Netherlands and Belgium worse places to live than say France or Denmark.
1 star
Getting Things Done In A Chaotic Environment | Stay SaaSy
One of the first things my CEO told me is that things move fast, so you have to get things done as completely as possible and move on to the next thing. I think about that advice a lot, and I find myself telling people that same thing again and again.
However, execution of that sage advice is not easy. Of course everyone wants to get stuff done completely. But I find people make four common mistakes when trying to get things done:
Having more than one main focus
Ignoring things you can’t ignore
Not completely finishing things
Taking too long to do things
I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train – I’ve travelled 310,000 miles so far | Metro
Okay, ‘squatter’ isn’t really accurate. While the 17-year-old does indeed live on trains, he does so entirely legally. And with a surprising amount of comfort.
Lasse travels 600 miles a day throughout Germany aboard Deutsche Bahn trains. He travels first class, sleeps on night trains, has breakfast in DB lounges and takes showers in public swimming pools and leisure centres, all using his unlimited annual railcard.
Meet the real-life versions of Dune’s epic sandworms | Nature
Misleading title, but still quite interesting:
A Dune-loving worm palaeontologist makes the case that worms have been just as important on Earth as they are in the blockbuster film.