Links
4 stars
Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals” | Dwarkesh Podcast [YouTube]
146-minute video
I rarely (never?) include podcasts, and this one may not be everyone’s cup of tea...but this conversation between Andrej Karpathy and Dwarkesh Patel is fascinating.
The Andrej Karpathy episode. During this interview, Andrej explains why reinforcement learning is terrible (but everything else is much worse), why AGI will just blend into the previous ~2.5 centuries of 2% GDP growth, why self driving took so long to crack, and what he sees as the future of education. It was a pleasure chatting with him.
3 stars
You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Be a Reenactor | The Atlantic
19-minute read
Its living room rapidly reached the swelter and volume of a blacksmith’s forge operating as a front for an unlicensed tavern. Upon entry, about half of the company sloughed off their soaking breeches to stand around in voluminous shirts, pantsless, like giant toddlers; within minutes the place reeked of sodden natural fibers, sweaty armpits, and, intermittently, a tropical kiss of summer, owing to a decision by some of the men to repurpose some scrounged-up kids’ sunblock as cologne. “Okay, so this is not—this is not coke,” a man told me as he sprinkled a pinch of the brown powder he had just snorted off a sword onto the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger. (It wasn’t coke! It was snuff—“battle crank,” they called it—dispensed from a porcelain canister with HONOUR TO THE KING hand-painted in spidery letters on its lid.)
[...]
This, perhaps, is the chief merit of reenacting: not that it glorifies past accomplishments or condemns past failures, but that it emphasizes how any action humans have ever performed, whether for good or for ill, has been carried out by ordinary women and men. The Green Mountain Boys were not hellhounds. They were farmers. Kind and generous fellows were no doubt among the British soldiers killed at Bunker Hill. George Washington turned out in clean military dress because women did his laundry.
Original link | Archive.is link
Why Warm Countries Are Poorer | Uncharted Territories
9-minute read
Today I bring you what I think is a ground-breaking article. I have never seen this theory anywhere.
[...]
Societies that live closer to the equator are warmer. Why are they also poorer?
[...]
In order to avoid all that, people close to the equator tend to live higher up, in mountains, where temperatures are cooler and the dew point is lower, allowing people to cool down with sweat when necessary.
The big tradeoff for this comfort though has been much higher transportation costs, so less trade, so less wealth.
This also leads to much more ethnic diversity.
This diversity breeds conflict, which makes everybody poorer.
Ethnic diversity and conflict also mean institutions are much harder to make and keep.
Sidelined, or No Pain, No Gain | The Offing
10-minute read
My injury was the end of my world as I knew it, but the coaching staff still had a world that was spinning and very much alive. They needed to focus on winning. They cared about me and my recovery, but sometimes they forgot about me. Not in a malicious way, not that that made it hurt any less. Being sidelined from the game meant that I was also sidelined from their attention and praise, something that made me feel desperate and crazy. With an ACL tear, I was of no use to them. But I wanted to be useful, I wanted to stay relevant. In their minds and to the sport.
What I know about being an injured baller: I was afraid to lose my coaches’ love, especially that of my head coach, the one I had the most fraught and tense relationship with. I don’t know that I had the insight or intuition to know it at the time, and if I did, I was too ashamed to ever allow myself to confront that fear. My coaches were, in many ways, my second set of parents, and I wanted to be the best kid for them, to play well and perform for them, to earn their love. To say, See, all your sacrifices were worth it; I am a good investment; I’ll make you proud yet.
[...]
It may come as no surprise, but playing my senior season on a torn ACL absolutely destroyed my knee. It was bone-on-bone all season, and countless times, a doctor had to drain my traumatized knee in preparation for a game because it was swollen beyond recognition. Usually, it took more than one syringe to remove all the fluid. In these moments, my head coach would hold my hand. Whether out of care for me or her own guilt, I’ll never know. Despite how much pain I was typically in—an eight or nine out of ten, not that I’d admit that when asked—I was weirdly proud. I thought what I was doing was noble. And my coach’s small act of love reinforced that I’d made the right decision, that I was in fact doing a selfless thing for my team and coach.
2 stars
The Coloradans Exercising Their Right To Die—and a Doctor Who Helps Them Find Peace | 5280
12-minute read
The hospice referred Alan to Denver Health’s Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) clinic. In 2016, voters passed the End of Life Options Act, which makes it legal for terminally ill adult Coloradans to obtain and self-administer a fatal dose of prescribed medication. Roughly 1,100 people have used MAID in the state, and recent legislation increased access for the sickest patients. On June 17, Alan met virtually with Kerri Mason, a Denver Health physician who serves as the clinic’s medical director. Mason confirmed Alan’s cancer diagnosis and thought he fit Colorado’s MAID criteria, which include being of sound mind and having six months or less to live. A week after that first consultation, a second Denver Health doctor agreed with the assessment. Mason then prescribed the drugs that would end Alan’s life.
Fast Times on America’s Slowest Train | Longreads
11-minute read
In 2014, the National Rail Passenger Corporation, best known as Amtrak, pulled off one of the epic marketing coups of U.S. railroad history—granted, there haven’t been many of late—when they announced the Amtrak Residency for Writers, where they would send 24 writers on cross-country trips, meals and beds gratis, to write the Great American Novel. The announcement of this perfect marriage of two beloved dinosaurs—trains and publishing!—set Twitter aflame, like hearing Panasonic and Oldsmobile had teamed up to launch a new line of gas-powered fax machines.
[...]
I knew just which one I wanted to ride. I was born hardly a mile from Central Station in Memphis, Tennessee, midpoint for that fabled locomotive of song, Amtrak’s City of New Orleans. As a boy, this train called me awake at my grandmother’s house in Greenwood, Mississippi, its sonorous horn summoning me to a day of biscuits and books. As a young man, the same train clattered over a derelict coffee house in Jackson, Mississippi, where I loafed on allergenic chesterfields and first dreamed my name onto a title page. As a grad student in Illinois, attempting to finish at least one story that would not induce suicidal ideation, I watched the City of New Orleans roll past the windows of another coffee shop, slow and steady. How perfect to ride this train while actually finishing a manuscript. I applied with gusto.
Queen of Darts | Victory Journal
9-minute read
This year, in 2019, 5,857 entrants have paid their 22.50 Euros to take a chance at some kind of glory while thousands more have come to swirl and gawk and cheer. And as I pop out of the tree line, there is that heat. Already, the patio of the De Bonte Wever is overrun by the clamor and the smoke of hundreds of dartspersons happily getting beer-drunk before noon.
Inside, a complex of carpeted conference rooms has been made over with batches of plywood and partition walls covered in blue tarp. Before, perhaps, there would have been metal fold-up chairs. Drowsy lectures. Now, everywhere, there are the demarcation lines known as oches and dartboards, and, everywhere, there are children and women and men smashing darts into them, thwack thwack thwack, three at a time.
Heaven or High Water | Popula
11-minute read
He was framed by Biscayne Bay, and made me think of expensive butter sitting on a blue ceramic dish. I ooohed and ahhed over the view, quite genuinely, because if you don’t think about the fact that it’s filled with thousands of pounds of post-Hot Pilates ceviche poops, Biscayne Bay is breathtaking.
I asked how the flooding was.
“There are pump stations everywhere, and the roads were raised,” he said. “So that’s all been fixed.”
“Fixed,” I said. “Wow. Amazing.”
I asked how the hurricanes were.
He said that because the hurricanes came from the tropics, from the south and this was the west side of Miami Beach, they were not that bad in this neighborhood. “Oh, right,” I said, as if that made any sense.
I asked him if he liked it here. “I love it,” he said. “It is one of the most thriving cities in the country, it’s growing rapidly.” He pointed to a row of buildings in a neighborhood called Edgewater that were all just three years old. “That skyline was all built in the last three years.”
Wow, I said, just in the last three years . . . “They’re not worried about sea level rise?”
“It’s definitely something the city is trying to combat. They are fighting it, by raising everything. But so far, it hasn’t been an issue.”
I couldn’t wait to steal this line, slightly altered. “I am afraid of dying, sure, but so far, it hasn’t been an issue.”
The Benefits of Bubbles | Stratechery
11-minute read
Inflection-driven bubbles have fewer harmful side effects and more beneficial long-term effects. In an inflection-driven bubble, investors decide that the future will be meaningfully different from the past and trade accordingly. Amazon was not a better Barnes & Noble; it was a store with unlimited shelf space and the data necessary to make personalized recommendations to every reader. Yahoo wasn’t a bigger library; it was a directory and search engine that made online information accessible to anyone. Priceline didn’t want to be a travel agent; it aspired to change the way people bought everything, starting with plane tickets.
[...]
The fundamental utility of inflection bubbles comes from their role as coordinating mechanisms. When one group makes investments predicated on a particular vision of the future, it reduces the risk for others seeking to build parts of that vision. For instance, the existence of internet service providers and search engines made e-commerce sites a better idea; e-commerce sites then encouraged more ad-dependent business models that could profit from directing consumers. Ad-dependent businesses then created more free content, which gave the ISPs a better product to sell. Each sector grew as part of a virtuous circle.
A window into modern loan origination | Bits about Money
11-minute read
Why finance the purchase? Windows cost $1,000 to $3,000 each and updating all or a large fraction of them quickly becomes a mid-five figures project; relatively few homeowners will pay upfront with cash.
[...]
You could imagine the buyer could bring their own financing, perhaps by going to their usual bank and asking for a home improvement loan. That product very much exists, but it might be surprisingly less attractive to all parties: it will be costly, low margin for the bank, and have poor operational dynamics for the window company. And so you could imagine the window company asking the financial industry to come up with an alternative.
That alternative exists, and can underwrite and paperwork a four-party commercial loan in fifteen minutes, before the salesman has even left their home visit that sold the window.
The Myth of the Sommelier | Cremieux Recueil
12-minute read
The Judgment of Paris was a watershed moment in the world of wine. Cheap, unknown, and comparatively inexpensive California wines from upstart vintners had defeated elite French bottlings derived from generations of tradition, permanently resetting the starched views of critics, collectors, and consumers about the origins of great wine. But more importantly for us, they showed that cultured, haughty oenophile prejudices were bereft of substance; they laid bare the reality that the refined judgments of the top sommeliers were lacking in predictive power.
[...]
Let me be clear. There are hundreds of different large-scale wine scandals that suggest the institutions responsible for reviewing, rating, and certifying wine don’t deserve the reputations they pride themselves on. The authorities responsible for training sommeliers and informing the interested public about oenology are also bankrupt. Many wine scandals indicate credulity rather than expertise; others suggest that the skills sommeliers and their like have claimed to hone are limited at best and in so far as those skills inform the refinement of their palates, those skills and that refinement may be as good as nonexistent and perhaps little more than prejudice.
This Amarillo Woman Devoted Years to Maintaining America’s Nuclear Arsenal. She’s Paid a Hefty Price. | Texas Monthly
8-minute read
We were approaching Pantex, the plant where nearly all of America’s nuclear weapons are assembled, dismantled, and maintained. Beside the cells stood a three-story, 348,000-square-foot administration building. Wire fencing, punctuated with signs reading “Warning: Use of Deadly Force Authorized,” enclosed the 17,500-acre property. At the tree-lined main entrance, another sign proclaimed “Pantex Pride! Global security begins here.”
Ray long worked at Pantex, where she met countless friends and felt good about protecting the nation. “We were very patriotic,” she said. But those memories are outweighed by the toll that the radiation and chemicals present inside the facility has taken on thousands of Panhandle residents, including her. Peering out the windshield at the plant’s western side, she said seeing it now “reminds me of people who died.”
In Arizona, a fight against a deadly fungus is under threat from Trump’s health policies | Grist
12-minute read
Most people who breathe in cocci spores — about 6 in 10 — won’t develop symptoms. But the 40 percent of exposed people whose immune systems can’t or won’t fight off the fungus develop symptoms such as fatigue, muscle aches, coughing, and rash that can last weeks or months. In the 5 to 10 percent of symptomatic cases where the fungus invades the vital organs, the death rate is as high as 25 percent. The pathogen is so powerful the U.S. army weighed whether to develop it into a bioterrorism weapon in the 1960s.
[...]
Some portion of the rise in reported cases represents growing awareness among physicians and an associated surge in testing. The pace of new construction in untouched areas also plays a role.
But the recent increase in cases has been so dramatic, Galgiani and other researchers across the West who study the fungus think another factor may be driving the trend: supersoaker winter monsoons followed by scorching summer heat and drought, a cycle made more intense by climate change.
Is the Democratic Party dominated by progressives or by centrists? | Silver Bulletin
14-minute read
Is the Democratic Party dominated by progressives or by centrists?
No, and no. But compromise choices like Harris don’t always work out either. Here are the lessons we can draw from every Democratic nomination since 1968.
One app, 60 men, 26 dates: my adventures in alt-right dating | Cosmopolitan
9-minute read
One day last July, I went to dinner with a man who had sent me death threats. “I’ll kill you slowly...” he’d emailed me repeatedly several years ago, when I was working as a magazine editor covering, among other things, sexual assault and abortion rights. Like many women on the internet, I didn’t know if he was fixated on me specifically or if mine was just an email an angry man found on 4chan. Now, years later, I recognised his email address after we matched on a dating app. Did he remember? Did he recognise me? Was that why he wanted to go on a date?
[...]
From May to November, I would match with a total of 60 men across a wide conservative spectrum — self-proclaimed MAGA bros, ‘European’ guys looking for their submissive ‘European’ dream girls, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists — although most identified in some way with the alt-right. I’d scour profiles in an effort to figure out where these men were coming from, why they seemed to oppose the things I’d previously spent a career fighting for: women’s rights, social justice, reproductive freedoms, LGBTQIA+ equality. I tried to imagine that maybe we weren’t so different, maybe there was some chaotic internet-age misunderstanding at play.
1 star
We are different from all other humans in history | The Garden of Forking Paths
8-minute read
Nothing groundbreaking, but a nice reminder:
This morning, I woke up in a supremely comfortable bed, knowing there would be no deadly predators or pests to eat or infect me. With cheap soaps and pristine, hot water, I became cleaner in five minutes than was possible for any human—no matter how wealthy—in the past.
With a flick of a switch, I conjured hot coffee into existence with a taste and quality that could not have been summoned by any empire or fleet previously. In a safe car that could rapidly whisk me to another country in a few hours—by driving onto a train that literally travels under the ocean—I typed a few keystrokes on a magic device that allowed me to listen to virtually any music recorded, anywhere on the planet, in the last century or so. And the entire time, I never feared violence, starvation, disease, or death.
When we compare ourselves to humans past, we, not them, are the weird ones. And the more you peer at modern social reality, the more extraordinary our differences seem.
What’s Going On at Beijing’s “Fake Offices”? | The Dial
6-minute read
In cities like Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen, offices advertise themselves as places to “pretend to work.” In an online tour of one such “office” in the district of Yizhuang in Beijing, I saw desks, people typing at laptops, snacks — even mock salary slips. For 30 to 50 yuan ($4 to $7) a day, people can enjoy the trappings of being a white-collar worker in an office space indistinguishable from the real thing. A similar company in Shenzhen declared: “The best thing about work isn’t the salary, it’s the people pretending to be busy next to you.” In a promotional video, the founder showed off an office chess set, beers brewed from lurid blue Yunnan mushrooms and a small library stocked with quantum mechanics textbooks.
Billionaire baby boom | The Pursuit of Happiness
5-minute read
I generally have strong views on important public policy issues. The recent drop in global fertility rates seems like a major issue. And yet I have a hard time coming up with any useful policy advice on the topic. In this post, I’ll try to explain why.
Why Argentina’s Economy is Floundering | Persuasion
3-minute read
It’s easy to imagine how pundit Milei would have reacted a few years back if faced with President Milei’s bumbling. Market forces, he would have said, are far too powerful to be stymied by administrative fiat. Dependence on unpredictable allies, he would have railed, makes a mockery of Argentinian sovereignty. Half measures, he’d have concluded, only invite further speculative attacks.
In all this, pundit Milei would’ve been right. President Milei, alas, stopped listening.
Ethan Mollick | Linkedin
1-minute read
GPT-5, Claude, Kimi, Grok, and Gemini: “I can travel back in time to any time before 1500 and change only one thing, what is the single thing you would change, nothing obvious.”
Everything to Know About 2025 PN7, Earth’s Newest Moon (Sort Of) | SYFY
2-minute read
Earth’s only true natural satellite is the Moon, but every so often some much smaller object falls into temporary companionship with the planet, joining a class of objects commonly quasi-moons. The asteroid 2025 PN7 is the latest to be discovered. Quasi-moons actually orbit the Sun, but because of their unique paths through space, they appear to circle Earth from our perspective on the planet. At its farthest point from Earth, 2025 PN7 gets about 11 million miles away and it only gets as close as 2.5 million miles, roughly 10 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
Close-Up Photographer of the Year Celebrates Minuscule Marvels and Delicate Details | Colossal
1-minute read
The shortlist for this year’s Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition has arrived. After deliberating for a total of 20 hours on Zoom, 22 judges evaluated a record-breaking 12,557 photographs and consolidated its most promising contenders.
How Men and Women Spend Their Days | FlowingData
2-minute read
Household activities remain more common for women. Also add personal care, caring for household and non-household members, and consumer purchases to that list. Work, sports, and socializing are more common for men.
X-59 Supersonic Test Jet Takes To The Air | The War Zone
4-minute read
Perhaps the most extraordinary-looking aircraft to have taken to the air in many years, the X-59 Quiet Supersonic Technology experimental test aircraft, or QueSST, has made its first flight. Much is resting on the test program that has now been kicked off, with the future of supersonic passenger flight arguably dependent on its successful outcome.
“Gender without Children” | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
What would the lives of women look like if they knew from an early age that they would not have children? Would they make different choices about human capital or early career investments? Would they behave differently in the marriage market? Would they fare better in the labor market? In this paper, we follow 152 women diagnosed with the Mayer-Rokitanski-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) type I syndrome. This congenital condition, diagnosed at puberty, is characterised by the absence of the uterus in otherwise phenotypically normal 46, XX females.
The Nordic Countries Where There’s No Word for ‘Please’ | Mental Floss
2-minute read
When travelers heading to other countries want to learn some local words to make sure they have a stress-free time, please is probably near the top of the list. Spanish has por favor, German has bitte, and French has s’il vous plaît. But it’s trickier for those visiting visiting Scandinavia (or more generally, the Nordic countries): In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland, please isn’t part of the vocabulary like it is in English. Without it, how do you get along?
Informative jury disagreement | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
The article introduces a counterintuitive argument, contending that jury disagreement on the defendant’s guilt-a nonunanimous conviction-may well provide a more informative signal, compared to consensus. Because stronger consensus implies higher likelihood of herding, it is shown that beyond some threshold, further accumulation of votes to convict would carry negligible epistemic contribution, barely enhancing the posterior probability of guilt.