3 stars
How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust? | New York Times [gift article]
More than just a movie review:
Not everyone took this moral U-turn at face value. The British philosopher Gillian Rose, who advised the Polish government on how to redesign the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum after the fall of Communism, believed that the new regime of memory was mired in bad faith. By framing the Holocaust as an unfathomable evil — “the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted,” as the writer Elie Wiesel once put it — we were protecting ourselves, Rose argued, from knowledge of our own capacity for barbarism. “Schindler’s List” was a case in point. For her, Spielberg’s black-and-white epic, which sentimentalizes the Jewish victims and keeps the Nazi perpetrators at arm’s length, was really just a piece of misty-eyed evasion.
A richer work, she suggested, would present the Holocaust as something legibly human and goad the viewer into asking an uncomfortable question: Could I have participated in this? In a startling passage from her final book, “Mourning Becomes the Law” (1996), Rose called for a film that would center on “the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathize with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him.” Instead of eliciting “sentimental tears,” like Spielberg’s production, such a film would leave us “with the dry eyes of a deep grief.”
“The Zone of Interest,” the astonishing new film from Jonathan Glazer, one of England’s most talented and unpredictable directors, can feel at times as if it were made to fulfill Rose’s desideratum.
Toward a shallower future | Noahpinion
Thought-provoking, for me at least:
Some romanticists feel the urge to knock over the edifice of industrial society intentionally, in order to kick against the seeming shallowness of modern life — to return humanity to a world of toil and struggle, in order to ennoble us. But these dark romantics are rightfully recognized in fiction and public discourse as villains. The heroes of our stories are the people like David Ho — the ones who fought to hoist humanity up from the muck so that future generations could be a little more childlike, the ones who studied politics and war so that our grandchildren may study statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
Romanticists need to accept that the nobility of suffering has always been a coping mechanism — a way to sustain hope through the long twilight of apparent futility. And they need to accept that heroism is always inherently self-destroying — that saving the world requires that the world is worth having been saved.
And they must at least try to understand that in a more general sense, happiness isn’t truly shallow — it just has a different kind of depth. The passions of people raised in a kinder, gentler world may be alien and incomprehensible to the older generation, but they are no less intense, and the culture around them is no less complex. Adversity forces us to rise to its challenge, but abundance allows us to discover who we might become, and that is a different sort of adventure.
2 stars
Singing The Blues | Astral Codex Ten
Millgram et al (2015) find that depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music. This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music. But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn’t it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up? […]
Depressed people seem to purposefully seek out the most depressing thoughts they can. They find that, unbidden, they are forced to think about the most humiliating thing they ever did, dwell on their worst failures, consider all the things that could go wrong in the future. They’ll be trying to cook dinner, and their brain will tell them “Consider the possibility that you could die alone and unloved.” Why is their brain so insistent that they spend time considering this possibility? Maybe it’s for the same reason that a feverish person’s brain makes them shiver: it’s trying to maintain an extreme state, and it needs to pull out all the stops.
We know that if we make depressed people stop doing these things, they feel happier. This is the principle behind behavioral activation, opposite action, and cognitive behavioral therapy, three of the most powerful therapies for depression. If you depression tells you to do something, do the opposite. Go on a nice walk in the park! Listen to happy music! Spend time with your friends! If you do these things, your depression is pretty likely to go away. The problem isn’t that they don’t work, the problem is that it’s like a feverish person trying to take an ice bath, or an anorexic trying to eat a big meal - all their instincts are telling them not to do it.
math team | bene dictio
and other horrible things you do to get into stanford […]
I remember with perfect clarity what it was like to get rejected by Princeton. I was at math team practice when my dad called. The early decision letter had arrived, he said. He didn't mention anything about the letter's size – large envelope for acceptance, small one for rejection – and I tried not to read anything into his voice. I asked him to come pick me up right away. I blew up at him when he tried to stop for gas on the way home. I got home and opened the small envelope, which I'd somehow already known was waiting for me. I skimmed the first few lines – we regret, exceptional group of applicants, etc – cursed, picked up a knife, and stabbed it into my dresser. Then I screamed into my pillow. It wasn't that I particularly needed to go to Princeton. It was just that I wanted it to be over. […]
The story started and ended with math team, although a lot of other things happened in the middle. We'd heard of a magnet high school called Bergen County Academies, which had a competitive application process to get in. The math team coach there kept an eye out for new talent and had a lot of pull with the admissions committee. His favored mathletes had an amazing track record of getting into the best schools – not just the Ivies, but the biggest names, like Harvard, Princeton, and MIT.
A quick aside on terms here. A mathematician seeks the patterns that unify all things, that allow systems of dizzying complexity to grow from just a few elegant formulas. […]
A mathlete is someone who participates in math competitions. He (almost always he) uses the elegant axioms of mathematics, the underlying structure of creation, in the same way that a drunken barfly uses a grip of darts, flinging them against a wall to impress friends or strangers. The patterns they leave mean nothing at all, except that sometimes they land in this curvy bucket instead of that one, scoring five points, or a hundred. The only point is to win. On math team, we were mathletes.
34 years later, a 13-year-old hits the NES Tetris “kill screen” | Ars Technica
For decades after its 1989 release, each of the hundreds of millions of standard NES Tetris games ended the same way: A block reaches the top of the screen and triggers a "game over" message. That 34-year streak was finally broken on December 21, 2023, when 13-year-old phenom BlueScuti became the first human to reach the game's "kill screen" after a 40-minute, 1,511-line performance, crashing the game by reaching its functional limits.
Will scaling work? | Dwarkesh
When should we expect AGI?
If we can keep scaling LLMs++ (and get better and more general performance as a result), then there’s reason to expect powerful AIs by 2040 (or much sooner) which can automate most cognitive labor and speed up further AI progress. However, if scaling doesn’t work, then the path to AGI seems much longer and more intractable, for reasons I explain in the post.
In order to think through both the pro and con arguments about scaling, I wrote the post as a debate between two characters I made up - Believer and Skeptic.
Meet the Con Artist Who Deceived the Front Range Tech Community | 5280
When Aaron Clark disappeared from Colorado, he left hundreds of thousands of dollars unaccounted for. His employees, contractors, and investors are still wondering who he really was—and where he is today.
What’s With All the Different Salts? Here’s How to Use Them. | New York Times [gift article]
Table salt, kosher salt, finishing salt: The choice can be confusing, but we offer a little explanation and advice.
Marvel Studios’s Origin Story | Commoncog
Did you know, for instance, that Marvel Studios — and by extension the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe — was formed as the result of some extremely creative financial dealmaking?
The following case tells that origin story, and returns to an earlier theme of our series — that of skill in raising capital.
52 things I learned in 2023 | Tom Whitwell
52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023 | Kottke
52 things I learned in 2023 | Kent Hendricks
81 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2023 | The Atlantic [gift article]
It’s that time of the year again, when everyone copies Tom Whitwell’s idea. As usual, though, there are some neat facts here:
Job satisfaction in the US is at a 35-year-high. In 2010, less than 45% of people said they were satisfied with their jobs. In 2022, over 62% said they were, and you need to go back to the 80s to find satisfaction as high as today. Big gains come from work/life balance and the performance review process. […]
Humans are now roughly as tall as we were 12,000 years ago. 4,000 years ago, the average man was 5’4”.
Ciabatta was invented in 1982. […]
The San Francisco subway system still runs on 5 1/4-inch floppies.
Every iron object made before 1200 BC came from meteorites.
One reason the United States didn’t adopt the metric system was because the ship crossing the Atlantic from France carrying a standard kilogram—yes, a real physical object—requested by Thomas Jefferson in 1793 was blown off course into the Caribbean and captured by pirates.
The genetic mutation behind “Asian glow” might help protect people against certain pathogens—including tuberculosis. […]
You have two noses, and you can control them separately via your armpits.
1 star
Motion Extraction | Kottke
In this video from his YouTube channel “about anything”, Posy demonstrates a video filtering technique called motion extraction. A commenter calls this video “a tutorial, a demonstration, and a work of art”, all rolled into one. It’s really lovely and informative. My jaw actually dropped at the “how can you tell which stones were disturbed on the path” part.
Uber and Traffic Fatalities | Marginal Revolution
Using these more detailed data, we find a consistent negative effect of ridesharing on traffic fatalities. Impacts concentrate during nights and weekends and are robust across a range of alternative specifications. Overall, our results imply that ridesharing has decreased U.S. traffic fatalities by 5.4% in areas where it operates. Based on conventional estimates of the value of statistical life the annual life-saving benefits are $6.8 billion. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that these benefits are of similar magnitude to producer surplus captured by Uber shareholders or consumer surplus captured by Uber riders.