The curse of Kenya’s long-distance runners | The Economist
17-minute read
Kelvin Kiptum’s final run began at an abandoned fluorspar mine on the floor of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. It was 6am on Sunday February 11th 2024 and he’d already been awake for two hours. He’d left his home while his wife and their two young children were still in bed and climbed into his silver Toyota Premio. He picked up his coach, Gervais Hakizimana, and three training partners, then drove down a rocky dirt road into the valley, stopping outside the gate to the mine. It was still dark, but the countryside was alive with birdsong and the jingling of cowbells.
After limbering up, he embarked on the 35km run back home, trailed by Hakizimana, who was driving Kiptum’s car. It was a punishing route, full of twists and turns, which brought Kiptum from the baobab and mango trees of the tropical valley floor to the cedar and eucalyptus of the cooler climes above.
[...]
But Kiptum would never run another race. That Sunday night, despite the early start and arduous training, he decided to spend the evening out with Hakizimana and a friend, Sharon Kosgei, in Eldoret, a city of half a million people and the unofficial capital of Kenya’s distance-running industry.
Just before 11pm, while driving home to his apartment in the small town of Chepkorio, Kiptum lost control of his car, which veered into a ditch before hitting a tree. Both Kiptum and Hakizimana were killed. Kosgei, who was in the back seat, survived.
Original link | Archive.is link
P-Zombies Would Report Qualia | Astral Codex Ten
4-minute read
There’s a long-running philosophical argument about the conceivability of otherwise-normal people who are not conscious, aka “philosophical zombies”.
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I think beings would talk about qualia - the “mysterious redness of red” and all that - even if we start by assuming they don’t have it. I realize this is a surprising claim, but that’s why it’s interesting enough to re-open the argument over.
2 stars
Escape from Los Angeles | Alta Online
4-minute read
My friend whose house burned down says that people for whom L.A. feels like home will disassociate or do whatever they need to stay, but for those who don’t have this connection—staying feels crazy. In the desert, for the next week, we walk the dog in the silver moonlight and feel as though we’re on another planet. The light is so bright you can read a book. But I find it hard to read or to focus on anything. We go to a bowling alley in Yucca Valley; we go to the crochet museum. Is this a vacation or an evacuation or neither?
Farming Was Extensive in Ancient North America, Study Finds | New York Times
3-minute read
A new study has found that a thickly forested sliver of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the most complete ancient agricultural location in the eastern United States. The Sixty Islands archaeological site is recognized as the ancestral home of the Menominee Nation. Known to the members of the tribe as Anaem Omot (Dog’s Belly), the area is a destination of pilgrimage, where remains of the settlement date to as far back as 8,000 B.C.
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“Traditionally, intensive farming in former times has been thought to be mostly limited to societies that had centralized power, large populations and a hierarchical structure, often with accumulated wealth,” said Madeleine McLeester, an environmental archaeologist at Dartmouth College and lead author of the study. “And yet until now the assumption has been that the agriculture of the Menominee community in the Sixty Islands area was small in scale, and that the society was largely egalitarian.”
Original link | Archive.is link
1 star
My expensive, exhausting, happy failed attempt at homesteading | Washington Post
4-minute read
How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s strawberry demand? I still don’t know. We dedicated 80 square feet to strawberries last season. The bugs ate half our harvest, and the other half equaled roughly what our kid could eat in a week.
Have you ever grown peas? Give them something to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heavens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost criminal misuse of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 minutes to shell a single serving. Meanwhile, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Walmart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.
The work of homesteading is never-ending and constantly undermined. I rebuilt our composting system but forgot to put chicken wire under the bottom, which allowed a possum to dig a tunnel inside it. The house came with 1,200 feet of deer fence surrounding the gardens, but deer fence doesn’t last forever. It has fallen in some places, and the deer can now jump over it. They like to eat the blueberry bushes, which I spent 20 hours pruning last year.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Claude Bliss Attractor | Astral Codex Ten
3-minute read
This is a reported phenomenon where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness.
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Anthropic swears they didn’t do this on purpose; when they ask Claude why this keeps happening, Claude can’t explain. Needless to say, this has made lots of people freak out / speculate wildly.
[...]
You’re probably guessing where I’m going with this. The AI has a slight bias to talk about consciousness and bliss. The “two instances of Claude talking to each other” is a recursive process, similar in structure to the AI sampling its own image generation. So just as recursive image generation with a slight diversity bias leads to caricatured black people, so recursive conversation with a slight spiritual bias leads to bliss and emptiness.
But why would Claude have a slight spiritual bias?
Student Assessment in the Age of AI | In My Tribe
2-minute read
In my vision, which is part of my seminar project, the professor feeds into the AI the course syllabus, the key concepts that a student is expected to master, the background materials used in the course, and the desired assessment methods and metrics. With that information, the AI will be able to conduct the interview and make the assessment.
One advantage of this approach is that it scales well. A professor can teach hundreds of students and not have to hand off the grading task to teaching assistants. Because the assessments are all done by a single entity, they will be consistent across students.
But the big advantage is that the assessment can be thorough. An interview can assess the student’s reasoning about course concepts and ability to apply them (also known as knowledge transfer).
Chubby♨️ (@kimmonismus) | X
1-minute read
A week ago, I shared Dwarkesh's insightful take on why superintelligence might take longer than expected...but perhaps it is (or will soon be) no longer valid:
SEAL: LLM That Writes Its Own Updates Solves 72.5% of ARC-AGI Tasks—Up from 0%
This is a breakthrough that is rarely seen and could open up undreamt-of possibilities.
Roman-era 'fast food' discovered in ancient trash heap on Mallorca | Live Science
2-minute read
Songbirds were on the menu 2,000 years ago on the Roman island of Mallorca, archaeological evidence reveals. Bones of the small thrushes were discovered in a trash pit near the ancient ruins of a fast-food shop, giving researchers new clues about Roman-era street food.
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By looking closely at the specific thrush bones found in the cesspit, Valenzuela found a pattern: While there were numerous skulls and breastbones (sterna) from the small birds, there were almost no arm and leg bones or bones of the upper chest, which are associated with the meatiest parts of the bird.
Deport Dishwashers or Solve All Murders? | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
I understand being concerned about illegal immigration. I definitely understand being concerned about murder, rape, and robbery. What I don’t understand is being more concerned about the former than the latter.