I recently came by this fun story on getting an out-of-memory error on Linux when trying to free memory: Production postmortem: ENOMEM when trying to free memory That error made absolutely no sense, as you can imagine. We are trying to release memory, not allocate it. Common sense says that you …
Oh wow, now this is something: A Microsoft font may have exposed corruption in Pakistan: The Microsoft font Calibri is now a key piece of evidence in a corruption investigation surrounding Pakistan’s prime minister. Investigators noticed that documents handed over by the prime minister’s daughter, …
In Why do I suck, Scott Alexander is analyzing why his earlier articles (from 2013 - 2016) were much more popular than his recent ones. I would like to highlight his insight into the perception difference between a small blog and a big one: If you have a small blog, and you have a cool thought or …
Matt Levine writes the amazing Money Stuff newsletter for Bloomberg. I’ve been a reader of his for a few years now, and I’m a huge fan of his writing. He recently wrote about the new US legislation on sesame seeds (search for the title “Sesame”) that I found hilarious: …
Facebook (err, sorry, Meta) is launching their Twitter competitor today in the US in the form of a new stand-alone app called Threads. The Verge has a good summary on what is known: Instagram’s Threads: all the updates on the new Twitter competitor. I can also recommend the Hacker News thread; it …
Quantum immortality is a thought experiment that runs roughly like follows: If the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, each “choice” (however this may be defined) creates a branching point: there will be a universe that explores each possibility. Simply put, if …
At this point my blog has been alive for a few days now, and so it’s high time I mentioned Scott Alexander, and his blog(s): the Star Slate Codex and Astral Codex Ten. He writes about complex topics in a refreshingly sober, straight-forward and illuminating manner. His articles will most …
I’m very excited for the upcoming The Three Body Problem series! I’ve read and thoroughly enjoyed the book trilogy, and it looks like they are sticking decently close to the source material. This must be a challenging story to put on screen! The book’s cover text: Set against the …
A fascinating deep-dive from New York Magazine and The Verge into how AI models – including ChatGPT, Bard, and other LLMs (Large Language Models) – are trained, and the industry that provides the data, control, and feedback: Inside the AI factory […] ChatGPT seems so human …
StillDrinking has a lot of great essays. He has a way with words that makes reading his articles both entertaining and illuminating at the same time – a powerful combination. Anyway, their essay on AI and ChatGPT, and how the world we have built will continue manages to be human-hostile in …