He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal – an interesting profile of June Huh. In Times of Scarcity, War and Peace, a Ukrainian Finds the Magic in Math – a profile of Maryna Viazovska who became the second woman to win a Fields Medal in the award’s 86-year history
Patrick Collison’s Questions. A lot to chew on.
But you, here, you’re capable of anything because you’re so bad at everything.
— Waymond Wang, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Gödel’s Loophole. “In 1947 Einstein and economist Oskar Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam because they were concerned about his unpredictable behavior: During his voluminous preparation for the exam, Gödel said, he had uncovered a flaw in the U.S. constitution that could lead to a dictatorship.”
Putin’s Philosophers, NATO’s Philosophers and An International Relations Theory Guide to the War in Ukraine — interesting reads to understand how we got here and what lies ahead.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
— Elmore Leonard
10 Lessons I learned walking 10,000 Kilometers in 2021’s Pandamic Year. Meditative and reassuringly approachable. Long read, and therein lies its comtemplative beauty.
The Chinese Room Thinks. “In my view, one of the most famous thought experiments in philosophy, John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment, has been decisively answered by science.”
Crony Beliefs and and an addendum on this topc. A great set of essays - “Earlier I argued that other people are the cause of all our epistemic problems. Now I find myself arguing that they’re also our best solution.” From the author of The Elephant in the Brain
An app can be a home-cooked meal - Robin Sloan’s essays are always a treat to read. “When you liberate programming from the requirement to be general and professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether.”
103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known. Kevin Kelly on his 70th birthday. Every single one of them is worth thinking over.
Edsger W. Dijkstra: a Commemoration, “a multiauthored portait of Edsger Wybe Dijkstra that consists of testimonials written by several friends, colleagues, and students of his” (PDF).
chez baldwin, “Some of the sounds that filled the abode of James Baldwin in St. Paulde-Vence,. These songs document the vinyl records left behind in Chez Baldwin after his death in 1987”. A Spotify playlist.
Lenin
I need a drink…God
Heaven is not your local pub,
but we’ve a house white on tap:
Water of Life. Glass or Goblet?Lenin
Shot glass. Neat.God
Think of it as Korsvodka.
Red blush on your cheeks—
it’s not rouge. Is it?Lenin
‘Tis, but O All Knowing, when will the boat of capitalism sink?God
When church spires soar above skyscrapers,
when those who influence the influencers
blast hell to heaven.
— Rafiq Kathwari - Lenin in the Presence of God
Nobody knows
How cold it grows
And nobody sees
How shaky my knees
Nobody cares
How steep my stairs
And nobody smiles
If I cross their stiles
— Nick Drake - Poor Boy
Pray for solace,
Pray for resolve.
Pray for a savior,
Pray for deliverance, some kind of purpose.
A glimpse of a light in this void of existence.
Now witness the end of an age.
Hope dies in hands of believers
who seek the truth in the liar’s eyes.
— Lamb of God - Walk with me in Hell
I lay down in the empty street and parked
My feet against the gutter’s curb while from
The building above a bunch of gawkers perched
Along its ledges urged me don’t, don’t jump.
— Bill Knott - Advice from the Experts
Here we go again, a personal post by one of Kaspersky’s Threat Intelligence (GReAT) team members on working for a Russian cyber security comapny in the current charged world.
The Fierce Triumph of Loneliness. “A paired life is not an aspirational state, but a compromised one. Loneliness is not the terror we escape; it is instead the reward we give up when we believe something else to be worth the sacrifice.”
Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings. “Choose joy” and what an impactful choice it will be.
How a man who washed his own underwear built investment colossus GIC. “It was also Goh who nursed the then radical idea that the nation’s reserves could – and should – be invested to yield returns, a notion that eventually led to the formation of GIC.”
Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation. Interesting mental exercise topic as always. What the author shys away from, which is a pity, is the angle of questioning as to what it means that “slow-moving and petty and cavemannish as we” can even start to think of these simulations.
Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary. Provocative, interesting discourse.
I gave myself three months to change my personality. “The late psychologist Carl Rogers once wrote, “When I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,” and this is roughly where I’ve landed.
Our Universe is SO big, it’s mindblowing! 21st-century remake of Charles and Ray Eames’ short documentary film Powers of Ten from 1977. Mind blown.
There’s no remaking reality… Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.
— Everyman, Philip Roth
The last one of this year!
The ESG Mirage. “MSCI, the largest ESG rating company, doesn’t even try to measure the impact of a corporation on the world. It’s all about whether the world might mess with the bottom line.”
The Top 22 Security Predictions for 2022. Comprehensive and some unique ones in there.
You write what you see and what you hear with tiny letters squeezed together, squeezed together like ants, which go from your heart to your honorable right side.
The Arabs, they have letters that lie down, get on their knees and rise up completely straight, like spears: it’s a writing that coils and unfurls like the mirage, which is clever as time and proud as combat.
And their writing travels from their honorable right side to their left, because everything ends there: at the heart.
Our own writing, in the Ahaggar, is a writing of nomads, because it is all made up of dashes which are the legs of all the herds. Legs of men, legs of meharis, of zebus, of gazelles, everything that traverses the desert.
And then the crosses determine whether you go to the right or to the left, and the periods, you see, there are a lot of periods. They are the stars that steer us through the night, because we, the Saharans, we don’t know the way, the way that is guided, in turns, by the sun and then the stars.
And we set out from our heart, and we make bigger and bigger circles around it, to enlace the other hearts in a circle of life, like the horizon around your herd and around yourself.
— Dassine Oult Yemma
Testing Firefox more efficiently with machine learning. “If we simply ran every test on every configuration on every push, we’d run approximately 2.3 billion test files per day!” Now, that is a problem.
Amy Jordan in conversation with Naomi Klein on “Branding, privacy, and identity: growing up in surveillance capitalism.” Too short a discussion, but so many interesting tangents of thoughts to follow up on.
Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3, by Tim O’Reilly. Some thoughts to ponder on (not all bubbles are bad, building useful infrastructure is key) though not a lot of new ones.
If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will — millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space — unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually taking place in the Fatherland.
— When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut
Robin Sloan’s Notes on Web3 “I do not think Web3 is a desirable or even tolerable path forward for this web right here, but I take its lesson well. “Code wins arguments”, and so do clubs, and cults; time remains to build all three.” The Non-Innovation of Cryptocurrency, straight talk - “There are indeed a lot of fools in this world, but to presume an infinite chain of them as the core of an investment thesis is beyond absurd.”
topher fixed it - “parody alternate endings to beloved but problematic children’s literature”, featuring the fixed ending of The Giving Tree
Tim Ferriss with Noah Feldman. Interesting discussion on building constitutions, Supreme court of Facebook, ‘crypto’ organisations (DAOs) and others.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
— Christopher Morley
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers of orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. Haweve, sins xe Wely, xe Airiy, and xe Skots du not spik Ingliy, xei wud hev to hev a speling siutd tu xer oun lengwij. Xei kud, haweve, orlweiz lern Ingliy az a sekond lengwij at skuul!
— Progress, M.J. Shields
Some thoughts on writing Why I write and why I won’t and Write 5x more but write 5x less
“The Human Crisis”, Albert Camus’s talk at Columbia University in 1946. “The years we have gone through have killed something in us.”
Atlassian Boosted Its Female Technical Hires By 80% — Here’s How. Informative and practical.