Interesting reading from the past few weeks
"If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't."
Ian Stewart (via Infinite Loops)
Age of Invention: How to Steal Technology - on organised espionage across the English Channel in the textile industry and the man leading it
LLM search & energy; Turing transformation; AI blockade on China; Funflation & Twitter demise ++ #444 - interesting data on the energy costs of LLM-based search
Metalessons from the LK-99 saga, Ben Reinhardt
Foundry launches today - Eliot Peper on what led to writing his newest book Foundry - a spy thriller involving the geopolitics of semiconductor manufacturing
How to Write like Malcolm Gladwell - on writing engaging non-fiction prose
Then the scene shifts to a fashion shoot. Like a novelist, Gladwell keeps the ground unfamiliar. Every sentence adds detail: the executives’ dialogue gives us the contrasting knowledge of new locations, resale techniques, and the cliff-hanger close. No sentence can be removed without the information needing to be restored somehow. There is no mood or atmosphere without fact. All technique—long sentence followed by short, convoluted syntax, use of dialogue—is put in service to the arrangement of information.
…He gives the example before the explanation. The story catches your attention: the science persuades you of its relevance. “Once the advice became practical and memorable,” Gladwell writes at one point, “it became persuasive.” Quite so.
“No one deserves to be praised for kindness if he does not have the strength to be bad." - Rob Henderson curates 31 maxims from the French moralist Rochefoucauld.
“One of the reasons why so few people seem reasonable and attractive in conversation is that almost everyone thinks more about what he himself wants to say than about answering exactly what is said to him. The cleverest and most polite people are content merely to look attentive––while all the time we see in their eyes and minds a distraction from what is being said to them, and an impatience to get back to what they themselves want to say. Instead, they should reflect that striving so hard to please themselves is a poor way to please or convince other people, and that the ability to listen well and answer well is one of the greatest merits we can have in conversation.”
The Possibility Engine - sci-fi recommendations from Eliot Peper
Automatic CAD Instructions, ImageNet for Robots, Lockheed Mines An Asteroid - Recent developments in robotics curated by Kenneth Cassel
your best american girl. Also recommend how to meet curious people
This is the largest map of the human brain ever made, Nature (via Azeem Azhar)