Here is a short list of some links I liked this month. Some of them are thoughtful, some funny, and some are both. I hope you find something that you like as much as I did.
AI 2027. If you read this blog, you’ve likely already read this post. If you haven’t yet, I recommend it. If you’re someone who doesn’t follow AI news very much, you might think that this piece was written as science fiction. But many people in the AI research community, myself included, think that this fictionalized future is extremely plausible. You may find that concerning. I find that concerning.
Skittle Factory Dementia Monkey Titty Monetization. This article is madness. It’s deranged. It’s about derangement. It’s insight about cognition and the human experience. It asks us to look to the demented elderly — who we rarely see but often become — to learn something about who we are today.
The Molecular Bond That Helps Secure Your Memories. There’s a fundamental riddle in human memory, and it goes like this: The molecules that make up our memories in the neuron break down after a few days or weeks, but our memories can last a lifetime. This article recounts how this riddle is solved and how we know. They find that two proteins bind together to hold the memory, allowing each protein to be replaced in situ, kind of like the double helix of DNA.
The America I loved is gone. Despite the gloomy title, this is an essay about the beautiful things in America, through the eyes of a Canadian author. This quote in particular made me stop and reassess American consumerism, something I have always seen as crass and degrading but, like America itself, holds a lot of good.
Fun. America was fun.
Other countries do pleasure or luxury or celebration. America did fun. The Beatles were fun because they played American music. McDonald’s conquered the world because they put a fun-for-five-minutes piece of plastic in with the fries and called it the Happy Meal. “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol once wrote. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”
“The world is a museum of passion projects”. Yes, I’m link-blogging a tweet from 3 years ago, like I don’t know how to use the internet. I saw this quote recently, and it has stuck with me. All of the amazing things in the world exist because someone cared, deeply, and their passion sustained them through the long, hard work.
A Strange Interview. The two interviewees in this local news segment have a very unusual communication style, about an incident on Steve Irwin Way.
o3 Is a Lying Liar. This is representative of my favorite AI news from this month, which is that a lot of people quite like OpenAI’s recent o3 model, except that they dislike how much it lies.