March Review

Wiresong April 01, 2024 #Review

Books

Explorations into pop-math continue, this time with Jordan Ellenberg's Shape, a book on geometry and its role in several disciplines. I find that generally the first few books of authors are much better than their later work; definitely not true for this one. Shape was an excellent read, I recommend it highly.

Music

Not much new music this month-I'm still stuck on Brakence. I've replayed Ginger Tea probably 50 or so times. Such a good song.

  1. I heard you like polyrhythms. A really fun, really melodic exploration into polyrhythms.
  2. Rosier by Brakence
  3. Ginger Tea by Brakence

Misc

  1. A great reference on binary search trees
  2. Hitherby Dragons, a collection of loosely-connectet short stories about many, many different topics, incorporating Buddhism, chinese/greek mythology, computer science, and a hodgepodge of other random topics. Whimsical and very fun.
  3. The demiurge's Older Brother, a decision-theoretic exploration into how nonexistent AIs can acausally negotiate with currently-extant AIs. More fun than it sounds; written really well.
  4. How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title, a lovely interactive fiction game. Comedic, sprawling, great puzzles.
  5. How to be More Agentic, great post on agency by someone who's empirically done well at it. The thing about the moat of low status resonates a lot.
  6. The Art of Debugging, a small document from an old text-multiplayer-game codebase. The recommendations about specific tools may not be relevant for everyone, but the debugging theory within is lucid, concise, and broadly applicable.
  7. Oh, Deer: There Goes the Gear. Apparently, deer are a significant wildlife hazard to aircraft; this is something I wouldn't have thought of.
  8. Eleven Magic Words. I really like the writing. Worth reading if you have 10 or so minutes.
  9. Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole
  10. These Butterflies Full of Wasps Full of Microwasps Are a Science Nightmare
  11. Markets are Efficient if and only if P = NP
  12. World_sim, a claude-3-opus instance prompted to act like a world simulator. Very, very fun. Feels like the new iteration of AI dungeon, with less features but better writing.
  13. Infinite Backrooms, a collection of conversations between 2 claude-3-opus instances talking to each other. Gets very psychedelic very quickly. Strongly recommend reading a few.