A Link Dump Because I have COVID
Featuring counterfeit consciousness
Hi! I have COVID, so I didn’t prepare anything to post this week. Instead, here’s a link dump of stuff I’ve been looking at.
Why am I still posting anything if I have COVID? Simple: because it’s Saturday.
By the way, just because I feel like it, this link dump is more annotated than the usual monthly ones I put out at the end of the month. If you prefer this annotated style more than a list of links, please let me know. I’d love to know what you think works better.
One last thing: of course, get vaccinated and stay healthy. If you’re in the U.S. you can get free at-home tests from USPS at this link.
Links!!
1 - 2022 is ending with all eyes on ChatGPT, which can write convincing college essays on its own. Which is funny because, as I learned from Language Log, 2022 started with academics publishing fake papers with AI, where they were caught because their AI tried to evade plagiarism detection software by, for example, replacing “breast cancer” with “bosom peril.”
Let’s play a quick game. What were these shitty AI-substituted phrases supposed to mean?
“Invulnerable framework”
“Blunder pace”
“Focal point of mass”
“Profound neural organization”
“Counterfeit consciousness”
Answers in this footnote!1
2 - In other news in counterfeit consciousness, researchers found a strategy that beats Go AI KataGo but loses to human amateurs. You’ve probably heard of a different Go AI called AlphaGo, possibly because I will not stop talking about the documentary on it. Also relevant is an old post I made about “centaurs,” teams of humans and chess AI that perform better than chess AI alone.
3 - I now have 400 followers on Medium, so thank you for that! I wanted to find a relevant link, so I did a YouTube search for “400” but all I found was this.
4 - While we’re on the subject of chess and AI, you’ve probably heard of the controversy around Hans Niemann. You want a Hans Niemann link don’t you? Well here’s Hans Niemann losing last week to up-and-coming Singaporean chess star Tin Jingyao.
5 - Sam Bankman-Fried got arrested and I realized I never checked what happened to FTX’s massive sponsorship deals. The Mercedes F1 team pulled FTX logos off their cars and suspended their deal. “TSM FTX drops FTX” reported The Verge, showing a player who wasn’t on TSM at the time of their publication. The Miami Heat are still stuck with the “FTX Arena” because judges haven’t approved of their deal’s termination yet. If I wrote the article for that one, the sub-header would be “one court makes another court very sad.”
6 - Speaking of FTX, if you’re unsure what happened, Coffeezilla is doing top-tier work investigating and documenting the ongoing FTX saga.
7 - In other cryptocurrency news (or “secretive coinage news” as the academic-paper-writing AI would probably call it), the metaverse NFT real-estate project Decentraland now lets you become an NFT landlord, renting out your digital land plots (via Molly White). It sounds depressing.
Decentraland is basically a virtual world in the metaverse where you spend a cryptocurrency called MANA to buy virtual plots of land (which you then “own” as NFTs). Every article I could find on Decentraland notes that one, it’s hella buggy, and two, no one is ever online and everyone in the community seems more interested in trading the virtual plots of land.
But now if you spent, uh, 2 million dollars on an NFT for a piece of virtual land in the metaverse, you can rent out your virtual land to virtual tenants. As White notes, there is already talk about virtual mortgages.
8 - Quanta published a good article on the periodic tiling conjecture from geometry. You can use combinations of shapes to produce tilings, and some tilings are periodic (meaning they repeat, like a hexagonal tiling), while other tilings are aperiodic (meaning they don’t repeat, like the Penrose tiling).
You cannot produce an aperiodic tiling of the 2-D plane with one shape (the minimum is two shapes, as in the Penrose tiling). The periodic tiling conjecture says this is also true for 3-D space and higher dimensions. But a few months back, Rachel Grenfeld and Terence Tao announced they had disproved the periodic tiling conjecture by finding a single shape that can tile high-dimensional space aperiodically. Speaking to Quanta, Tao described the shape as “a nasty tile.” Do not tell Quackerton about these disgusting new tilings.
9 - In good news, WheezyWaiter only read good news and, good news, it was good!
10 - I got back into Every Noise at Once. It’s way too much fun diving into hyper-specific genres of music I’d never heard of. And it’s one of the coolest data science projects out there.
I spent too much time searching through “partyschlager,” a hilariously corny, awful style of German EDM played at festivals like Ballermann or Oktoberfest. This genre has songs like “Ich bin Chefkoch,” a song by a barber who merely moonlights as a successful German pop singer, a song with lyrics about Happy Meals and a chorus (translated) that proclaims, “I can do burgers, I can do fries, I’m the head chef for McDonald’s.”
11 - For a long time, I only knew “Rachel Carson” as the name of one of my university’s dining halls. But I read Marginalian’s post on Rachel Carson’s 1952 National Book Award acceptance speech, and it’s got so much wisdom. As a person who spends a lot of time trying to explain complex topics in math, this line from the nature writer resonated with me:
“If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”
12 - Since I’m sick, there’s a Confucius quote (that I couldn’t actually find the origin of) that I keep thinking of: “A healthy man wants 10,000 things, a sick man only wants one thing.”
13 - MSCHF are dropping a giant froot loop you can buy for $19.99. You may remember MSCHF as the art collective who made the “Satan Shoes,” worn by Lil Nas X, that prompted a lawsuit from Nike.
14 - When I’m sick, I need a good laugh or two to keep my spirits up. I had a giggle reading that old Gawker piece where Caity Weaver spent 14 hours in a TGI-Fridays eating “endless” mozzarella sticks.
15 - Similar to the last link: “I Tried 21 Flavors of Mountain Dew for Some Reason.” Classic. Something always gets me about videos and articles where you watch the creator lose their mind in real time:
16 - Mikey dropped two new hour-long videos on meditation and learning.
17 - Apparently the Avatar sequel came out yesterday and I only found out about it because The Guardian called it a “soggy, trillion-dollar screensaver.”
18 - Casey Newton’s tech predictions for 2023.
19 - More AI stuff: there’s a call center trying to remove workers’ accents using AI.
20 - Finally, there’s a lot of talk about AI art, and how it will impact originality, the art market, and the livelihood of artists. I don’t have a lot to say about it right now, because it’s probably going to be a much bigger piece (if you have thoughts on it feel free to share). But I want to shout out three artists near and dear to me: Mathieu, Bryan, and Vii. Check out their stuff.
Thanks for all the get well soon wishes. Hopefully should be healthy by next week. Stay strong.
“Invulnerable framework” = “immune system.” “Blunder pace” = “error rate.” “Focal point of mass” = “center of gravity.” “Profound neural organization” = “deep neural network.” “Counterfeit consciousness” = “artificial intelligence.”