December-ish links

The Effective Altruism Debates

The Effective Altruist Shell Game 2.0, which I thought spawned … In Continued Defense of Effective Altruism, but nope those were just published at the same time …. but then came Contra DeBoer on Movement Shell Games Why not Effective Altruism? And if you want to see where Open Philanthropy is putting it’s GiveWell money ….

I started saying a few years ago “We’re finally in the future ….” and it seems to keep going:

The Evolution of Stretch by Boston Dynamics (video). I switched from Robotics to programming after grad school because robotics did not seem like a promising career (unless I spent 10 years getting a PhD and doing postdoc work). Now it is. Uh, we made robots out of cells, too? And it was easier than expected? (Another version). Micro nuclear reactors are coming on line The Large Hadron Collector is a ring 27km in circumference. This new particle accelerator is 10 cm long, (admittedly its 1000x times weaker, but its much much smaller). On the other hand, we’re still working out the kinks on 3D printed houses. Update — Using LLMs combined with Tensor Flow to allow computer programs to write programs that produce solutions better than any mathematician has yet discovered for hard problems like bin packing. (Slashdot, Article)

On a lighter note:

Epic Rap Battles of History’s Latest — Henry Ford vs Karl Marx In case you feel like an old curmudgeon, listen to a 22 hour old curmudgeon. (Music Video by Sparks). Did we learn nothing from Alfred Hitchcock? We’re teaching birds to call each other via cell phone?

Misc:

If you have a public library card, you can use it on kanopy for free movies and videos, including a ton of The Great Courses (of which I’ve bought a half dozen or so in the past, but free is nice, too. Currently listening to the Linguist John McWhorter’s “Language from A to Z”) I usually browse Longreads “Best of the year” essays each year.