Books
How Dead Languages Work by Coulter H. George. I’m a sucker for any comparative linguistics book, and especially one about the difficulties of translation. This book covers six ancient languages and how their form influences poetry written in them. Interesting - I spent some late nights reading this - but I wish it had gone more in depth. The book only gives us a few verses from each language and brief commentary about each, and I feel like that’s not enough to catch the flavor.
A similar, shorter book is Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which is a deep dive into a single, short poem from the Tang dynasty, looked at through the lens of 19 translations. This book I periodically come back to and reread - it’s concise, witty, and self-contained.Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, by Edward N. Luttwak. This one was definitely weird to read out in public. It presents a coherent theory around how to run coups, which I always thought were more organic, contingent events, but turn out to all share a very similar structure.
Management and business
Smart and Gets Things Done Are Not Enough. I really loved the list of "extra superpowers" that potential employees can have. I think I have 5 or so of them - what do you have?
Every Achievement Has A Denominator, from charity.wtf. Not immediately relevant, but interesting reading.
“Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmaking. The piece is about how the speech that introduced the idea of “founder mode” really just explains commonly known facts about management. While this is true, very few people know about these facts!
For all new managers reading this: there is a commonly accepted theory and practice of good management. If this is your first time managing, you probably do not know this theory. You can learn this theory by reading any commonly available book on management - they mostly say the same things. (My book was The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier, which I thought was exceptionally good, but all the books I’ve read so far had similar content.) You will be a better manager after reading such a book, because you will know what a “1-1” is, and that you need to do things like have interactive understanding checks with your reports.
Programming
Simpler backoff. Quote: “Don’t write code that generates a small, fixed set of values. Use a lookup table instead.”
The Hidden Subgroup Problem, about a common cryptographic flaw in public key systems.
Sguaba: hard-to-misuse rigid body transforms for engineers with other things to worry about than linear algebra. I pointed towards this idea of keeping coordinate frames in the type system earlier. It’s cool that Rust has a powerful enough type system to do this in practice. Typescript does as well, we’ve just never gotten around to it at Mach9.
Proofs through typography with Hungarian notation
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The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.
Published for the first time: the Princeton INTERCAL Compiler's source code
An illustrated guide to Amazon VPCs - first time I had ever really understood what a VPC was!
-2000 Lines Of Code, a classic story about misaligned metrics.
left-pad, from the person who started it all.
Subtype Inference by Example Part 1: Introducing CubiML. I wanted to pick through this, but I haven’t had time yet.
History
Notes on Tunisia. I always like Matt Lakeman’s posts.
REVIEW: Road Belong Cargo, by Peter Lawrence. The Psmiths are the source of my two books above; I didn’t read this book, but the review seems almost as detailed as the book.
REVIEW: Cambridge Latin Course Unit 1, by the Cambridge School Classics Project. This one I’m explicitly not supposed to read.
I had first encountered the drama around this a few months ago. Noted classicist Mary Beard had written a mea culpa explaining that most classicists couldn’t actually read Latin fluently. There were a variety of responses from Medievalists that pointed out that this was primarily a problem with volume - there’s just not enough Classical literature to practice with to learn how to read fluently, whereas there’s much more Medieval Latin to learn from.
This volume over quality debate is roughly why I’m doing Daf Yomi with basically no background or preparation. The idea is that if you just study enough of the Talmud regularly. you’ll get used to it via immersion.An Inside View of Hoity-Toity East Coast Boarding Schools. I went to one of these!
The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction. Material over social trends wins every time.
Math and science
A simple way of estimating logarithms, originally developed to be done by hand for calculation. Simple but cool.
Why Quadratic Funding Is Not Optimal. The analogous Pareto optimality theorem about markets is still useful in the real world because it’s a “continuous” result - the closer you are to the preconditions, the closer to optimal the market gets. Do the optimality theorems around quadratic funding also have this property?
Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to really, really matter. Why?
The magic of through running (this one’s about trains). Finally, a layperson’s explainer of why NJ Transit and the LIRR should run through Penn Station, or why a 2 mile connection through Downtown Boston would be so important.
Fun
Consider Knitting. I don’t think I’ll try knitting this month, but maybe next month!
The World’s Last Internet Cafes. Holdout businesses always sample from the extremes of the distribution.
Seven Days at the Bin Store. I think “the bins” as a TikTok meme is a few months old, but this article came out in June. I moved apartments this month, and it was very expensive to get rid of old furniture I didn’t want anymore - for some of what I had, it was more expensive to get rid of than it was to buy! Looking forward to a future of robotic deliveries so the asymmetry in the supply chain between bulk and last-mile can be reduced.
Occasional paper: The impossible predicament of the death newts. Good old-fashioned evolutionary race.
For those who don’t know: Know Your Meme’s entry on Came In A Fluffer
At LessOnline this year, someone suggested that I read “My Immortal” As Alchemical Allegory. I can’t believe I hadn’t read it before, it was great. Sunday night of LessOnline was also Shavuot, on which Jews traditionally stay up all night learning Torah. To reflect this, I helped run a session where we picked random verses from Pirkei Avot and reinterpreted them Kabbalistically to refer to AI, inspired by Scott’s talk on an AI interpretation of the Book of Revelation.
Dystopia
I had been joking about the conclusion of The Intelligence Curse for several months, but no one knew what I was talking about because I forgot the title of the essay. I finally re-found it and will record that fact, and the link, here.
I got into the LA Times covering Worldcoin! Here’s my quote:
At the World store in San Francisco, Zachary Sussman was eager to check out the orbs with his two friends, both in their 20s.
“For me, the more ‘Black Mirror’ the technology is, the more likely I am to use it,” Sussman said, referring to the popular Netflix sci-fi series. “I like the dystopian aesthetic.”
If you say extremely weird things to reporters, they will quote you.