Taking stock of open(ish) machine learning / 2023-06-15 by Luis Villa. A review of the good the bad the ugly the scary the confusing and the hopeful bits of open (ish) ML. Prescient too. Skip all the review papers on ML and the linkedin crap. Read this fellow.
Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco I’ve had it with the term Fascism. Semantic and epistemic satiation has been achieved, congratulations, activists, you won. But Eco, he makes so much sense, and once you read this, the ur-facism of the online progressive is easier to spot.1
Is the love song d y i n g? By David Mora and Michelle Jia A quantitative and visual exploration of how the topics in western popular music has changed over the years. The pudding produces GREAT stuff.
Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans 2 Some heroes wear capes, others make people carry pianos through mazes and see how ants carrying piano equivalents through mazes solve the puzzles. This paper is gold from start to finish. How do things that cannot envision 3 dimensions the way we can, do things in 3 dimensions? What strategies do humans take in solving problems when they have limited information and ability to coordinate? All your questions have answers and the answers lie in mazes filled with longhorn crazy ants.
Four Poems by Pamilerin Jacob They are all great. The first one is reproduced here, but you 100% need to read all of them.
The Baffling Intelligence of a Single Cell The story of E. coli chemotaxis By James Somers and Edwin Morris An illustrated and animated story that gives you a birds eye view and then takes you into slowly into ALL the details of exactly how these little beasts move and find food. As a bonus, in the process you also learn just how science asks questions, finds answers and how tough real science is. MIND was BLOWN
251 words you can spell with a calculator I was surprised, nay, ecstatic to learn boobies aren’t the only objects that can appear on a calculator screen.
- But see, all cultural criticism is astrology. It’s not meant to be science, and reading it like you would science is a mistake. ↩︎
- T. Dreyer, A. Haluts, A. Korman, N. Gov, E. Fonio, O. Feinerman, Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (1) e2414274121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2414274121 (2025). ↩︎