Around the Web #7
Around the Web #7
AI writes codes, the laws of nature, and How to get rich
🏀 ⚽️ 🏈
1: [Sports]
Tobi Amusan made the news last month when she broke the world record for the women's 100m hurdles event. I went through the rounds of reading the articles written about shoes, Michael Johnson, and what-not. Then I started digging into the best times in the event, and then I wondered how the women's times compared to the men's. At this point, I realized for the first time that for men, it’s the 110m hurdles, and for women, it is 100m hurdles. For a decent follower of track and field, I was pretty surprised I didn’t know that, or at least I was not fully aware of that, until then. Some folks attempted to explain why that is the case on Sports Stack Exchange.
📲🤳🏿📱
2: [Social Media]
Cal Newport's latest piece in the New Yorker is pretty good. He discussed the evolution of the model of engagement of social media giants, current competitions, and the liberation that may follow.
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Mignano, former head of podcasts at Spotify, also wrote an essay on the end of social media. Again, he addressed the evolution of the models of engagement.
“Platforms like the massively popular (and still growing) TikTok and YouTube put far less emphasis on friends and social graphs in favor of carefully curated, magical algorithmic experiences that match the perfect content for the right people at the exact right time. This is recommendation media, and it’s the new standard for content distribution on the internet.”
“In recommendation media, content is not distributed to networks of connected people as the primary means of distribution. Instead, the main mechanism for the distribution of content is through opaque, platform-defined algorithms that favor maximum attention and engagement from consumers.”
🎥🍿🎬
3: [Movies]
I saw Sardar Udam on prime video a few weeks ago. It tells the sad but very intriguing story of the 1919 Amritsar massacre in Bristish India. I do recommend it.
“A young Sardar Udham was left deeply scarred by the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. He escaped into the mountains of Afghanistan, reaching London in 1933-34. There, Udham spent the most decisive 6 years of his life, re-igniting the revolution. On 13th March, 1940, 21yrs since carrying the unhealed wound, Udham Singh assassinated Michael O’Dwyer, the man at the helm of affairs in Punjab, April 1919.”
👩🏼💻 🖥👨🏿💻
4: [Programming]
"In files where it’s enabled, GitHub says nearly 40 percent of code is now being written by Copilot...it will remain a free tool for verified students and maintainers of popular open-source projects." Link.
Programmers already copy and paste codes anyways, but this is quite mind-blowing: Your AI pair programmer. Copilot link. So, AI now writes codes. What else are we going to see?
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Really nice Google colab features I just came across recently: 1) interactive tables, 2) easily check execution history of codes, 3) command palette: if you need to find your way around colab, there is an easy way to do it.
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Google engineers launched a new programming language called Carbon.
🇳🇬
5: [Nigeria]
Baba Agba, Jimi Solanke turns 80. Beautiful Nubia interviews him.
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A short documentary about Indians in Nigeria.
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Unfortunately, there are only a few worth listening to today in Nigeria's political scene. Dele Farotimi is conspicuously one of them.
🤖🖥👨🏿💻
6: [AI]
‘Bringing back’ the dead: First through language (stories, folklores, myths), the written words (letters), then photos, and then video recordings. And now their actual voice.
“Amazon.com Inc. is developing a voice-mimicking feature for its virtual assistant Alexa that replicates the speech of people alive and dead, joining other companies that are experimenting with creating digital memories of people after death.”
See an actual example at Amazon re:MARS 2022.
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Pretty impressive resources here to learn deep learning: from the mathematical foundations to computer vision, language modeling, and deep generative models. I was recently looking for some content on recurrent neural networks, and I came across it.
🧐🧠🧐
7: [Philosophy]
Great talk by Ed Feser about “What is a law of nature?”
He gives an overview of how to account for the law of nature: 1) theological account, with occasionalism as the end product. 2) regularity theory account (traces back to David Hume). 3) Platonic view of laws. 4) The instrumentalist's view (as opposed to scientific realism), and 5) the Aristotelian accounts. Ed defended the Aristotelian view, describing laws as a reflection of essences and causal powers.
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“It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here.” – Eugene Wigner. William Lane Craig on Eugene’s The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics. How can we explain the remarkable applicability of mathematics to the real world?
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Alexander Pruss is easily one of my favorite contemporary philosophers. Outside of his very hard-to-read blog, I don’t see much more of him on social media, YouTube, etc. I came across one of his contents recently. It’s a beautiful lecture on ‘God, Beauty, and Mathematics.’
🩺🥼🧑🏻⚕️
8: [Medicine]
FDA Planning to Allow Clinical Trials of Pig Organ Transplants in humans.
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Sleep and your heart.
🤑💳💸
9: [Wealth]
How to get rich by Scott Galloway, lots of wisdom in ten minutes.
✍🏿
10: [Academic Research]
