November 2024 updates
Hope everyone is having a great fall!
Some general updates:
Vaden Masrani and I were invited onto the Doom Debates show to discuss epistemology and AI (part I, part II). I'll let you decide whether these were at all successful or simply infuriating. In unrelated news, never read the youtube comments about yourself.
We had Tamler Sommers on the podcast, which is my favorite conversation we've had so far.
Since August, the bookclub tackled A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway), Understand (Chiang), My Struggle (Knausgaard ... I know what you were thinking), and Lolita (Nabokov). Blood Meridian is up next!
New writing
Just one new essay on some exciting productivity trends along with some very speculative thoughts on how they relate to the great stagnation.
Recommendations
- Timothy Gowers records himself solving a maths problem. It's intoxicating. (h/t Joseph Walker).
- Phil Hanley's 2022 standup special.
- Joe Walker's conversation with Richard Butler on nuclear diplomacy.
- Andrea Botez's new live rave mix, if you like that sort of thing. Someone said this was Berghain quality, which is praise enough.
New math notes
My sense is that most of you actually subscribe for the math. Apologies that you have to wade through the rest, but there's no way I'm making a separate newsletter for the math. I can barely handle one newsletter.
Keep crushing.
- Ben