The Pope on AI, scaling via self-play?, FM-2030, Lynch RIP
The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR):
PEAR employed electronic random event generators (REGs) to explore the ability of test subjects to use psychokinesis to influence the random output distribution of these devices to conform to their pre-recorded intentions to produce higher numbers, lower numbers, or nominal baselines. Most of these experiments utilized a microelectronic REG, but experiments were also conducted with "a giant, wall-mounted pachinko-like machine with a cascade of bouncing balls".
A good walkthrough of the Boeing / McDonnell Douglas merger.
In 2017, Huntington Ingalls delivered a new $13B aircraft carrier to the Navy (a). The carrier lacked the 11 elevators necessary for loading bombs onto its planes.
Pope Francis on AI (from Dilexit nos, his fourth encyclical):
In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home. It was a moment of culinary apprenticeship, somewhere between child-play and adulthood, when we first felt responsible for working and helping one another.
Along with the fork, I could also mention thousands of other little things that are a precious part of everyone’s life: a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy. All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms.
The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories “kept” deep in our heart.
"FM-2030 believed that synthetic body parts would one day make life expectancy irrelevant; shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer, he described the pancreas as 'a stupid, dumb, wretched organ'."
Ashlee Vance is starting a media company.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo have engineered bacteria to break down microplastics found in wastewater. This new trait allows the bacteria to biodegrade polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a common plastic, potentially reducing microplastic pollution.
I look forward to rehashing the Australian Cane Toad ecodrama but with plastic-ravenous microbes instead of petulant toads.
The UK government announces an AI roadmap.
Gwern speculates that OpenAI et al. may have gotten a self-play scaling paradigm to work, hence the recent cryptic euphoria from OpenAI researchers...
Thiel op-ed in the Financial Times (a). Struldbrugg!
New from Jay Sanguinetti's group at U Arizona: Enhancing equanimity with non-invasive brain stimulation. Here's a thread by the lead author.
New from Matthew Sacchet's group at Harvard: Advanced and long-term meditation and the autonomic nervous system: A review and synthesis.
A Beckley/Cornell collaboration: Exploration of the effects of psychedelics on brain micro-vasculature. See also Michael Johnson's Vasocomputation.
My youthful visage getting plastered across Tyler’s feed catalyzed a visit to this piece I wrote about motorcycle risk, years ago.
Rob Henderson: What people got wrong about the film Parasite
Los Angeles firefighting aircraft damaged by drone.
"After The Elephant Man's success, George Lucas, a fan of Eraserhead, offered Lynch the opportunity to direct the third film in his original Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi."
David Lynch’s children invite you to a tribute 10-minute meditation tomorrow (Monday the 20th) at 12 noon Pacific.
Max Chiswick (1985–2025), RIP.
"Lewis's book A Grief Observed describes his experience of bereavement in such a raw and personal fashion that he originally released it under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk to keep readers from associating the book with him. Ironically, many friends recommended the book to Lewis as a method for dealing with his own grief."
File under "highly speculative".
Rogan (softly): "Who coached you?"
Zuck: "Um, it was basically a bunch of the guys..."