Some things sundry #4
You can't *tell* people anything
An eclectic collection of thoughts and links that I found interesting this past week, which I have nowhere to dump than here.
🔗 You can’t tell people anything
A twenty-year old post, from back when blogging on the web was still new, about how hard it is to get people to truly grok what you’re trying to tell them. Decades later, so much of effort is actually meta-work in trying to understand what people mean and trying to help them understand what we mean. Humans communicating with each other is still a work-in-progress.
🔗 Compress to impress / JPEG your ideas
Related to the link above, the inimitable Eugene Wei: “You've spent all that time cooking your idea, why not spend an extra few moments plating it?”
🔗 Does America suddenly have a record number of bees?
Remember how a few years ago we were all worried about declining bee population and ‘colony collapse’ and the ecological disaster about to follow? Turns out that’s been addressed with some sensible tax policy. But like every time we try to poke at the ecological balance, it’s not all good.
Reminds me of the viral video from a few years ago about wolves being re-introduced to Yellowstone National Park.
🔗 What are AI agents and who profits from them
Excellent overview of an emerging space within LLMs.
🔗 3Blue1Brown explaining Transformers
Good video if you haven’t already been working with transformer models to understand the engine behind Chat GPT. But more than that, check out the other videos from 3Blue1Brown — that is some serious skill in explaining complex concepts quickly and simply!
🔗 Three body problem on Netflix
Utterly binge worthy, even if not faithful to the book.