fw: Link Incubator - What’s the right amount of context?
Ro.bert
here’s your weekly dose of treats 💌
a weekly list of goodies, ideas, pieces of research, principles, models, and other random stuff curated by Robert
fiery stuff I've been ingesting
1/. Theses on sleep by Alexey Guzey
Summary of the essay:
Comfortable modern sleep is an unnatural superstimulus. Sleepiness, just like hunger, is normal.
Depression <-> oversleeping. Mania <-> acute sleep deprivation
Occasional acute sleep deprivation is good for health and promotes more efficient sleep
Our priors about sleep research should be weak
Decreasing sleep by 1-2 hours a night in the long-term has no negative health effects
2/. Short doc I’m watching - Raised on Porn
Exposes the ways [soft] pornography (nowadays mostly on Instagram, Twitch, TikTok) has become the new sex education for children and unpacks the dangerous lifelong implications of this global phenomenon. While the film doesn’t contain any nudity, it features discussions and images of a sexual nature that some viewers will find disturbing.
3/. Mozilla hits pause on crypto donations following backlash
4/. When Deepmind starts coding - they have announced a machine learning project that can semi-automatically write code. OpenAI has also worked on this, but it’s always difficult to tell how much of this is a great demo and how much of it is a ‘birth of flight’.
5/. Fit’s Law - In 1954, psychologist Paul Fitts, examining the human motor system, showed that the time required to move to a target depends on the distance to it, yet relates inversely to its size. By his law, fast movements and small targets result in greater error rates, due to the speed-accuracy trade-off. Although multiple variants of Fitts’ law exist, all encompass this idea.
6/. US still struggling with TikTok privacy. One can also watch What China’s crackdown on algorithm’s means for the US (video). You can still use Douyin in China, which is their version of TikTok. Kind reminder that TikTok is a Chinese company, but it is not allowed in China. Anyway - imagine you are under 14 and when you swipe, instead of getting videos with people dancing, pranking each other, or soft pornography, the Chinese get instructional videos, science experiments that you can do at home, museum exhibits and patriotism videos. They want their kids to grow up to be astronauts and scientists, not influencers. China also limits Douyin use to 40 minutes a day. Also, when you scroll, they also have a mandatory 5 second delay asking you if you want to get up and do something else. Because when people simply sit there infinitely scrolling. Teenage mode is another initiative, which limits viewing time for real-name authenticated users under age 14 to 40 minutes a day, only between 6am and 10pm. This can also prevent FOMO.
7/. The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant by Nick Bostrom
This paper recounts the tale of a most vicious dragon that ate thousands of people every day, and of the actions that the king, the people, and an assembly of dragonologists took with respect thereof.
In this paper the author challenges the reader to think about death - not as a natural, inevitable occurrence of life but more like a degenerative disease that can be fought - like any other disesase. I also wrote a quick one on this a few years ago - Life Extension or Immortality?
8/. The Clip (What’s the Right Amount of Context?) — when it came to using a clip and interpreting intent, Cardinal Richelieu put it famously:
“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.”
9/. Medical bills forced him to become a millionaire
10/. Thousands march in Kyiv to show unity against Russian threat
11/. Enjoyed watching Green Book.
12/. Collector’s Fallacy.
13/. SpeakPipe allows your listeners to send you voice messages directly from your website or voicemail page.
14/. Threadit for Chrome - a browser extension which allows you to quickly start a meeting, record a video + add table of contents
15/. The Bewildering Architecture of Indoor Cities (video)
the implications of bringing our urbanism indoors, and compares and contrasts the spatial qualities of each approach — the contingent and gritty urbanism of the Pedway, with the pristine perfection of the hotel lobby and conference center.
latest YouTube video
How to "Google It" like a Content Creator (Fundamentals)
Other places
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(͡ ͡° ͜ つ ͡͡°) Telegram group for me to save & share random stuff that might be useful — I find it to be slightly easier vs. Discord for now, but we will see.
👾 some YouTube video essays
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🧪 check out Visual Theory on Twitter and Instagram, a side-project of mine where I am learning how to see.
— Robert
Thank you for reading!
How’re you and yours doing this week? Any major changes to your status quo, or are things fairly locked-in and predictable at the moment? I respond to every email I get—consider sending me a message