Google like a pro
Ro.bert
here’s your weekly dose of treats 💌
a weekly list of goodies curated by Robert.
follow the white rabbit 🐇
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🎶 something to listen to while reading
fiery stuff I've been ingesting
1. A Dyson Sphere could bring humans back from the dead
here’s how it will go down: A megastructure called a Dyson Sphere will provide a superintelligent artificial agent (AI) with the enormous amounts of power it needs to collect as much historical and personal data about you, so it can rebuild your exact digital copy. Once it’s finished, you’ll live your whole life (again) in a simulated reality, and when the time comes for you to die (again), you’ll be transported into a simulated afterlife, à la Black Mirror’s “San Junipero,” where you’ll get to hang out with your friends, family, and favorite celebrities forever.
the gist: It’s a hypothetical shell encircling the sun to harness a large part of the majestic 400 septillion watts per second of energy our star emits on any given day. That’s on the order of a trillion times our current worldwide energy usage. This is Plan C of the “Immortality Roadmap,” a project on which Russian transhumanist and life extensionist Alexey Turchin has been working since 2014.
2. building complex reasoning skills online through open-ended activities
proficient teachers with small class sizes orchestrate group discussions to develop complex reasoning skills
a quick vignette illustrates how that might look:
The teacher begins class discussion: “What are the most significant causes of structural inequality?” Students write briefly on their own as she peppers in advice: “Draw evidence to support your argument from the primary sources in your packets.” Then the teacher has each person share with their neighbor, focusing their attention: “Which evidence did your partner use? How did they build their argument from it?” The teacher invites pairs to share their ideas, lightly prompting them to draw out certain points and disagreements. She summarizes the discussion on the board, emphasizing key concepts and connecting them to broader ideas.
3. (podcast) AI for Good: clean water access in Africa
they analyzed over 500,000 data points to predict future water point breaks. This enabled African governments to make data-driven decisions related to budgeting, preventative maintenance, and policy in order to promote and protect people’s access to safe water for drinking and washing.
4. brain anatomy alterations associated with Social Networking Site (SNS) addiction
this study relies on knowledge regarding the neuroplasticity of dual-system components that govern addiction and excessive behavior and suggests that alterations in the grey matter volumes, i.e., brain morphology, of specific regions of interest are associated with technology-related addictions.
5. I’ve been experimenting with SigmaOS.
browsers have barely changed since the 90s, but today, they are our primary work tool.
6. how do you search google like a pro?
the future of education is about speed-learning how to use the internet to extract, connect, and build on bits of information coming from Big Data.
Reading biographies and observing friends, family, and colleagues has led me to become interested in what factors drive the variance in cognitive stamina and observed levels of energy between individuals. Identifying the biological, environmental, or motivational factors which produce this difference seems important and neglected. Understanding this is a research agenda’s worth of work, so my contribution will be to draw a conceptual boundary around the idea of an “energetic alien” and explore some (not selected i.i.d.) examples of eminent energetic aliens from different fields, discuss some hypotheses about the energetic alien phenomenon, and then put forth some ideas for how we non-energetic aliens can compensate.
8. digital people would be an even bigger deal
Digital people could, for example, copy themselves hundreds of times to try different approaches to figuring out a problem or gaining a skill, then keep only the most successful version and make many copies of that version.
9. Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube.
Daily share of news consumption on YouTube, a social media platform with more than 2 billion monthly users, has increased in the last few years. Constructing a large dataset of users’ trajectories across the full political spectrum during 2016–2019, we identify several distinct communities of news consumers, including “far-right” and “anti-woke.” Far right is small and not increasing in size over the observation period, while anti-woke is growing, and both grow in consumption per user. We find little evidence that the YouTube recommendation algorithm is driving attention to this content. Our results indicate that trends in video-based political news consumption are determined by a complicated combination of user preferences, platform features, and the supply-and-demand dynamics of the broader web.
10. (fun) run Internet Explorer 5 in your browser!
send me reading material 📚
anything from computer science, history, language & literature, crypto, rationality, self-improvement, philosophy, genetics, physics, mathematics, linguistics, medicine, music, tech, etc.
Dump your link in the form below ⇣⇣⇣
latest YouTube video 📷
The Art of the Short Attention Span: The Most Underrated Skill
Tweets for thought 🐦
Some stuff I collected from Twitter.
The most interesting thing I learned this year is this mental model for generating world-class writing. https://t.co/RE0Rahk3ng
Visual Theory
Here’s the evolution of one of my side projects — Visual Theory. I am re-learning how to see.
➜ You can follow the project on 🐦 Twitter & 📷 Instagram
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 and telling me a bit about yourself and what’s been up in your world.
— Robert