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
divisive stuff I’ve been ingesting
1.
There’s a Research Assistant to Professor Nick Bostrom position available.
Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, superintelligence risks, and the reversal test. In 2011, he founded the Oxford Martin Program on the Impacts of Future Technology, and is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.
Quite interesting to see what type of tasks you would need to tackle. These include:
Read the literature on ‘moral cluelessness’ and understand it well enough to have a deep conversation with Nick about it
Prepare a shortened version of ‘The Vulnerable World Hypothesis’ for a non-academic outlet; receive comments from Nick and incorporate his feedback; submit for editorial review, and review their changes and suggestions prior to publication. (See finished piece in Aeon)
2.
Alice in Wonderland syndrome
People may experience distortions in visual perception of objects such as appearing smaller (micropsia) or larger (macropsia), or appearing to be closer (pelopsia) or farther (teleopsia) away than they actually are. Distortion may occur for other senses besides vision as well.
Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS) is often associated with migraines, brain tumors, or psychoactive drug use.
3.
Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes
4.
“SEER: Self-supervised Pretraining of Visual Features in the Wild”, Goyal et al 2021 (blog; near-SOTA by training 1b-param CNN on 1b unfiltered unlabeled Internet images—another reminder that unsupervised learning is really working!); “‘Learning From Videos’ to understand the world” (rapid FB expansion of self-supervised training to millions of photos/videos/hours-of-speech); “Contrasting Contrastive Self-Supervised Representation Learning Models”, Kotar et al 2021 (Supervised learning from ImageNet is now obsolete for transfer learning, and ImageNet just a contaminated validation set)
5.
Why Do Wealthy Parents Have Wealthy Children?
Several explanations have been proposed. One is a pure selection story; parents may genetically pass on abilities and preferences, creating intergenerational associations in income, savings behavior, or financial risk-taking. This can generate a strong correlation in wealth across generations even if there is no actual effect of parents’ wealth or behavior on the child.
6.
macaque plays mindpong with Neuralink (video)
Neuralink is developing a fully-implanted, wireless, high-channel count brain-machine interface (BMI) with the goal of enabling people with paralysis to directly use their neural activity to operate computers and mobile devices with speed and ease.
Check out neuralink.com
7.
Vue.js Documentary (30 min)
What began as a side project of a Google developer now shares the JS leaderboard with #React and #Angular. With the help of Sarah Drasner, Taylor Otwell, Thorsten Lünborg and many others from the Vue.js community, Evan You tells the story of how he fought against the odds to bring #Vuejs to life.
8.
Touchland: Transforming the hand sanitizer experience (video)
a hydrating, eco-friendly hand sanitizer mist designed to be more pleasant to use than traditional sanitizers.
9.
When medicine offers no relief, a biohacker begins a radical self-experiment
In 2015, the US scientist, artist and self-described ‘biohacker’ Josiah Zayner undertook a controversial project to help resolve his lifelong gastrointestinal issues. The plan was to replace the vast colonies of microbiota on and inside his body via transplants from a healthy donor – and then document the proceedings.
10.
Relax to some ambient music inspired by real-time Wikipedia edits.
11.
Take digital tours of ancient Egyptian monuments via Harvard’s Giza Project.
12.
Build your ideal background noise.
13.
Marvel at renderings of ahead-of-their-time inventions thought up by Leonardo da Vinci.
14.
Ride along on a slightly disconcerting road test of a self-driving car.
👽 My latest YouTube video
This is how I migrated my site to Notion using Super.so - a service that allows you to turn Notion pages into fast, functional websites with custom domains, fonts, Google analytics, and more. Migrating my site to Notion was easy and somehow frictionless as it only took me 1 day. There's some tweaking to be done, yes, but I found the benefits to be astonishing.
🐦 Tweets for thought
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Thank you for reading 🤜🤛
If you enjoyed this, maybe I can tempt you with my YouTube channel.
My website is here.
💌 My Favorite Links: articles I've enjoyed, podcasts, tech, software, ideas, and personal philosophies.
I do share some thoughts on 📰 Instagram & on 🐦 Twitter.
✍️ Medium at some point.
🔴 Discord server for the community.
Again, you can also reach out via Instagram, Twitter, or using gravitational waves.
That said, 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.
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Have a great day ahead!