Simulating copies of the Earth
Here’s your monthly dose of treats, goodies, ideas, pieces of research, principles, models, and other random stuff curated by Robert
Follow the white rabbit 🐇
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Have you ever felt like everything around you looks the same? Like every building, every advertisement, every product, and even people's lifestyles all seem to blend together into a single, homogenous blob? You're not alone. Here is a video essay I have created.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin says in rare public appearance that company ‘definitely messed up’ Gemini image launch
Marginalia, those scribbles in the margins, have a long history dating back to ancient times when scholars would add commentary and interpretations to classical texts.
The mathematician who finds the poetry in math and the math in poetry
Remembering what flying was like fifty years ago
Anthropic announced evidence the AIs have become self-aware. What happened? 1. Claude realized he was an AI 2. Claude realized he was in a simulation 3. Claude (unprompted!) realized this simulation was probably an attempt to test him somehow He showed he’s fully aware he might be being tested and is capable of "faking being nice" to pass the test. This isn’t incontrovertible proof, of course, but it’s evidence. Importantly, we have been seeing more and more behavior like this, but this is an usually clear example. Importantly, Claude was NOT prompted to look for evidence that he was being tested - he deduced that on his own. And Claude showed theory of mind, by (unprompted) inferring the intent of the questioner. (More precisely, btw, Anthropic used the term “meta-awareness”)
Good movies for rationalists?
Laurie Anderson made a generative AI chatbot of Lou Reed, her late partner
Taiwanese chip companies are building in China, for geopolitical diversification.
AI Will Help Mankind Colonize Mars
2023 goes down as one of the safest years in commercial aviation history
Michel Talagrand took home the 2024 Abel Prize for his work on stochastic systems, randomness and a proof of a physics reaction that many experts thought was unsolvable.
Amazon Adds $2.75 Billion to Its Stake in the A.I. Start-Up Anthropic
Nvidia is simulating a copy of the Earth
Aestheticism and utilitarianism: the principles of a new logic in Dostoevsky
Building complex reasoning skills online through open-ended activities
Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art.
(͡ ͡° ͜ つ ͡͡°)Telegram/Discord group for me to save & share random stuff that might be useful.
X/Twitter - https://x.com/rtheoryxyz
👾 some YouTube video essays
— 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.