Blob Opera

Control one of four opera voices at a time and the others will improves to sing along, recommended.

Interesting Hacker News comment on different kinds of work / learning

David Epsteinā€™s /Range/ has a lot to say about this topic. Carmackā€™s idea of ā€˜deepā€™ work [0] is environmentally dependent. It works for him and for the places he has been at. But it is not a universal rule for learning in /all/ environments. Epstein uses Tiger Woods and Roger Federer as his headline case, but goes into many other forms of learning. Woodsā€™ golf is a /kind learning environment/; the rules are clear, the feedback is quick, the skills are straightforward. Federerā€™s tennis is an /unkind/ learning environment; the rules arenā€™t as clear, the feedback isnā€™t as quick, and the skills are more murky. A lot of tennis is the mind-game aspect and in elite tennis, you donā€™t get the same person very often. With programming and development, the environment Carmack talks about is a /kind/ learning environment (rules are stated, feedback is a compile away, skills are practicable). Contrast this to the business/marketing people whose environment is unkind (unclear rules, long feedback cycles, skill overload). Epstein relates the method to be great at a thingy is to know what environment you are in. This gives the keys to success. In kind learning environments like programming, golf, or chess, the key is practice and drilling, to do it until you canā€™t be bad anymore. In unkind learning environments like tennis, jazz, or marketing, the key is to learn as many things as you can as broadly as you can, to gain a reservoir of ideas to use.

Phoneme synthesis

Convert IPA phonetic notation text to speech

Why does Wikipedia link to an IPA chart instead of using this?

Cohomology for computer science video

NASA radiation testing reports (memory, CPUs, etc)

Radiation testing reports are publicly available on NASAā€™s website.

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Toucan - Learn a new language

Fun Chrome extension to replace English words with words from the language youā€™re learning so you can read them in context.

Weā€™ll show you words and phrases in the language you want to learn as you browse. Youā€™ll pick up vocabulary faster when you see it in context.

My personal cruxes for working on AI safety - EA Forum (Buck Shlegeris)

A Neighborhood of Infinity: The Essence of Quantum Computing

In other words, what I am saying is in direct contradiction with what is said by some of the founding fathers of quantum computing. Actually, I think thatā€™s a good thing, it means that whether Iā€™m right or wrong, I must be saying something non-trivial.

Pick up just about any paper describing a quantum algorithm and youā€™ll see that the important step is a ā€˜conspiracyā€™ to make the amplitudes of ā€˜undesirableā€™ states sum to zero (or at least something small). Probably the simplest example is counterfactual computation where it is arranged that the computation is executed along two different branches with equal and opposite amplitudes.

New David Spivak book

About the category /Poly/.

In this chapter we will investigate a remarkable category called /Poly/. We will see its intimate relationship with both dynamic processes, data storage and transformations, and decision-making.

Images of the samples from Ryugu

Material brought back from the Asteroid Ryugu. Also, contaminated? (See ā€œArtifical object?ā€ in last image)

Endnotes on 2020: Crypto and Beyond

Vitalik Buterin on 2020 and the future. Self-recommending.

But also, economics itself seems to be a less powerful tool in dealing with these issues. Out of all the challenges of 2020, how many can be understood by looking at supply and demand curves? One way to see what is going on here is by looking at the relationship between /economics/ and /politics/. In the 19th century, the two were frequently viewed as being tied together, a subject called ā€œ political economy ā€œ. In the 20th century, the two are more typically split apart. But in the 21st century, the lines between ā€œprivateā€ and ā€œpublicā€ are once again rapidly blurring. Governments are behaving more like market actors , and corporations are behaving more like governments .

So we have a world where:

  • One-to-one interactions are less important, one-to-many and many-to-many interactions are more important.
  • The environment is much more /chaotic/, and difficult to model with clean and simple equations. Many-to-many interactions particularly follow strange rules that we still do not understand well.
  • The environment is /dense/, and different categories of powerful actors are forced to live quite closely side by side with each other.

Brr

New Daniel BĆ¼nzli library for web programming. I canā€™t wait to try it.

Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine

Itā€™s pretty cool you can just download the source code of the Pfizer vaccine (in a Word docā€¦). Also, itā€™s only 4284 characters long.

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