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AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).

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  AI text detectors and the LLMs they try to catch are locked in a permanent cat-and-mouse arms race.

  LLMs

  Their words

  AI checkers are essentially a cat-and-mouse game. AI checkers may learn to detect a certain pattern that is indicative of AI-generated content. Then, the next LLM may incidentally or deliberately not exhibit that pattern and avoid detection. The AI checker then has to be updated to detect said LLM, and so forth.

  Building an AI Text Detector From Scratchmagazine.sebastianraschka.com

Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Thinking Forth

  Their words

  Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie. I used to have this habit where I learned various programming languages. To challenge my perspective, I chose languages from families and paradigms that were fundamentally different from what I already knew. Occasionally, I stumbled upon greatness. Thinking Forth presents programming as a creative process, and it delivers those lessons in an entertaining and pedagogical way. The book is particularly strong on software analysis and design, but it's the execution and technical writing that brought the book to my top five. This is the book for anyone writing about software — Leo's way is the way to do it.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

From one piece Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The fear that a big lab will simply build your product is overstated, because no organisation can aggressively prosecute a hundred priorities at once.

  Google

  Their words

  And just human organizations are complicated and it's very hard to have um to manage to aggressively prosecute 100 different priorities and to deal with all the issues and interference that arises among them and so forth. And so, you know, Google has done incredibly well in a bunch of specific places, but it's not like Google has done all the things even if in some kind of basic material sense, uh Google maybe, you know, had that ability.

  youtube.com

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  Dropping out of college is not a trapdoor and the reputational cost is nil: as far as anyone can tell, nobody has ever cared.

  Their words

  You know, I think a lot of parents think that dropping out is very risky and impune your reputation for the rest of your life and so forth. And as far as I can tell, nobody has ever cared.

  youtube.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  A History of Biology

  Their words

  The chapter on medieval Islam wasn't very deep, otherwise this is truly excellent, particularly when covering the very complicated 20th century. I don't have much more to say, because it is so good, except that I should try to get my brother to review it.

  bactra.org

Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.

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  Medieval law codes prescribed death for almost everything and almost never delivered it, and the reason is patronage rather than mercy.

  Their words

  And then you look at the actual trial records, and maybe one in a hundred convictions for that crime actually ends in a capital sentence. And almost all of the other ones end in a fine or a public flogging, but not in the sentence that's on the books.

  youtube.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  The Scientific Renaissance, 1450--1630

  Their words

  An old (1962) but still interesting history of the earlier part of the scientific revolution. In every field, Boas traces a basically-humanist impulse to discard medieval ideas and accomplishments, in favor of reviving antiquity, the more antique the better, which only gradually turned towards striving to go beyond Greco-Roman science to something actually new and unprecedented.

  bactra.org

Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.

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  Babylonian omens never meant that A causes B; the diviner could only ever say what might happen.

  Their words

  So all you can ever do and ever, ever have been able to do is to say, “There’s a sign here that says that the queen could die,” meaning “could die,” not “will die.”

  youtube.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  Queen Demon

  Their words

  I do not think this book could really be enjoyed without the previous book, but with it, it's lots of skillfully-written fun, and leaves me eager for more.

  bactra.org

Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

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  Dinosaurs were doing fine right up to the impact; there is no good reason to think they were already in terminal decline.

  Their words

  But yeah, there's been a back and forth about whether dinosaurs were already on their way out or were they a bit limited by the very end of the Cretaceous. I think the more recent analyses have shown that's probably not the case, because in other words, they were basically doing fine right up to the extinction event. And so yeah, if the asteroid hadn't hit, there's no reason to think that they were on some kind of terminal decline.

  youtube.com

Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.

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  The Mongol Empire was destroyed by the plague, which its own courier system carried out of southern China to the rest of the world.

  China

  Their words

  But this great system that united, it's called the Yam or Ortogh, that had united everything, people could move back and forth quickly that it could also take the plague out of Southern China into all parts of the world. And I do think that's what happened. And the plague destroyed the Mongol system.

  youtube.com

Medieval historian at the LSE; writes Going Medieval and The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, and spends a lot of it correcting what people think the period was like.

From one piece On what Americans know about medieval history 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  How harshly people judge the Middle Ages tracks how little they know about it.

  Their words

  Clearly as well we see that the more people know about the medieval period, the more likely they are to be correct about it.

  On what Americans know about medieval historygoing-medieval.com

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  The Renaissance and early modern period were not a better time to be alive than the Middle Ages they are said to have rescued Europe from.

  Europe

  Their words

  I am not here to tell you that the medieval period is a specifically peaceful time, but it pales in comparison to what goes down in the early modern period, in which both the apparently beloved Renaissance and Enlightenment periods lie.

  On what Americans know about medieval historygoing-medieval.com

Writer and consultant on technology, organizations and history; founded the blog Ribbonfarm and now writes the Contraptions newsletter.

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  City of Fortune

  Their words

  I read that last month, and visited Venice while I was reading it, and I was struck by the extent to which medieval Venice was a well-oiled political economy machine.

  contraptions.venkateshrao.com

Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.

From one piece Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Somebody was mapping the world during the last Ice Age, which is why medieval Portolan charts carry accurate longitudes and an Antarctica nobody had seen.

  Their words

  I don’t think that makes sense. I think somebody was mapping the world during the last ice age, but that doesn’t mean that they had our kind of tech.

  youtube.com

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  Nobody knows how the Great Pyramid was built: neither ramps nor wet sand can lift seventy-ton granite blocks three hundred feet into the air.

  Their words

  But that is not going to help you get dozens of 70 ton granite blocks 300 feet in the air to form the roof of the King’s Chamber and the floor of the chamber above it, and the roof of that chamber, and the floor of the chamber above that, and so on and so forth. Wet sand never got those objects up there.

  youtube.com

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

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  The origin of life is abrupt, not gradual — life snaps into existence.

  Their words

  I think it’s actually abrupt. I’ve never been able to say that in my entire career before. I’ve always gone back and forth about whether the original life was gradual or abrupt. I think it’s very abrupt.

  youtube.com

Neuroscientist at UC Davis; studies memory and wrote Why We Remember.

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  Expertise is not passively absorbing patterns — it is learning what to look for, which makes becoming an expert a training of attention.

  Their words

  This fits with some of the studies of chess experts and so forth that it’s not so much that you learn the patterns passively. You learn what to look for. You learn what’s important and what’s not.

  youtube.com

Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.

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  User Mag

  Their words

  Taylor Lorenz is my personal internet culture queen, and I simply follow wherever she leads.

  platformer.substack.com

Machine learning engineer working on recommender systems, personalization and information retrieval. Previously worked on LLMs and LLM infrastructure at Mozilla.ai and on ML and recsys at Duo, Tumblr, Automattic and Comcast; wrote the 'What are embeddings?' text and ran the Normconf conference.

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  The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

  Their words

  A wonderful idea for a book and brilliant execution as she lives from Medieval France to modern day.

  vickiboykis.com

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

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  The Black Company

  Their words

  I enjoyed the first book a great deal: it’s in a fairly stock medieval setting, but it handles the dark fantasy well

  gwern.net

Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.

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  Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900

  Their words

  David Graff's Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 is actually a political-institutional history of China from 200 AD-1000 AD, and is probably the best political narrative history we have for the time period.

  scholars-stage.org

Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Life expectancy in Italy fell sharply between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from 35-40 years in the 1200s to 18 by 1500.

  Their words

  In Italy, average life expectancies in the solidly Medieval 1200s were 35-40, while by the year 1500 (definitely Renaissance) life expectancy in Italian city states had dropped to 18.

  exurbe.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

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  Eye movement reprocessing went from alternative to establishment, and moving your eyes while talking about a trauma does seem to help you process it.

  EMDRTrauma

  Their words

  Eye movement directed reprocessing (alternative when the book was written, now basically establishment) where you move your eyes back and forth while talking about your trauma, and this seems to somehow help you process it better.

  Book Review: The Body Keeps The Scoreslatestarcodex.com

Full-stack developer, creator of Tailwind CSS; writes at adamwathan.me and makes courses and screencasts for web developers.

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  Calendly

  Their words

  I use Calendly to schedule podcast interviews and other meetings. So much nicer than trying to work out a time to chat by going back and forth in an email thread.

  adamwathan.me