• Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, an intro to this book that will make its way onto the pile as soon as it comes out
• Inclusivity In Healthcare Should Not Be Valued Above Our Paramount Mandate: First, Do No Harm (controversial?)
• New capitalism III: Capital from Branko Milanović, who should be on the short list for the “Nobel” in economics for this series of posts alone
• Things: The Surprising Power of Stuff That Exists is a brilliant description of every book Malcolm Gladwell and his lookalikes ever published

Note: While these link posts are usually untitled, this one is in reference to recent troubles at the Marginal Revolution blog. Isn’t HTML great?

I have updated my now page. The last update was in March so let’s call this my Quarterly-ish update.

A version of Poisoning Pigeons in the Park was the first mp3 I downloaded and played — on Winamp, of course — some time in the mid 1990s, spurred by an episode of Chicago Hope of all things. R.I.P. Tom Lehrer.

The cell phone of my childhood, still in operation. If you are in Serbia and need to leave the Matrix there are quite a few of them around.

Flighty does not seem to be as up-to-date traveling internationally as it is on domestic flights. The IST airport departures board had our flight listed as delayed as soon as we got there, yet the app thought everything was fine. Trust no one.

Yesterday I learned about talismanic shirts, and now I know what nerds from 500 years ago did for fun and profit.

Day 2 in Istanbul, finding out that the coffee we had been ordering from Amazon for years started out within walking distance of Hagia Sophia.

Casey Handmer on LLMs:

Every time one of the labs releases an updated model I give it a thorough shakedown on physics, in the style of the oral examination that is still used in Europe and a few other places. Claude, Grok, Gemini, and GPT are all advancing by leaps and bounds on a wide variety of evals, some of which include rather advanced or technical questions in both math and science, including Physics Olympiad-style problems, or grad school qualifying exams.

And yet, none of these models would be able to pass the physicist Turing test. It’s not even a matter of knowledge, I know of reasonably talented middle schoolers with no specialized physics training who could reason and infer on some of these basic questions in a much more fluent and intuitive way.

Alexander the Great had Aristotle, some poor kid will have a brain-dead version of Wheatley.

(Casey’s post is deeper than simple LLM-trashing for he gives the actual 8-step process of reasoning through physics problems, so please do read the whole thing.)