For a contrarian take on LLMs as intelligent machines, here is Alexey Guzey saying that:

• ChatGPT understands what it reads
• LLMs are creative
• Compression is intelligence and ChatGPT compresses really well
• The idea of AGI is stupid
• It doesn’t matter if AGI is real or not

I remain dubious.

• Vinay Prasad Is a Bernie Sanders Acolyte in MAHA Drag (Apologies for linking to the WSJ. Please file it under “textbook hit piece”, that worked.)
• Zero-sum Thinking and the Labor Market (From Kyla Scanlon, whose substack blog is a jewel.)
• Design Your Own Rug! (We just came back from Istanbul, where rugs are no longer made by hand and the ones who are sold as such were made 40+ years ago and “refreshed. These are from Afghanistan and are “only” around $1K.)
• Belgrad Forest on Wikipedia (Speaking of Istanbul, the forest closest to it was named after the village next to it, “settled by thousands of Serbs who were deported to the capital Constantinople from the city of Belgrade in 1521” — to maintain a millennium-old Byzantine aqueduct. Please file it under “isn’t history fascinating”.)

• 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.