Links (VII)
- How to sort 10x faster with SIMD instructions.
- A C++ library the makes using SIMD easier. (Used in the sorting application mentioned above.)
- What you need to know to understand ggplot.
- What makes the United States exceptional?
- The team that made the world's first million transistor chip was surprisingly small.
- Masonry structures can be analyzed graphically. These analyses are often more interpretable and allow failure modes to be more easily explored than numerical methods do.
- Why do neural networks generalize well? Because they find large margins.
- One went insane, one didn't stop, and one became the first man to sail nonstop around the world.
- It is possible to make strangers feel close to one another within an hour of meeting.
- Nicely written account of a boom town.
- Fascinating profile of Grigori Perelman.
- Chomsky on the lack of substance in postmodernism (with some interesting asides on Foucault too).
- Are there any intellectuals on the level of Bertrand Russell today?
- Welcome to Yodaville, Marine aviation's urban close air support training range.
- Most content from startups is marketing and not very interesting, but this short article gives a good overview of different methods of tracking nearby aircraft and why Zipline chose to use sound.
- One of the dumbest things rationalists subscribe to is runaway-AI. Curtis Yarvin has an (unusually) coherent and relatively succinct explanation of why this fear is overblown.
- Mothers of boys with gender identity disorder are substantially more likely to be borderline.
- Will deep learning models that rely on scaling laws to improve performance run out of data before they get good enough?
- Marshall McLuhan is one of those thinkers who used to be important but who now nobody reads, but how did he become famous?
- Psychoceramics is "the study of crack-pots, a.k.a. kooks, cranks, flakes".
- Was there an elephant civilization prior to human civilization?
- If the Soviet union had fast computers and the right mathematical ideas could their planned economy compete with capitalism?
- Nice slides on a modeling non-linear time series.
- Emily Oster's eulogy to her mother.