Approved Thoughts

A jumbo edition this week after a two-week break that was really not necessary.

1. At Secret Math Meeting, Researchers Struggle to Outsmart AI:

   On a weekend in mid-May, a clandestine mathematical conclave convened. Thirty of the world’s most renowned mathematicians traveled to Berkeley, Calif., with some coming from as far away as the U.K. The group’s members faced off in a showdown with a “reasoning” chatbot that was tasked with solving problems they had devised to test its mathematical mettle. After throwing professor-level questions at the bot for two days, the researchers were stunned to discover it was capable of answering some of the world’s hardest solvable problems. “I have colleagues who literally said these models are approaching mathematical genius,” says Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia and a leader and judge at the meeting.

2. Hajj on Horseback (NYT):

   More than 1.5 million people traveled to Saudi Arabia this year for the hajj. Only three of them rode on horseback all the way from Spain, recreating the pilgrimage of Andalusian Muslims centuries ago and sharing their travels in the most modern way with big followings on social media.

3. Festivo, All Festivals, Everywhere (in Asia, for now): A calendar of all festivals.

4. Did She or Didn’t She? She Did, and She’ll Tell You Exactly How. (NYT): I am surprised it took so long to get here and not at all surprised who made it happen. Smartest family?

5. New York City’s Best Chefs Pick Their Favorite Restaurants (NYT)

6. Is it any surprise he won? (The Pope):

   As a bishop in Peru, Robert Prevost was often on the lookout for used cars that he could buy cheap and fix up himself for use in parishes around his diocese. With cars that were really broken down, he'd watch YouTube videos to learn how to fix them.

7. I used to be a high-performing robot and Maybe you’re not Actually Trying. "Agency" is having a moment online as seen in all the "You can just do things" memes. Interesting.

8. LLMs in Kitchen?: I made Tofu with peanut sauce today based on a receipe created by Claude. Honestly, the proportions were off but it wasn't half bad.

   are LLMs 10X-ing anyone else in the kitchen? I am so much more confident cooking when I can ask infinite dumb questions and brainstorm ideas, backup plans, substitutes, etc.

   in the last couple weeks I’ve made jerk chicken with coconut rice and mango salsa, chipotle turkey tacos, honey-lime sriracha chicken & sesame snap peas, skillet-blistered tomato and ravioli, and a fancy dessert. some of these things were just me looking in the fridge and saying “uhh this is what I have, help me turn it into something good” and so far they’ve all been great.

   I’m the stereotypical guy that knows how to make ~3 variations on a protein bowl and maybe ~2 nicer dishes for impressing girls when I was single and that’s about it.

   it’s fun feeling my agency expand and confidence quickly increase in this very practical domain. AI is great.

9. Andrej Karpathy's Keynote at YC. Self recommending as some say.

10. Kitty Olympics: AI Video is getting better.

11. Texan guy recites his electric bill like he’s a character in a William Faulkner novel. Hilarious.

12. AI is transforming Indian call centers.:

    For three years, Kartikeya Kumar hesitated before picking up the phone, anticipating another difficult conversation with another frustrated customer.

    The call center agent, now 29, had tried everything to eliminate what a colleague called the “Indian-ism” in his accent. He mimicked the dialogue from Marvel movies and belted out songs by Metallica and Pink Floyd. Relief finally arrived in the form of artificial intelligence.

13. Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide by Ethan Mollick:

    Every few months I put together a guide on which AI system to use. Since I last wrote my guide, however, there has been a subtle but important shift in how the major AI products work. Increasingly, it isn't about the best model, it is about the best overall system for most people. The good news is that picking an AI is easier than ever and you have three excellent choices. The challenge is that these systems are getting really complex to understand. I am going to try and help a bit with both.

14. How cultures heal:

    Every digital platform is flooding the market with short videos, but the audience is now spending more time with longform video—and by a huge margin.

15. Flying on Frying Oil:

    The noodle hawkers in Kuala Lumpur are getting a nice little bump in profit but who is going stall to stall to check that the oil is in fact used? And what counts as used? One fry or two? Clever entrepreneurs have cut out the middleman. Virgin palm oil can be substituted for used cooking oil and voila! Sustainable aviation fuel is contributing to deforestation in Malaysia. Malaysia exports far more “used” cooking oil than oil that it uses. No surprise.

16. The search for MH370 has resumed. (NYT). What a mystery.

17. Rick Perry: I’m dedicating my life to fighting for a psychedelic drug. (NYT): Yes, Rick Perry.

    Marcus had lived with my wife, Anita, and me at the governor’s mansion after coming home from war. He was in constant pain from his injuries and dependent on opioids just to get through the day. He also drank heavily and used nicotine to cope with stress. Worse, he was carrying the burdens that come with war: grief, trauma and survivor’s guilt. For years, we tried to find him help. And for years, nothing worked. But after undergoing ibogaine treatment at a clinic in Mexico, Marcus came back changed. He no longer needed opioids. He hasn’t touched alcohol in years. He even quit chewing Copenhagen, a longtime habit.

18. When your father is a swimming coach

19. Alpha School:

    I first heard about Alpha in May 2024, and in the absence of randomized‑controlled clarity, I did what any moderately obsessive parent with three elementary-aged kids and an itch for data would do: I moved the family across the country to Austin for a year and ran the experiment myself (unfortunately, despite trying my best we never managed to have identical twins, so I stopped short of running a proper control group. My wife was less disappointed than I was).

20. Your semi-regular reminder to subscribe to Don't Worry About the Vase.

A lot of NYT links today. For all its flaws, of which there might be many, the NYT is incomparable.

1. Good advice from Ross Douthat:

   Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read.

2. Or play a boardgame?:

   New York can be expensive, overwhelming and intimidating, and sometimes it is hard for people to connect. A martini can cost $25 in a bar that’s too noisy for conversation, and raucous nightclubs aren’t for everyone. So a free, monthly B.Y.O.B. (bring your own board game) night in an office building food court has become a big hit.

   In addition to Werewolf, people were playing classics, like chess and mahjong, but also relatively newer games, including Catan, Splendor, Hues and Cues, Saboteur, Nertz, Wavelength, Blokus and Camel Up.

   Board game events and clubs have grown in popularity in recent years — in New York and across the country. This one is organized by Richard Ye, a 24-year-old who works in finance. He bills the event as New York City’s largest board game meet-up, and a video of Mr. Ye celebrating his March gathering — where 500 people were in attendance — was widely shared on social media.

   File another one under #youcanjustdothings.

3. What I Didn’t Know About the Egg Industry Horrified Me: As a life-long vegetarian who can't even imagine turning vegan, I try to avoid evangelizing about what people should eat. Despite the click-baity headline and not the most objective tone, the scientific brekthrough here is worth cheering.

   Called in ovo sexing, it determines the sex of the chick embryo long before it hatches, allowing the producers to get rid of the male eggs and hatch only the females.

   This is important because:

   I had no idea that while the Ladies enjoyed shelter and sunshine, fresh bugs and freedom, their newborn brothers faced a gruesome fate shared by 6.5 billion male chicks around the world each year. These male birds can’t lay eggs but also aren’t raised for meat. Because they come from egg-laying breeds, they don’t grow big or fast enough to be used for food. So they are ground up alive or gassed to death.

4. Questions about the Future of AI by Dwarkesh Patel: I haven't read most of this but what I have is great.

5. Another important question about AI by Radek Sienkiewicz : Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? Click the link. They really do.

6. In a year will this still make news?:

   Australian Radio Network (ARN), the media company behind KIIS, as well as Gold and iHeart, used an AI-generated female Asian host to broadcast 4 hours of midweek radio, without disclosing it.

   This probably still will:

   “It seems very odd that CADA hired a new ethnically-diverse woman to their youth station and then just forgot to tell anyone.”

   It’s notable because ARN is the whitest thing in media since the Night King and his throng of walkers on Game of Thrones. The network is also home of Australia’s most expensive, complained about and censured radio show, Kyle and Jackie O.

7. Penn Station’s Not-So-Secret Other Life: The People’s Dance Studio:

   “Penn Station is first and foremost a transportation hub,” said Aaron Donovan, the deputy communications director for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “But you know, as long as folks abide by the rules and regulations that govern the use of the space and don’t block platforms or interfere with passenger flows, we generally don’t have any problem with what’s going on.”

8. Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining by Simon Willison:

   First, this is really fun. Watching the model’s thought process as it churns through the photo, pans and zooms and discusses different theories about where it could be is wildly entertaining. It’s like living in an episode of CSI.

   It’s also deeply dystopian. Technology can identify locations from photographs now. It’s vitally important that people understand how easy this is—if you have any reason at all to be concerned about your safety, you need to know that any photo you share—even a photo as bland as my example above—could be used to identify your location.

1. Unintentionally hilarious:

   The Danish Defense Ministry also plans to fund two more dogsled teams to protect the 375,000-square-mile Northeast Greenland National Park, the largest in the world. These would be the hardcore Sirius patrols, viewed by the Danes as the Navy SEALs of the Arctic, which began operations during World War II.

   Two. Not one.

2. How to vibe code?: A fairly decent app and when you see his conversations with ChatGPT, its mostly just plain english. Does a programming background help. Sure, but you can go quite far without any. Here are the actual conversations:

   a. Starting the app

   b. Enhancements

   c. More enhancements

   d. Deploy to iPhone

   e. The actual App

3. Why we ended up homeschooling:

   TL;DR: homeschooling makes it much easier to individualize education, which makes it more efficient and meaningful.

4. Tokyo vs. Rest of Japan:

   This is called the sponge city effect in my little world of demographics. In a declining region we often see the biggest city soaking up population since jobs and health services etc cluster in a single area rather than spreading out. Japan has been shrinking for three decades while Tokyo happily grows.

5. How Much Would You Need to be Paid to Live on a Deserted Island for 1.5 Years and Do Nothing but Kill Seals?: What it says on the label.

6. Best take:

   people are rightfully upset about this atlantic story because it gets at a truly alarming issue: being added to large, ongoing group texts without consent

   😂

7. True that!:

   Your brain will invent fake problems for you if you don't go out and find real ones

8. I don't know if this is the right path, but its the right destination

Most books should have been blog posts, most blog posts should have been tweets and most tweets should never have been written. - Unknown Tweeter

Another set of AI-heavy links. I can’t help myself right now.

1. Set up a fake cricket league:

   These arrangements might have suggested that the league featured professional-grade cricket that an online audience would find worth watching, but in fact, the players weren’t established cricketers or even skilled amateurs. They were locals that Davda had recruited with the promise of paying 400 rupees (about £3.50) per day — twice what people in the area make in daily wages working on farms and for local businesses.

   Respect.

2. How to choose a religion (NYT Paywall):

   But for the general obligation imposed upon us all, as time-bound creatures in a world shot through with intimations of transcendence, a different Eliot line is apt: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

   I didn’t know Eliot plagiarized The Gita. The book is called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. I hope to read this book.

3. I am (not) a Failure: Lessons Learned From Six (and a half) Failed Startup Attempts. I am a sucker for these stories, having a failed startup in my recent past. The conclusion conveniently helps me feel good about the failure.

4. Agency:

5. How to prepare for an AI future: Coincidentally, I ran into a number of pieces on this topic last week. The first one from Tyler Cowen and the second from Nate Silver. Both have the same advice in the first place: use LLMs more than you do and for more things than you do.

6. Using AI to build a nuclear fusor: Combining the wisdom of the previous two links.

7. Using AI to improve learning: I would love to see how the tutor was created. Perhaps I, too, need to take the advice from links 4 & 5 and do this project myself.

1. How to be More Agentic by Cate Hall - Staying with the new year resolution theme… as the twitter meme goes, you can just do things.

2. Life Without Stars: Stanets and Ploons by Julian Gough - Could most life in the Universe exist without stars, in the deep oceans on icy moons of large planets?

3. How to do the jhanas by Nadia Asparouhova

4. Will Smith eating spaghetti - the pace of progress in AI is mind boggling.

5. How Dwarkesh Patel uses AI a podcast by Dan Shipper - Also subscribe to Dwarkesh’s podcast if you don’t already.

6. A Tutorial on Teaching Data Analytics with Generative AI by Robert L. Bray