At least 5 interesting things in August

1. The grammar lesson that made me a better writer (and a happier person)

A short post and piece of advice that’s actually unique and is probably worth the occasional reminder.

2. New Zealand as Mediocristan

With an intro like this, how can you resist reading?

Last weekend I found myself in hospital with mystery chest pain. This led me to think many brand-new thoughts, such as: ‘AAAAAGH shit shit shit I’m too young to die’. At the same time, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by my up-close-and-personal tour of the public health apparatus. After being covered in electrodes and wheeled through the emergency room bleeping and blooping—just like on TV!—I was swabbed, exsanguinated, irradiated, ultra-sounded, interrogated, and eventually served lunch, for a loose definition of ‘lunch’. A few hours later, the doctors were satisfied there was no problem with my heart, and I was free to go.

Good old New Zealand. No ruinous hospital bill dangling over my head, no labyrinthine insurance claim to navigate. In fact, there was no paperwork whatsoever. I just strolled straight out the front door.

3. Did an experienced alpinist leave his girlfriend to die at the top of a mountain? [Mirror]

Spoilers: The answer is yes. And you’re not going to be pleased with the sentencing.

4. The dark night of mathematics

At the start of the month, OpenAI’s Astra model proved the existence of non-sofic groups. Not having touched group theory since college, and even then only briefly, I have no idea what that means (other than I’m pretty sure it’s not that kind of sofic), but I think it’s fair to say that in response, mathematicians have started to existentially freak out.

(That’s not me casting judgement. I’m a software developer and I’ve been existentially freaking out for the past six months.)

The headline link I’ve shared is the most evocative, but I also highly recommend reading this call to action.

Mathematicians, math enthusiasts, and curious laypeople are responding to these developments in ways that I believe obscure what is, for me, the true heart of the problem. I do not speak for everyone in the math community in my response. But I suspect I am not alone.

I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments. I have been screaming internally for days. It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare. The recent Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics is, to me, a well-muffled scream. A saccharine mélange of self-soothing over which looms a painfully obvious absence.

5. The defining distinction of conservatism is [its lack of] empathy

He worked as a prison guard for one year, and had to stop because he didn’t like who he was becoming. To protect himself as a prison guard, he had to be vigilant, paranoid, dehumanizing. What’s most interesting about his account is his observation of what the prison guards and inmates shared: complete antipathy, and the same exalted idol.

Every morning at the prison where I worked, I’d pass through the same ritual. Badge in. Keys collected. Radio check. Then the walk through the sally port into a world where empathy was a liability and cruelty as much of a currency as ramen. What I didn’t expect was how much that world would teach me about the one outside the wire, about the officers who guarded, the politicians who governed, and the invisible psychological threads connecting them all.

Bonus

1. Emily Wilson’s Christopher Nolan hit piece is painfully transparent.
2. The unforced death of San Francisco’s famous Market Street.
3. The enduring unpopularity of Woodrow Wilson.
4. Leveragers: The story of the rationalist, bodyworking, demon-infested Silicon Valley cult.
5. A 2XKO senior producer grapples with trauma after working on a game dead after 10 years, and gets insulted and demeaned for downplaying his culpability / passing the buck.
6. Whatever this genre of joke is.
7. For I am the old one of Alba’s shoresOlder than the forest, the peat bog, the moors

Quite a few of the links this time leaned dark, so to balance that out a little… here’s an especially adorable owl.