Media highlights 2023 (January to June)

Published 30 June 2023

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Media I enjoyed from the first half of 2023. Previous lists:

Ordering remains arbitrary. Let me know if you find something from this list that you end up enjoying.

Books

I keep track of what I read on Goodreads.

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories — B. J. Novak
The White Album: Essays — Joan Didion
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life — George Saunders(sidenote: Get the audiobook for Saunder’s own gravelly avuncular armchair lecture narration. I also really enjoyed ‘The Incredible Buddha Boy’.)
The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics — Ben Buchanan
What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies — Tim Urban(sidenote: Robin Hanson has a review: “We might try to create and enforce social norms that encourage use of high minds, relative to low. Unfortunately, this distinction just isn’t identified very well in terms of clear enough observables, of the sort that social norms require for successful enforcement […] I suggest that what would really help are better social institutions”)
The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work — William Daniel Hillis
Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency — Andy Greenberg(sidenote: Works incredibly well as a sequel to American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road. The continuity is uncanny.)
Labor Econ Versus the World: Essays on the World’s Greatest Market — Bryan Caplan
Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers — Robert Jackall
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd Ed. — Edward Tufte
Diaspora — Greg Egan
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea — Barbara Decimal
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century — Louise Perry
Means of Ascent and The Path to Power (books 1 and 2 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson) — Robert Caro
The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq — Rory Stewart
The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Richard Rhodes(sidenote: An arresting passage: “We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn, and there were just a few streaks of gold in the east; you could see your neighbor very dimly […] Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen […] It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye […] A new thing had just been born” To Teller at Compañia Hill the burst “was like opening the heavy curtains of a darkened room to a flood of sunlight.” Had astronomers been watching they could have seen it reflected from the moon, literal moonshine.)

Music

I log most things on rateyourmusic.com. I also have a Spotify with some playlists.

Absolute highlights are maybe Gongjoong Doduk,13 Songs, the Nicolas Jaar set’, The Gorge ‘98, Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space, with some recency bias.

Favourite songs

매듭 The Knot (Mid-Air Thief, from 공중도덕 (Gongjoong Doduk))
Oh My Love (Cécil McLorin Salvant, from Gouache)(sidenote: The Lennon track played straight as love ballad, works amazingly.)
Binz (Solange, from When I Get Home)
Orient (Parts 1 & 2) (Don Cherry, from “Mu” First Part / “Mu” Second Part)
Nightingale (EP) from Mammal Hands
101 FM (Little Simz)
Waltz For Debby (Bill Evans Trio)
Heavy Things (Phish, from Fukuoka 06/23)
Red Clay (alt take) (Freddie Hubbard)

Other things

Films and videos

I watched two great trilogies for the first time:
- Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight (2013)
- The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), The Return of the King (2003)
The King of Kong (2007)
The Return of Benjamin Lay
The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can(sidenote: In particular, modern soda cans solve the problem of how to create a tab which easily opens the pressurised can, without falling off once opened. Also, the little tab on a drinks can always folds to the left when it’s opened. The more you know.)
The Speedrun Where Link Stares at Rupees for 17 Hours
The Spring Paradox
YouTube, the jewel of the internet(sidenote: I think we generally don’t appreciate that our willingness to pay for access to sites like YouTube is probably very high. They provide a lot of value which doesn’t show up in GDP (in the same way nice weather does). Also, YouTube seems to have solved their comment ranking algorithm? Contrary to what (I imagine) someone who hasn’t checked in recently might believe, the top comments on popular videos are almost universally constructive and almost bizarrely nice.)
Neural Network 3D Simulation
world’s best ai vs geoguessr pro
Real-life fractal zoom
Geoffrey Hinton: The Foundations of Deep Learning
Solving the mystery of the impossible cord.
Safety evaluations and standards for AI | Beth Barnes | EAG Bay Area 23
A surprisingly sparse suduko
Mini Countries Abroad: How Embassies Work
Building a 4D Rubik’s cube

Websites

Gandalf(sidenote: Very neat game to get intuitions for prompt injection: find ways to get LLM Gandalf to tell you the password for the level, except LLM Gandalf is instructed not to reveal the word. I’m stuck on level 7.) prompt injection game
Aaronson oracle(sidenote: Scott Aaronson in Quantum Computing Since Democritus: “In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time.”)
Two approaches to ‘transformers from scratch’
A visual book recommender

Writing

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