What the Accelerationist’s Political Compass says about us
Every now and then, this “political compass” of acceleration vs. deceleration, hyperhuman vs. unhuman pops up. It’s a pretty interesting breakdown so I wanted to jot down a couple thoughts.
Thoughts on Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem series
Several weeks ago I read through the entire Remembrance of Earth’s Past series, which starts with The Three-Body Problem then continues with The Dark Forest and Death’s End. While somewhat disappointing from a literary perspective, the series nevertheless has a fresh perspective on certain aspects of society and culture, which I will briefly discuss.
Meals that are healthy, quick, inexpensive, simple, and tasty
Although I enjoy cooking for its own sake, I am often too occupied by other things in my life to spend time planning and preparing elaborate meals.
The West could not have created NieR: Automata
The rot of Western culture is well summarized in a single observation: it could not have created NieR: Automata.
Dear readerーwhen was the last time that you were deeply moved, at a primal level, by a work of Western art?
Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
What happens to the distribution of programmer salaries in the age of LLMs? I argue they will separate bimodally, much like what happened to lawyers’ salaries in the 1990s due to the rise of the Internet.
Underrated aspects of the “genetic singularity”
We now know that human traits are largely:
- additively composed of thousands of non-pleiotropic genomic variants,
- largely independent without noticeable tradeoffs between different traits at the margin, and
- increasingly predictable from genetic data as models improve and biobanks get larger.
For simplicity I will define the “genetic singularity” as the point when people become freely able to explore the high-dimensional space of human genetic variation without restriction, easily selecting or editing embryos with +5 standard deviation boosts to tens or hundreds of desirable traits. In my view, this is inevitable and is perhaps 1-2 decades out.
レビュー：ESSE DUE （パスタ、ケーキ）
赤坂においてイタリア料理の店。安い上にとても美味しかったです。料理の範囲が印象的でした。総合評価：4.5/5
レビュー：初音（餡蜜）
東京の名店「甘味処初音」のレビュー。総合評価：3.5/5
What happened at Alameda Research
If you want to read a poorly researched fluff piece about Sam Bankman-Fried, feel free to go to the New York Times. If you want to understand what happened at Alameda Research and how Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), Sam Trabucco, and Caroline Ellison incinerated over $20 billion dollars of fund profits and FTX user deposits, read this article. (And follow me on Twitter at @0xfbifemboy!)
To be clear, we still don’t have a perfect understanding of what exactly happened at Alameda Research and FTX. However, at this point, I feel that we have enough information to get a grasp on the broad strokes. Through a combination of Twitter users’ investigations, forum anecdotes, and official news releases, the history of these two intertwined companies becomes progressively less hazy, slowly coalescing into something resembling a consistent narrative.
A simpler way to memorize seed phrases
Seed phrases are mnemonic phrases of 12 or 24 words where each word is drawn from the BIP-0039 list of 2,048 distinct English words. There is a well-defined process where a seed phrase can be used to generate arbitrarily many private keys for cryptocurrency wallets. For people who self-custody their assets, i.e., directly access and interact with their own wallets, it is imperative to have access to the seed phrase used to generate them, in case of device failure, theft, unrecoverability, etc. However, memorizing 12 or 24 arbitrary words can be challenging and error-prone, while storing a seed phrase elsewhere (in a password manager, on a piece of paper, via a hardware wallet, and so on) exposes you to a variety of other risks.
I propose a novel method for generating “easily memorizable” seed phrases, which can be easily personalized or adapted as the user desires. These seed phrases are easy to remember, but hard to derive unless you have access to the Internet or a computer. In general, because you don’t typically benefit from having perfect recall of your seed phrase at all times (while you’re in the shower, hiking the Swiss Alps, and so on), you can memorize a procedure that is only computable with Internet access that is much easier to remember than a list of 12 or 24 arbitrary words. That is to say, we can choose to trade off “ease of reproduction” in return for “ease of memorization.”