Roaring Bitmaps

Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

TikTok and the Sorting Hat

Excellent post on how TikTok became what it is.

The Sorting Hat is perhaps the most curious plot device from the Harry Potter universe. Is it a metaphor for genetic determinism? Did Draco have any hope of not being a Slytherin? By sorting Draco into that house, did it shape his destiny? Is the hat a metaphor for the U.S. college admissions system, with all its known biases? Is Harry Potter, sorted into Gryffindor, a legacy admit?

Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps.

Chrisopher Alexander: A Primer (video)

See tweet section for more Chrisopher Alexander

My tier list of interesting YouTube channels

By Tristan Hume

Gelman Against Parsimony (lesswrong)

Robert Sapolsky Human Behavioral Biology

Fun series of lectures I've been watching when I have some free time and feel like thinking a bit but not too hard. Companion website

Adversarial Examples that Fool both Computer Vision and Time-Limited Humans

A Close Call: How a Near Failure Propelled Me to Succeed

Common Crawl

"We build and maintain an open repository of web crawl data that can be accessed and analyzed by anyone."

T5: Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer

Images of Panamax Ships in the Panama Canal Locks

Apparently neopanamax and post-neopanamax are ship size standards.

Tea preparation ISO standard

Abstract: The method consists in extracting of soluble substances in dried tea leaf, containing in a porcelain or earthenware pot, by means of freshly boiling water, pouring of the liquor into a white porcelain or earthenware bowl, examination of the organoleptic properties of the infused leaf, and of the liquor with or without milk or both.

NeuroSAT: Learning a SAT Solver from Single-Bit Supervision

Visualizing A Neural Machine Translation Model (Mechanics of Seq2seq Models With Attention)

An Untrollable Mathematician Illustrated

Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks

What does this prove? Some of the most gorgeous visual "shrink" proofs ever invented

11 Notes on McKinsey

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