Nonfiction

  1. An article on (the video game) Final Fantasy Rebirth, and the task of trying to remake the old game - the outcomes of choices made, the strain for creative expression hauled back down by the pull towards recreating scenes from the old games.
  2. OpenPhil’s yearly report. Zvi had a good breakdown, read on Wordpress here or Substack here. Mostly business as usual, though it comes with the semi-news that they have set up a dedicated forecasting team.
  3. qntm on AI coding assistance. He finds it to involve only the most tedious parts of programming; checking others’ code; and much enjoys prefers actually writing code himself: that’s the fun part. I can relate. Use it only to check your own work, kill bugs, or give an undergraduate-level intro to a topic. Though note the unreliability in all 3 of these (for now).
  4. MIRI are posting monthly newsletters again! Additionally, I also found out this month there was an event on Agent Foundations held at Wytham Abbey sometime last year, with recordings available.
  5. The blogger Adam Mastrioanni on how to get out of mental bogs. (Not) related, the Fitzwilliam on Irish bogs.
  6. In addition to his official final report of the FHI, Anders Sandberg’s personal letter on the end of the FHI.
  7. A lecture by Thomas Parr on The Neurobiology of Active Inference. The most lucid introduction I’ve yet to see on Active Inference. I’m no specialist on the topic, but the concept attracts me, especially as it relates to predictive coding, and Parr shows off demos of some fairly cool implementations in this talk.
  8. I finished Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am A Strange Loop this month. In some ways I am A Strange Loop felt like an afterword to Hofstadter’s previous work, GEB. This is partially because literally in the preface of the book he says that this one aims to correct things that people might have misperceived in GEB, but on top of this Strange Loop is a lot more autobiographical and in many places lets more starkly Douglas’ personal opinions and intuitions come through than in GEB. This is by no means a bad thing. Note also that this book is a lot less “stylish” than GEB; this is indeed a bad thing, but I trust that this was needed in order for it to actually be published. This book is not a replacement for GEB, but serves well as a digestif or an reflection on GEB.
  9. An article in Rest of World magazine about TSMC’s efforts to build a factory in the US.

Fiction

  1. AO3 fic “CORDYCEPS” by Benedict_SC, a great cognitive horror story. If you’ve read and like Anti-memetics division, this you’d likely enjoy this too. To tease a little bit, cordyceps is the name of a fungi which grows in ants and “takes over” its nervous system.