Collision Detection, Synthetic Biology and AI ā Live and Learn #4
Welcome to awesome stuff, from the last 2 weeks, bundled together in a newsletter. This time with booknotes on Indistractable by Nir Eyal, the Michael Levin podcast with Lex Fridman and AI for the next era, an article by Sam Altman!
āØ Quote āØ
The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we've made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel.
ā Sam Altman
š Book Notes š
Indistractable by Nir Eyal. Not a great read to be honest... A branch book, with a low density of original ideas. The main idea I took from it is that Ego Depletion is a self-fulfilling prophecy and if you don't believe your willpower to diminish when using it, it won't. Other than that it's filled with generic, already heard somewhere else advice, about how to declutter our lives from phones, notifications and email. And how to do the same for our relationships.
š» Status Update š»
Finished the 1-month project. Check out the articles on Collision Detection with SAT and the Introduction to Vector Mathematics.
Midjourney Pictures.
š¶ Song š¶
Trinity by Snarky Puppy.
I went to the concert in Berlin and afterwards listened to their new album quite a lot. The recordings can't quite compare to the live version, so if you have a chance to seem them live, go for it. Still awesome music though.
Links
Michael Levin Podcast by Lex Fridman. This is so so long, but the best podcast episode that I have listened to this year. They talk for three hours about ideas in the space of synthetic biology and how cells organize to form bodies and tissues and how we only begin to understand how all of this works. It was three hours of getting my mind blown every five minutes or so.
How to Build a Neural Net by Andrej Karpathy. If you wonder how neural networks work and want to get a masterclass in building a simple neural network from scratch, this is the best thing I have seen in that space. It's just so on point, making even the mathematical ideas easy to understand.
Forward Pass by Andrej Karpathy. I learned that Andrej Karpathy, besides having a YouTube channel, also has a blog and I really liked this short story about how an AI might "feel" about itself with each and every computation that is flowing through its neural network. Very techy, but beautiful.
AI for the Next Era by Sam Altman. An interview of Open AI founder Sam Altman. Thinking about AI from first principles, answering deep questions about the future and how it's going to play out. For example, what kind of impact AI will have on topics like nuclear fusion or creativity.
Moore's Law for Everything by Sam Altman. A text by Sam Altman about how AI can bring Moore's Law to everything in this world in the relatively near future and how this is going to change our lives forever. And a potential solution for how this new found wealth can be distributed to better benefit everybody in society.
I hope you found something useful reading this newsletter! If you did, or have ideas for improving it, please let me know!
Take care and enjoy your day!