Friday Fodder #19
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Ladies and Gentleman, we’ve got some huge, world upending news this week. That’s right, we have a new Chess World Champion!
Gukesh D capitalized on a surprise blunder by Ding in the endgame of the last match of the championship. And, honestly, it’s really interesting to watch the reactions as both players realize what’s happened. I am not good at chess, but watching the lines get calculated in realtime and the psychological forces at play for top players is wild. These guys have whole teams helping them prepare new lines and understand small tactical differences. Congrats to Gukesh, the youngest world champ ever at 18!
On to the reading!
Timely
Meet Willow, our state of the art quantum chip - Google built a 105-qubit chip, which is really incredibly impressive, and so some folks are now claiming indisputably that we live in a multiverse with many parallel universes. Let’s not get carried away on the existential questions yet, but this is definitely progress.
So what’s it good for? Well, a large enough quantum computer could theoretically break all current encryption from SSL to Bitcoin. There’s not much practical application yet - actually doing any of those things would take millions of qubits - but they’ve demonstrated a potential path to handle more error correction in a scalable way. Your digital gold is safe for at least a decade!FDA may finally ban artificial red dye from beverages, candy and other foods - It’s been less than a month since the New York Times had this banger about RFK Jr:
”Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many ingredients. In an interview with MSNBC on Nov. 6, he questioned the overall ingredient count: “Why do we have Froot Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients and you go to Canada and it has two or three?” Mr. Kennedy asked. He was wrong on the ingredient count, they are roughly the same. But the Canadian version does have natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used “for freshness,” according to the ingredient label.”
You showed him, NYT. Except now, not 4 weeks later, the FDA might ban red dye 40’s close petroleum cousin red dye 3. Just don’t take my Diet Coke.The Death of the Stubborn Developer - Steve Yegge was one of the best bloggers on programming in the oughts and early 2010s. His most famous post while at Google was the internal rant against platforms that accidentally went public and signaled the end of Google+. Here he’s back and talking about CHOP: Chat-Oriented Programming. We get a definition, the counter-argument, and an explanation of the sort of prisoner’s dilemma we could find ourselves in. All of these AI paradigms are still moving so rapidly, but Steve takes some great observations and gives us a glimpse of where our problems lead.
Debanking and Debunking - You may have heard some new rumors about debanking as popularized by Marc Andreesen to Joe Rogan. Patrick McKenzie has a deep history with Stripe and knows the financial backbones of the internet. He sorts fact from fiction and provides a neutral, insider’s riposte to the claims made. McKenzie (aka patio11) is a great internet writer but brevity is not what he’s known for. This one is long. Skim.
Timeless
The Intellectual Obesity Crisis - Speaking of junk food, this is an explanation of the mental version. The internet is filled with information, and all of this “gossip, trivia, clickbait, hackery, marketing, churnalism, and babble” acts on our brain just like sugar: it produces craving and provides no nutrition. I have been thinking a lot lately about the so-called liminal spaces in my day.. the in-between times I too frequently fill with podcast listening or scrolling. The reason so many thoughts come to us in the shower is because there’s time for our mind to wander.
Ave Maria - Andy Hickman offers a beautiful testimony of the romance and experience of the Catholic Mass and ends up meditating on the adventure and religious nature of the American dream. Andy is traveling with his wife around the forgotten places of America. His journey is insightful and worth following.
How God Plays Chess - One thing about chess that is surprising to most people is that most games ought to end in a draw. The sides are evenly matched and it’s very difficult for players to create imbalances and exploit them. This is a fun exploration of the limits of the game and what it would mean if chess were “solved” - e.g. every line could be calculated.
Fish Eye - A really clever exploration of the idea of information abstraction, and beautiful too!
Books
The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch - Full disclosure, David Deutsch is not an easy author to read. Both this and the Beginning of Infinity are focused on very fundamental ideas about the nature of our world. But they are worth it. Deutsch is the foremost public advocate of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. This is the idea that some people said was proven by the operation of Google’s Willow quantum chip. I don’t buy that, but if you want a richer, remarkably thoughtful understanding of our universe, there’s nobody better than Deutsch.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
The world is amazing. Cheers!