Apoorv Upreti - Observations (Page 9)

Wingdings

Vox tells the story [https://www.vox.com/2015/8/25/9200801/wingdings-font-history]behind the famous Wingdings font: > Today it's easy to cut and paste images from the internet, but it used to be a lot harder. There were few ways

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The Indus Script

Interesting article [https://www.nature.com/news/ancient-civilization-cracking-the-indus-script-1.18587] by Nature on the challenges of deciphering the script used by the Indus valley civilisation.

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Structure Sets Us Free

A good structure can increase your freedom. Just consider the following: * Poetry is written in a tight structure or rhyme scheme. E.g., The Iliad was written in dactylic hexameter [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactylic_hexameter]. * Poker is a deep and interesting game,

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Deep Sky Photographs

The photographer Rogelio Bernal Andreo has found ways to get incredible photographs of the deep sky. It's hard to believe that these weren't shot from a space telescope but from Earth: "Colors of Creation" by Rogelio Bernal Andreo

food

Acquiring Tastes: A Theory Of Novelty

Here's a hypothesis I've had for a while: Beyond a certain age, your brain punishes excessive novelty in food. Sure, small extrapolations of things you already like are fine: fried chicken is chicken + crispy and so it's universally

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Excel vs Genetics

This [https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates] is an incredible story demonstrating the power of Microsoft Excel: Scientists have renamed several genes so Excel doesn't auto-format them into dates. Quote: > From now on, they say, human genes and

biology

How Natural Selection Works: Individual Selection, Kin Selection, Reciprocal Altruism

Note: This is part two of a three-part series on the finer details of natural selection. Part one can be found here [https://apoorvupreti.com/how-natural-selection-works-group-selection-and-the-free-rider-problem/] . In part I of this series we learned about group selection and why it isn't the

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Ghost Kitchens

Ghost kitchens are a recent trend in the food industry – restaurants that only do delivery, that are sometimes located in industrial facilities. Two good articles on ghost kitchens, from the Superfood newsletter: * What's Next For Restaurants [https://superfood.substack.com/p/whats-next-for-restaurants]

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Transfiguration

Interesting piece of digital art from a team of designers called Universal Everything [https://universaleverything.com/projects/transfiguration-2020].

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Google's Museum

TIL Google have their own [https://artsandculture.google.com/explore]online museum, Google Arts & Culture. Here's [https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/leonardo-da-vinci/m04lg6?categoryId=artist] their collection of Leonardo's works.

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The Wisdom Of The Ancients: Real Or Imagined?

While reading The Odyssey, you sometimes feel like there is a deep wisdom in it. Two examples: * The sirens * The sirens draw everyone who listens to their music towards them, and doom the listeners to death as their ships are dashed on the rocks.

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Ancient Music

Following yesterday's post [https://apoorvupreti.com/gilgamesh-performed/]on the performance of The Epic of Gilgamesh, I've been listening to some millennia-old music recently. Specifically I've been listening to Hurrian [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrian_songs]Hymn no.

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Gilgamesh, Performed

Incredible performance of the first few lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in Sumerian:

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How GPT-3 Works

At some point I'll get around to reading the paper [https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165], but meanwhile Jay Alammar has managed to explain how GPT-3 works in a short Twitter thread [https://twitter.com/JayAlammar/status/1285498971960598529]. It doesn't

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Colorized Roman Emperors

Another [https://medium.com/@voshart/photoreal-roman-emperor-project-236be7f06c8f] attempt to create life-like portraits of Roman emperors using machine learning.

computer-science

Paper: Concrete Problems In AI Safety

Imagine you've created the world's first fully intelligent cleaning robot. You're getting ready for the very first real world test run. Attempt 1 You put the robot in your living room, turn it on, and command it to

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On Buying Tools

Why [https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2020/07/25/worst-tool-for-the-job/]simple, cheap tools are the best place to start.

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Where Do Prices Come From?

An essay [https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2007/Robertsprices.html]by economist Russ Roberts on where prices come from. I've always thought of prices being driven by demand. But of course, supply and the cost of providing the good plays an

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Paper: On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services

James Hamilton's paper On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ecc8/3096d1368ff7bdb78a13731774002207cf6d.pdf] has some solid advice on building large scale distributed systems. It was published in 2007, and since then much of the content has become common knowledge

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Software Performance

Programmer Nelson Elhage on the importance of software performance [https://blog.nelhage.com/post/reflections-on-performance/]: > What is perhaps less apparent is that having faster tools changes how users use a tool or perform a task. Users almost always have multiple strategies available to

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Bread And Emergent Order

Why wouldn't bread be cheaper and better if we had a government bureaucrat (a minister for bread) dedicated to managing the prices of bread and everything that goes into making it? The economist Russ Roberts has a wonderful video on how emergent

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AI Generated Abstract Paintings

A bit of light fun: 1SecondPainting [https://1secondpainting.com/]uses a neural network to generate abstract paintings. Some of them are quite good: Generated by 1SecondPainting [https://1secondpainting.com/]Generated by 1SecondPainting [https://1secondpainting.com/]Generated by 1SecondPainting [https://1secondpainting.com/]

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The Jio Story

This is a good two part series on the origins of Indian conglomerate Reliance and its extremely successful telecom division, Jio: Part I [https://hind.substack.com/p/reliance-origins/], Part II [https://hind.substack.com/p/from-oil-to-jio]. I wasn't in India in

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A Deeper Look At Goodhart's Law

Categorizing Variants of Goodhart’s Law [https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585] gives us a deeper look at the now well known Goodhart's law. The definition of Goodhart's Law from the paper: > a Goodhart effect is when optimization causes

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Mars In 4K

Incredible [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEyAs3NWH4A]photos of Mars in 4K from NASA's rovers.

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