Recursive Self-Improvement
Why automating AI research might yield incremental gains without guaranteeing an exponential leap in intelligence.
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Writings
Some thoughts on programming, films, and other things that caught my attention.
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“Spiderhead” mini-review
I watched this on a whim, after being intrigued by the trailer. It had some good bits, but it ultimately over-extends a relatively thin (and implausible) idea which would have worked better as a Dark Mirror episode — and there are plot problems which become fairly obvious towards the end.
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A snarky review of Top Gun: Maverick
A reluctant trip to see Top Gun: Maverick, and a few objections to its impossible mission.
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On Herd Immunity
Is it a defensible approach for dealing with a pandemic? An essay written in April 2020, exploring herd immunity and the difficult choices facing pandemic responses at the time.
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Why I think xkcd is wrong about Free Speech
Xkcd’s “free speech” cartoon is widely cited in defence of various forms of popular censorship. However, I think it contains significant errors and weaknesses, which I will discuss in 3 sections below.
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“Should The Value of Pi Change”
One of my favourite anecdotes about computer programming concerns a classic defence of the recommended practice of using “named constants” to avoid the proliferation of inscrutable and hard to maintain “magic numbers” in a codebase. It goes like this:
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Happi Pi Day
Fun Fact: Pi seconds is roughly a nanocentury! You can also approximate pi by throwing pins onto parallel lines. An experiment, a little geometry, and rather a lot of alliteration.
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