Un registro no exhaustivo de algunas de las cosas que he hecho, películas y series que he visto, artículos que he leído y podcasts que he escuchado en 2023. Leo y comparto con frecuencia cosas con las que no estoy totalmente de acuerdo o autores que en general son ideológicamente opuestos a mí: compartir algo aquí no implica que esté de acuerdo con su contenido.

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This issue is dedicated to SolidGoldMagikarp.

En español

• Un agente infiltrado
• ¿Eres “cercano a entornos potencialmente peligrosos”? Estás despedido del aeropuerto

Books & comics

• Uzumaki by Junji Ito
• Go For It, Nakamura! by Syundei

Movies

• Turning Red (2022)
• Raw (2016)
• The Menu (2022)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
• Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)

Podcasts

• Criminal: Out of the Box
• Welcome to the land that no country wants
• Becoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup

Computer science & math

• Google’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption Compiler — A Primer
• Remember when the IE 11 User-Agent forced Mozilla to freeze part of its User-Agent string (last week)
• I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer
• Using HDMI radio interference for high-speed data transfer

LLMs and other AI technology

• Chatbotocyplase 2, The botten-ing: A response to Scott Alexander on Chatbots
• ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
• SolidGoldMagikarp (plus, prompt generation)
  • “I’ve just found out that several of the anomalous GPT tokens (“TheNitromeFan”, “ SolidGoldMagikarp”, “ davidjl”, “ Smartstocks”, “ RandomRedditorWithNo”, ) are handles of people who are (competitively? collaboratively?) counting to infinity on a Reddit forum. I kid you not.
    • Redditors Are Counting to Infinity, One Number at a Time
• How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice

Politics & society

Economics

• Money laundering and AML compliance
• The Rot Economy
• Big Business’ Plan to Block Biden’s Ban on Noncompete Agreements
• Empathy Economics and Social Classes
• Financial World Celebrates Slowing Wage and Employment Growth in New Jobs Report
• The Best Tax System on Earth

Silicon Valley

• The End of the Silicon Valley Myth
• Inside Elon’s ‘Extremely Hardcore’ Twitter
• Advice for Less Experienced Software Engineers in the Current Tech Market

Misc

• The Emerging Fetish of Laying Alien Eggs Inside Yourself
• Held Hostage By Bedouins In Terra Nullius
• How My Consensual Nonconsent Orgies Work (note: not an endorsement, just an interesting read)
• How to Leak From the Supreme Court
• Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty

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I spent about half the time these past two months traveling or visiting friends, so this one is a shorter one :)

Books & comics

• Akamatsu & Seven: Vol. 1
• Our Dining Table
• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Movies & TV Shows

• The Super Mario Bros Movie (2023)
• Scream VI (2023)
• Please Like Me (2013)

Podcasts

• Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren’t conscious
• Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
• Hand dryers v paper towels: the surprisingly dirty fight for the right to dry your hands

Animal behavior and welfare

• Book Review: Do Fish Feel Pain?
• Measuring Animal Welfare, Part One: Maybe We Can Just Ask Them?
• Girneys

Misc

• This is how I sued the Spanish government for disqualifying my videogame from a 5 million euro grant from European Union funds
• They Posted Porn on Twitter. German Authorities Called the Cops
• The poop emoji: a legal history
• Barbados 4–2 Grenada
• A World Without Men
• American Ghent
• KYC and AML: beyond the acronyms
• Using HDMI radio interference for high-speed data transfer
• Common Knowledge

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En español

• Fiscalidad religiosa

Books & comics

• Akamatsu & Seven Vol. 2 and Vol. 3
• The House at the Cerulean Sea
• Capitalism and Social Democracy, by Adam Przeworski. I only read a few chapters, but I found the first one specially illuminating on the history of social democracy and how we ended up here (where here, is, well, 1986).

Movies, TV shows & documentaries

• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
• Succession, Season 4 (2023)
• Black Mirror, Season 6 (2023)
• Un Caos Aéreo

Computer science and FOSS

• Rewriting the Ruby parser
  • See also Ruby code whose parsing depends on what variables are in scope
• C Locales are deeply broken
• Add RFC on governance, establishing the Leadership Council by jntrnr · Pull Request #3392 · rust-lang/rfcs
  • A governance system, if you can keep it
  • The Rust I Wanted Had No Future
• RFC: Enforcing Bounds Safety in C (-fbounds-safety)

Misc

• The Four Guys Who Wouldn’t Shut Up And Were Wrong About Everything
• Lessons From a Renters’ Utopia
• This Is Catfishing on an Industrial Scale
• What kinds of protesting are more effective?
• The strange survival of Guinness World Records
• The great American tax haven: why the super-rich love South Dakota

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Books & comics

• Rust Atomics and Locks: Low-Level Concurrency in Practice
• El árbol viene
• Drones metafísicos

Videos, Movies, TV shows & documentaries

• Dropping the bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• How Police Make Up The Law
• How Ron DeSantis Let Billionaires Destroy Florida
• The 3 Types of Detective Game

• The Broken Economics of the Oceans

• The Celebration (Festen)
• and of course, Barbie and Oppenheimer!

Podcasts

• Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment
• Elie Hassenfeld on two big picture critiques of GiveWell’s approach, and six lessons from their recent work
• Adam Conover On the Hollywood Strike
• ‘You reach a point where you can’t live your life’: what is behind extreme hoarding?

Computer science & Mathematics

• C and C++ Prioritize Performance over Correctness
• Regex engine internals as a library
• Evidential Decision Theory via Partial Markov Categories, see also the paper

Surveillance, privacy, cyberpunk-adjacent

• Changes to UK Surveillance Regime May Violate International Law
• Palantir filed to go public. The firm’s unethical technology should horrify us
• After Vice’s Downfall, Top Journalists Start Their Own Tech Publication, some highlights:
  • The A.I. Surveillance Tool DHS Uses to Detect ‘Sentiment and Emotion’
  • Inside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale

Politics & society

• Credit card debt collection
• How PinkyDoll Mesmerized the Internet With ‘Ice Cream So Good’
• How Taylor Swift’s ‘Speak Now’ Became the ‘Scary’ Version
• Tony Evers uses veto powers to extend annual increases for public schools for the next four centuries
• Capitalism, power and epistemology: a critique of EA — EA Forum
• The Future of Design Studies Journal
• Lifespan extension: separating fact from fiction

Stuff that made me cry

• On Mental Hospitals
• Microloans in Cambodia Are Harming the Poor — The Dial
• Horror and Heartbreak in Oman

Wikipedia finds

• Casa Susanna
• Nasubi
• Murchison Murders
• Unethical human experimentation in the United States
  • Operation Sea-Spray
• Georges Ruggiu

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Books

• Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher
• Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
• Carcoma, by Layla Martínez

Movies, TV shows & documentaries

• Clue, 1985
• Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, 2020
• How To With John Wilson, Season 3

Videos

• Work.
• How languages steal words from each other
• How did the Ancient Egyptians find this volume without Algebra?
• Roblox Is Exploiting Kids. We Talked To Some Of Them.
• How the Far Right Took Over Croatian Wikipedia & How They Were Stopped (cw: discussion of genocide denial)

Podcasts

• Why are drug dealers putting fentanyl in everything? - Search Engine (cw: descriptions of violence and people suffering)
• Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives
• The widow and the murderer: a friendship born of tragedy – The Guardian (cw: terrorism, descriptions of violence)
• The Spy - Criminal

Computer science & Mathematics

• Perfectly Reproducible, Verified Go Toolchains
• Fixing For Loops in Go 1.22
• Stability without stressing the !@#! out · baby steps
• UTS #55: Unicode Source Code Handling
• A Gentle Introduction to LLVM IR · mcyoung
• Semver violations are common, better tooling is the answer
• A parlor trick for SET
• Penrose diagrams
• Explaining The Postgres Meme

Surveillance, privacy, cyberpunk-adjacent

• The End of Privacy is a Taylor Swift Fan TikTok Account Armed with Facial Recognition Tech
• White Supremacists Are Hijacking City Council Meetings All Over America
• DIY Chatbots Unleash Large Language Models’ Repressed Sexuality
• FBI Hoovering Up DNA at a Pace That Rivals China, Holds 21 Million Samples and Counting

Politics & society

• The Horrifying Kafkaesque Nightmare Of The U.S. Misdemeanor System
• Escorts are the ER Doctors of Relationships
• Confused Automakers Braced for Strike at the Wrong Plants
• How I Am A Marxist
• 2023 was the year the US finally destroyed all of its chemical weapons
• The Impossibility of Knowledge of Retrocognitive Knowledge · Gwern.net
• My “Life in the UK” Test and a Great British Travel Guide
• How are causes of death registered around the world?
• Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person
• Tardigrades on the Moon
• What can caged lab monkeys tell us about free human beings? (cw: animal suffering)
• Measuring Animal Welfare, Part Five: Chronic Stress (cw: animal suffering)

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The last log edition on one of the most intense years of my life (so far!). This issue is dedicated to Montserrat Bellido Durán. Kinda problematic, but you spark joy!

En español

• Por qué a CC.OO. y UGT no les ha gustado que hayan dado prioridad a los convenios autonómicos.

Books

• Hokusai, by Shōtarō Ishinomori
• Rust for Rustaceans, by Jon Gjengset
• Kallocain by Karin Boye

Movies, TV shows & documentaries

• Triangle of Sadness, 2022
• Mad God, 2021
• Godzilla Minus One, 2023
• Rick and Morty, Season 7
• La Mesías

Videos

• Tom Scott released some more videos for the Language Files series. I particularly liked:
  • Does the language you speak change how you think?
  • Why don’t subtitles match dubbing?
• Plagiarism and You(Tube)
• GitHub Actions Feels Bad. The pro-privative software stance is intensely annoying but you can mostly ignore it.

Podcasts

Some good 80,000 Hours episodes (also one promoting a terrible person but I just won’t link it here!):

• Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child
• Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe
• Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down

Computer science & Mathematics

• The ‘eu’ in eucatastrophe – Why SciPy builds for Python 3.12 on Windows are a minor miracle
• God Help Us, Let’s Try To Understand The Paper On AI Monosemanticity
• Actually Portable Executable
• I Now Own the Coinhive Domain. Here’s How I’m Fighting Cryptojacking and Doing Good Things with Content Security Policies.

Politics & society

• The Basics & The Gaps Overview - Future Cleantech Architects (Research on gaps for addressing climate change)
• State Capacity
• Will no one rid me of this turbulent pest?
• Overpolicing Doesn’t Solve Underpolicing
• The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers, content warning for ethnic cleansing and genocide apology
• Seeing like a Bank
• Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them
• It is only Q
• Olga of Kiev - Drevlian Uprising
• Nigerian Chrislam