Writings

• Ideas: Towards Benchmarking LLM Diversity & Creativity; Hierarchical Embeddings for Text Search

• Constrained Writing: Second Life Sentences; Better Trajectoid Words; Un-Biblical Sentences

• “A Christmas Protestation”

• Gwern.net:

  • help page

  • ordinal ‘progress indicator’ clock-like metadata icons (for any 0–100% data, eg. collapses showing part of the collapsed content)

  • keybindings & clickable icons: help cheatsheet, search, minimizing, dark-mode cycling, reader-mode cycling, return-to-homepage; popup minimization; access keys; 2 metadata icons

Links

Books

Nonfiction:

• The Little Prince/Wind, Sand, And Stars, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Fiction:

• Sourdough, Robin Sloan (2017)

• Range of Ghosts (2012_13ya; Eternal Sky Elizabeth Bear

  Interesting worldbuilding and an epic fantasy which winds up falling flat and being less than the sum of its parts, perhaps because the pacing was off, perhaps because the prose style rubbed me wrong somehow, perhaps because it suffers from too much setting up of its trilogy and being too long, and the occasional battles or travel increasingly indistinct. I read it over 2 plane flights, and by the end, I was as exhausted with it as the protagonist’s pony, and not inclined to continue.

  This is too bad because Bear writes well about horses, and the central conceit of the Eternal Sky world is intriguing: it is a funhouse mirror of Central Asia seen through a fantasy lense, where familiar places like the Assassins or Tibet or Song China or the Mongolian Empire or distant Japan/Russia are reimagined as epic fantasy empires, where, further, the rulers of a region do not just decide the state religion but the actual metaphysics & magic of that region, so ‘the sky changes’ as one travels (eg. in one region, the Khanate is visible as moons in the ‘eternal blue sky’, one per heir, and those improperly buried rise again as blood-ghosts; in another, Islamic, region, one sees but a single moon and there are no blood-ghosts, etc). The worldbuilding is a bit undermined by Bear’s insistence on Maimonides-style rationalization of all practices (every superstition or traditional belief must actually be some clever Chesterton’s-fence-style adaptation or trick) and obligatory strong female warriors (to the point where you wonder why Bear bothers having any male protagonists), but the concepts are still strong enough I feel a bit sorry I won’t see them developed in the sequels.

Film/TV

Live-action:

Animated:

• Golden Kamuy 2

• Lupin the 3^rd Part 1

Music

Touhou:

Vocaloid:

MLP:

Doujin:

Misc: