Posts on Spool-Five

Recently I visited China and spent a while in the north-eastern city of Anshan. Anshan is famous for Anshan Steel, once the largest industry in China (during the early period of industrialisation of the People’s Republic of China). It also has some nice tourist attractions that we visited, such as a zoo with two lovely pandas, a giant Buddha carved from a single block of jade, and the Thousand Mountains national park.

Related to my previous blog post, here are some of the interesting things I heard for the first time on the radio over the past couple of months.

The Taoist idea of Wu Wei (無為) has always seemed very ambiguous to me. In my own life, I often recall this principle, along with whatever interpretation of it suits best at the time, when making decisions. Here, I wanted to try think through some of the potential meanings of it.

Westworld is a science-fiction film (1973) and TV series (2016-2022) that is based on the premise of a theme-park populated by AI robots role-playing the setting of the American “West”. It’s been ten years since I’ve seen the show (and I only watched the first season), so I can’t remember the details well. However, I wanted to reflect a bit on the central premise, and how we are moving toward a real-life Westworld. The American West, as depicted through the Western genre, was a period of…

The term AI Alignment, like many new concepts associated with AI, is very broad and fuzzy. It means something like the techniques and processes to ensure that a LLM is aligned with human interests. It is usually discussed within the context of AI Safety, which can mean anything ranging from “content moderating LLM outputs” to “let’s not develop an AGI that takes over the planet and enslaves us.” There are lots of important philosophical questions that arise when we think about this effort.…

When I was younger, I used to love following music developments. I went to a lot of gigs and festivals, mostly indie music, but also a lot of house/techno. Then, at some point toward the end of my twenties/early thirties, I stopped caring. Now, when I do listen to music it’s mostly music from during that time. However, ever since I was very young, I’ve loved listening to the radio. That is one habit I still do keep up. Mostly classical music radio stations such as BBC Radio 3 and WHRB these d...

I came across the 512kb club a long time ago, and it was very influential in helping me understand how websites work and the impact different kinds of assets or design choices can have on how pages load. As a fan of gemini, it makes sense to me that websites should be as minimal as possible. Anyway, I’ve always enjoyed opening random sites on the 512kb club list of sites, so I decided to make an aggregated rss feed of posts from these blogs. If you want to check it out, it is currently hosted...