Links for Spring 2025
Phage beats bacterium beats AI apocalypse beats human beats crocodile
A brief history of liquid computers.
New breakthrough in crocodile theory: physicists finally worked out the equations that govern the scale patterns of crocodiles.
AI spearfishing: LLMs are getting pretty good at creating personalized scams by scraping the web for details about the target. As I argued earlier, it’s probably a good idea to limit what personal information you put on the Internet, before future bots use it to impersonate you and scam your relatives.
Exotic creature of the season: Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator, a bacterium found several kilometers deep into the ground of a gold mine in South Africa. Its main source of energy appears to be dihydrogen produced by the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium, making it one of the few organisms that could survive without a Sun.
Every now and then, I hear about a new obscure crypto meme coin with millions of dollars in “market cap”. This short comment on LessWrong explains what this actually means. I wasn’t going to buy the memecoin anyways, but I’m less confused.
Cool new biology: some phages (bacteria’s viruses) integrate themselves in the bacteria’s genome, and wait quietly for their host to proliferate before taking over the world. Sometimes, the dormant phage makes sure to grant some fitness advantage to its host, so it has maximum impact when it ultimately betrays it. One way to do this is to provide resistance to other phages, and that’s how you end up with phage-encoded anti-phage systems.
We all know Speech Synthesis is making progress, but it’s annoying to keep up with the state of the art because you have to pause your music to listen to the companies’ boring cringe demos. Instead, I recommend this wild conversation between ex-convict tech-bro Martin Shkreli and the (awesome) newest model from Sesame AI:
Wholesale Wikipedias
Mothers Against Decapentaplegic
List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience response
Music
In 1970, a Californian dentist drank too much LSD-contaminated Californian tap water, and had a vision about alien geometric figures floating in the sky. This prompted her to write the album Parallelograms, a marvel of minimalist psychedelic folk with lyrics about math. Sample lyrics:
[Verse 2]
Paralelo-lelo-gram
Paralelo-lelo-lelo-lelogram
Spiralelo-lelo-gram
Spiralelo-lelo-lelo-lelogram
Semi para bolic
Semi metra bolic
Radio-larial-uni-cellular
I see we are interested in similar topics.
One of my favorite albums. This explains a lot. Curiously, she didn't produce much music after that until just recently.
ACOPOLYPSE NOW
AND HOW
Ever onward
Ecstatic static
Marching into
Glory's gory
Marmalade maw.
Nothing's eternal
Except the world
Of a spinning girl,
Her attic an arctic
Of melting cool drool.
O say hello
To a vapid churl.
Sunrise is dawn
And sunset wan.
The riddle's
In the middle
Of her fiddle,
A glorious
Stradavarious
Tinkling pizzicato.
KR, 3.19.2025