A long annoyance with X is that you can't export your bookmarks, all you can do is scroll & scroll & scroll.…

A long annoyance with X is that you can't export your bookmarks, all you can do is scroll & scroll & scroll. So I asked GPT-5.6 Sol in Codex to do it, and it took over my Chrome and now I have all 5,302 back to 2014 with all sorts of data I also asked it to find gems (thread?)

Here are the gems the AI picked: 1. Sperm whales may have collectively learned how to evade whalers. Within a few years, the success rate of whalers’ harpoons reportedly fell by 58%, suggesting that information about the attacks was being shared among whales. An astonishing example of nonhuman culture adapting under pressure. x.com/SteveStuWill/s… 2. A 500,000–300,000-year-old handaxe was deliberately crafted around a fossil shell. The shell sits near the center of the tool, raising the possibility that its maker noticed and intentionally incorporated it. It may represent a startlingly early form of aesthetic intention. x.com/AlisonFisk/sta… 3. Intelligence may be far more distributed throughout biology than we generally recognize. This thread explores Michael Levin’s work on the underappreciated collective intelligence of cells and biological systems—and the perspective shifts that follow if we stop treating intelligence as something that happens only inside brains. x.com/kasratweets/st… 4. Wikipedia succeeded while seven similar online encyclopedia projects failed. They appeared at roughly the same time and pursued similar goals, but only one became a foundational part of the internet. This paper looks for the institutional and organizational reasons why. x.com/OwainEvans_UK/… 5. Beautiful data visualizations are more likely to be trusted. Across four studies, people placed more trust in more aesthetically pleasing graphs—even when beauty shouldn’t have affected the credibility of the underlying information. A useful warning for anyone who creates or consumes research. x.com/Mark_A_Thornto… 6. Choosing the right problem may be the highest-leverage skill in research. This long thread and accompanying Cell article examine how scientists and engineers select problems, including practical decision trees for deciding what is actually worth pursuing. x.com/mfgrp/status/1… 7. One man spent five years recreating all 107 recipes in the Alinea cookbook. What begins as a story of culinary obsession becomes a lesson about mastery, deliberate practice, and the strange process by which a consumer becomes a creator. x.com/kevinleeme/sta… 8. Shortly after World War I began, the Financial Times asked readers to predict how the war would change the map of Europe. It was presented as a game. There were cash prizes. It is a deeply strange and revealing artifact of how people perceived a catastrophe before its true scale was understood. x.com/khalafroula/st… 9. Charles Darwin once received a scientific critique of On the Origin of Species—and wrote a remarkable reply. Julia Galef explains why it may be her favorite letter in the history of science and what it reveals about Darwin’s intellectual character. x.com/juliagalef/sta… 10. Dungeons & Dragons contains technical debt inherited from its earliest origins. Its time and distance scales never quite synchronized because of rules inherited from the miniature-wargame Chainmail. That mismatch may also help explain why modern D&D characters feel like superheroes. x.com/mikemearls/sta… 11. Avant-garde perfume is an accessible form of experimental art. There is an entire world of strange, conceptual, independently produced perfume—and samples are inexpensive enough that it may be one of the easiest ways to explore a completely unfamiliar aesthetic medium. x.com/add_hawk/statu… 12. ShadeMap simulates every mountain, building, and tree shadow in the world. You can choose any location, date, and time and see how sunlight and shadow move across the landscape. It is both practically useful and oddly mesmerizing. x.com/shademap/statu… 13. The Whole Earth Index is a nearly complete, freely accessible archive of Whole Earth publications. The Whole Earth Catalog was one of the most influential documents of the counterculture and early technological imagination. Now much of that world is searchable online. x.com/longnow/status… 14. One project explored all 54 African countries through 54 works of architecture. Each project was intended to reflect the cultural identity and history of a different nation, creating an unusually ambitious visual survey of African architecture and design. x.com/omar_degan/sta… 15. Infinite Craft is an endless game of combinatorial discovery. You begin with a few basic elements and combine them to create new concepts, which can then be combined again. It is a wonderfully compact demonstration of how generative systems can produce genuine exploration and surprise.

Neal Agarwal@nealagarwal · Jan 31, 2024

The first version of Infinite Craft, an endless crafting game, is out now! > neal.fun/infinite-craft/

For those asking, I did try Grokbot first. It does not have API access to the bookmarks.

Here are 22 more gems according to the AI among my bookmarks 1. Researchers compressed 4.1 million recipes into a two-megabyte model of human cooking. The model spans seven languages and represents 1,790 ingredients in 300 dimensions. Beyond the technical achievement, it suggests a fascinating possibility: representing entire culinary traditions as a navigable mathematical space. x.com/josefchen/stat… 2. Scientists watched a single-celled organism evolve multicellularity in real time. After researchers introduced a predator, a single-cell alga evolved into a multicellular organism. The transition reportedly took about a year—a compressed demonstration of how environmental pressure can produce a major evolutionary transition. x.com/SteveStuWill/s… 3. The human brain contains billions of neurons but appears to process conscious thought at roughly ten bits per second. This paper asks why our enormous biological machinery produces such a narrow stream of conscious processing—and why we can generally think about only one thing at a time. x.com/EricTopol/stat… 4. Leaded gasoline may have reduced the cognitive ability of about half the American population. A study estimated the population-scale impact of childhood lead exposure from automobile exhaust. It is a remarkable example of a mundane technology quietly imposing enormous social costs. x.com/NBCNews/status… 5. Cats may exploit change blindness to sneak up on us. Change blindness is our failure to notice even dramatic environmental changes while our attention is elsewhere. This post connects the phenomenon to a familiar feline behavior: moving closer whenever you look away. x.com/DegenRolf/stat… 6. When did modern civilization finally surpass the technological achievements of the ancient world? The answer was far less obvious to people living in 1599 or even 1715 than it seems today. This essay reconstructs how early-modern thinkers assessed their own technology relative to antiquity. x.com/antonhowes/sta… 7. People in nearly every generation believe that morality is declining. Even young people often believe that today’s generation is worse than those that came before it. Research on the “illusion of moral decline” suggests that this recurring perception is produced by predictable biases in memory and attention. x.com/alexolegimas/s… 8. Here is a recreation of an entire GPT architecture inside a spreadsheet. It is a working nanoGPT with approximately 85,000 parameters, small enough to fit inside a spreadsheet file. Because the data and parameters are visible, it turns an otherwise opaque transformer model into something you can inspect cell by cell. x.com/chendabo/statu… 9. Studying the brain’s hardware may not explain human intelligence any more than studying computer hardware explains Excel pivot tables. This paper argues that human intelligence cannot be understood independently of accumulated culture. Much of what makes an individual capable exists outside the individual—in tools, institutions, norms, and knowledge inherited from other people. x.com/mmuthukrishna/… 10. When AI became better than humans at Go, human players subsequently became better too. Professional Go players began learning from strategies discovered by machines, producing an unusual example of superhuman AI expanding rather than simply replacing human capability. x.com/emollick/statu… 11. The familiar integer values assigned to chess pieces are convenient—but not really correct. A pawn is worth one, a bishop or knight roughly three, and a rook five. But a game as contextual as chess should not yield perfectly tidy integer values. This thread investigates what the pieces are actually worth. x.com/martinmbauer/s… 12. There is film of Paul McCartney going from almost nothing to the beginnings of a hit song in roughly 45 seconds. It is a rare chance to watch creative expertise operating in real time: not merely performing or explaining a finished work, but discovering it. x.com/tedgioia/statu… 13. What if The Lord of the Rings had emerged from ancient China? An artist reimagined Frodo and the Fellowship through the visual language of ancient China. It is not merely a costume swap; it demonstrates how strongly world-building depends on an underlying cultural vocabulary. x.com/leiahamart/sta… 14. Why does the post-scarcity civilization in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels remain so compelling? “Why the Culture Wins” examines the political and philosophical appeal of Banks’s civilization—and why it feels like more than a conventional science-fiction utopia. x.com/tszzl/status/1… 15. The University of Chicago offers a four-year Great Books discussion course that is open to anyone. The program provides a structured route through foundational works without requiring enrollment in a degree. Andy Matuschak completed its first year and shared his observations. x.com/andy_matuschak… 16. A collection of rules that produced exactly the opposite of their intended effects. One example: banning alcohol inside college football stadiums led fans to drink more beforehand, increasing intoxication problems. The thread collects similar cases in which incentives and adaptation defeated seemingly sensible policies. x.com/TrungTPhan/sta… 17. Here are 29 slides explaining the plot of Tenet. The post is funny, but it is also an impressive exercise in visual explanation: taking a deliberately disorienting film about inverted time and attempting to make its causal structure comprehensible. x.com/jasonjoyride/s… 18. This graphic compares how quickly every planet rotates—and the direction each one points. Jupiter spins at a remarkable speed, while Venus barely turns at all and rotates in the opposite direction from most planets. It makes the solar system feel less like a tidy diagram and more like a collection of wildly different physical worlds. x.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/… 19. Mario games demonstrate that two mechanically similar experiences can feel psychologically different. The example is a compact lesson in design: objective similarity does not produce subjective equivalence. Presentation, framing, feedback, and context can transform how the same underlying structure feels. x.com/Cheesemeister3… 20. An AI learned to defeat elite human poker players in a game of hidden information. Unlike chess or Go, poker requires reasoning about uncertainty, deception, and opponents who know things you do not. Pluribus decisively beat five professionals across 10,000 hands, making it an unusually important—and still underappreciated—AI result. x.com/deedydas/statu… 21. An open-source tool can turn any city into a minimalist map poster. Choose a place and generate a clean, highly detailed visual from its street network. It is a lovely example of public geographic data becoming personal art. x.com/geerlingguy/st… 22. A mostly complete visual map of neural-network architectures. The field contains far more varieties than the phrase “neural network” suggests. This graphic organizes many of them into a single taxonomy, making decades of architectural experimentation visible at once.

ₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ@hamptonism · Jun 27, 2024

A mostly complete graph of Neural Networks.