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.

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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)