Links: Absolutely (+3)
- Absolutely is an album by R&B artist Dijon; I hadn’t heard the album until this week when I found this incredible live performance of the whole album on YouTube. It’s an incredible performance, only 25 minutes long, but filled with a real presence and connection between all of the performers.
- Continuing the theme of Scott Alexander’s article I linked to in Tuesdays’s post is this thought-provoking piece from Nolan Lawson which very nicely captures the nail-biting ambiguity and anxiety I feel around using AI tools for software development.
- In a similar vein is this note from lauded Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra, whose algorithm for finding the shortest path in a graph is probably one of the most-used in the world, about how natural language will always fall short of capturing the full complexity and precision of problems in engineering, science and mathematics. It rings very true in our current age of AI slop, and it was written in 1978. It’s number 667 of Dijkstra’s “EWD” series of technical notes, on a huge variety of subjects, that he wrote throughout the course of his life, mostly as correspondence with his friends and colleagues: you can find a lot of them here — he wrote 1318 such manuscripts between 1961 and 2002. EWDs are another great inspiration of mine.
- This site contains a huge amount of free-to-air television stations to stream from all around the world. Could easily lose many hours with this, something I wish I had had access to as a teenager with time to kill.
Photograph: The lake at Crystal Palace park.