From the computer of Peter Clark

I live in NYC in a huge building and have made friends with so many of my neighbors. Having a kid helps — it’s easy to meet parents of other kids on the local playground and older people like to engage with little ones. Once after chatting in the elevator with a woman in her 90s about my toddler’s potty training, she stopped by with a potty training book that had a sticker chart. He loved it and was so enchanted that she brought it by especially for him. We became friendly — turns out she is a playwright. Eventually she invited us to the debut of one of her plays and my husband went while I wrangled the toddler. It was on a weeknight somewhere deep in Harlem. He said that at the end he realized another neighbor, our doorman and the building super were in the audience too — just the whole building quietly supporting her.

my favourite notebook, 25% off!

Fascinating repo of incredibly esoteric and difficult questions that frontier models can benchmark themselves on — Opus 4.6 scores a paltry 46%. Also discussed on the New York Times.

The questions shouldn't be shared but there are 2500 of them and they're accessible via Hugging Face — so interesting!

An example question which they shared:

Hummingbirds within Apodiformes uniquely have a bilaterally paired oval bone, a sesamoid embedded in the caudolateral portion of the expanded, cruciate aponeurosis of insertion of m. depressor caudae. How many paired tendons are supported by this sesamoid bone? Answer with a number.

Fuck this shit man

I’ve been somewhat facetiously, somewhat seriously, somewhat jokingly, been posing a question to everyone I run into these past few months: Don’t you feel like all meaning is being scrubbed from the world? Like the Langoliers are chomping up purpose, chomping up all the things to which we’ve ascribed purpose these past hundred-thousand years? And that nothing matters?

Really, what I’m asking is: Don’t you think our contemporary education system has long needed an overhaul? That our society has long needed to reconfigure itself? That we need to stop ascribing all our meaning and purpose to being a Web Designer, or Coal Miner, or Airplane Engine Factory Foreman, or Accountant, but instead to being A Good Person, Good Parent, Good Friend, Curious Researcher, Poet, Meditator, Facilitator, or any number of other Ways of Being uncoupled from “work” as we’ve defined it since the industrial revolution? Who is safe from the hunger and capabilities of the models? Yoga instructors?

Probably my favourite kids book / reference book. Cross section drawings remind me so much of my childhood. An under-appreciated art form!

SpaceX at $1.6-2t would challenge Meta for spot #6, potentially slotting in behind Amazon. When they qualify, passive funds managing $20t must buy. Index funds can’t raise cash. They sell existing holdings.

The mechanics become self-reinforcing. Index funds sell existing mega-caps to buy new entrants. Lower mega-cap prices trigger momentum strategies to sell further. Additional selling creates more pressure on the very stocks index funds track.