Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

10 points by adityaathalye 24 days ago | 20 comments

If you are anything like me, you will have about five answers at any given point in time for "What are you curious about?".

Arguably, a more interesting, revealing, and kinder question is; "What have you been curious about?".

I feel a looking-back-to-curiosity exercise has power to shed light on where to look ahead (and why to do it). More so, I feel it has power to grant permission to that "insatiably curious thirteen year old self" to step out and play. Because it probably already has been up to something, while your attention was elsewhere.

So, here is a prompt (see what I just did there? ;-))

Um... Except for LLM stuff, if you please. Just for this thread. Because these days the plurality of HN discussion appears to be about the curiosities of LLMs.

(cf. More about this in a blog post I published a while back https://www.evalapply.org/posts/what-have-you-been-curious-about/ )

ex-aws-dude 24 days ago |

I randomly read an old book by John von Neumann I found in a thrift shop called “The Computer and The Brain”

It’s only like 70 pages and it’s basically just him comparing how computers and neurons work and speculating on some stuff.

The general takeaway seemed to be that the brain looks digital at first glance (binary activation of neurons) but is actually a lot more complicated and more like a mix of analog/digital.

Now I’m really curious if there are any other modern books that do this comparison more in depth, basically exploring how a brain works but the author has a CS or EE background

This book is from the 50s so I’m sure a lot has changed since then.

a_tartaruga 24 days ago | |

That book is just so cool.

adityaathalye 24 days ago | | |

Both of you, thanks for the referral and the endorsement. The PDF is easily available for free download from several public sources.

Of course, Springer won't let you download it unless you spring some cash.

nb. Don't feed the beast, I'm just citing it here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-70911-1_...

gysakai 24 days ago |

I hadn't sat down to watch a concert on TV in a long time. It was Mozart and Vivaldi, performed in the courtyard of the Louvre. For a while, I kept wondering, "Where is the conductor?"

Then I noticed that one of the violinists was leading the other musicians while playing, through eye contact, body movement, and the music itself. Only after looking him up later did I learn that it was Julien Chauvin's ensemble, and that this was simply how they performed.

I ended up watching Julien Chauvin and his ensemble for a full hour. It went by in no time.

jfil 24 days ago |

The great Egyptian desert. Those raised "lines" across the wadis - what is their function? The remote border stations near the Egypt-Libya-Sudan border: what is life like for the soldiers stationed there? What are all those trucks nearby on the Sudanese side of the border? Smugglers?

On the Eastern side of the Nile, what are all those small areas of bulldozing near the gold mines? "Artisanal" mining? Is that profitable?

What have you been curious about, adityaathalye?

adityaathalye 24 days ago | |

Ooh, are you using satellite views to explore? When google earth first came out, I was hooked on making the globe go round and round and zooming into strange and wonderful places. Incredible.

As for yours truly; I'm trying to do "ten year projects" as part of my "second life" (the first is before 40, the second is after).

Allen Center / Levin labs / TAME / Bioelectric networks as the software plane of morphology

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10346 and other work from that fecund lab is ever-fascinating. I have been following their work for five or six years. Much of that informed a giant essay I wrote prompted by an essay contest on Consciousness: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/consciousness-lives-in-a-ded...

How to write a Hard SciFi novel that does not have magic technology genius, and certainly not magic ET showing up to save the day?

A spec fic author friend is on my case about it, because he said "why the hell haven't you written your novel yet?" and I foolishly said "yeah why not? okay let me do it", and now I'm stuck in an honour pact. Write or die trying.

How the hell does the weather even work (metrology)?

This is because of my current work project, helping an applied sciences team run weather forecasting models, like WRF (pronounced "Worf", which I absolutely love :D). My day-to-day is packer and FreeBSD and shell scripts, but I have to also understand enough about the domain to be somewhat dangerous.

And also... why the hell isn't everybody using FreeBSD for server workloads?

david927 24 days ago |

Each second Sunday of the month, I post an "Ask HN: What are you working on?" thread. I can add this to that, since the idea is the same. What do you think?

adityaathalye 24 days ago | |

Oh, that will be neat! I am a frequent reader of, and (very) infrequent contributor to that Ask HN :) Thanks for keeping it going. It always surfaces cool projects.

Speaking for myself, I have far many more active topics I'm curious about, than I can possibly do anything about. Curiosity just because is fulfilling in its own way.

No expectations of course. If you later decide this angle will add noise and/or too many tangents to your Ask HN, please drop it forthwith.

Thanks for the offer... cheers!

david927 24 days ago | | |

It was always supposed to be part of the question -- not just what cool projects you might be working on but also ideas that you might be thinking about. It fits nicely! Consider it done.

nicbou 24 days ago |

I am reading Letters from Birmingham Jail, and I'm stunned by how good Dr. King's writing is. I want to read more and learn how he managed to do it. I'm fascinated by the metaphors he uses and how vivid they are in my mind.

I am curious about impressionist paintings. It's my favourite art style but I struggle to replicate it on canvas. I'm glad that there are so many helpful YouTube art teachers now.

I have made elderflower cordial from harvested flowers, and it both got me into cocktails/mocktails, and tracking what else I can harvest throughout the year. Having garden flowers in the house and wild blackberry cakes is such a nice way to observe the passage of time.

a_tartaruga 24 days ago |

The recent major geopolitical shifts and their intersection with energy commodity markets.

The book Virtual Barrels by Ilia Bouchouev.

The details and mechanics of financial option pricing.

kwakubiney 24 days ago | |

>The recent major geopolitical shifts and their intersection with energy commodity markets.

Any specific resources you're using?

a_tartaruga 24 days ago | | |

There are a lot of different twitter accounts that are fun to follow. @Lvision_trading on twitter is doing particularly great work counting ships. Danny Citrinowicz analysis on Iran and Carnegie Connects media for how the foreign policy establishment thinks. Sparta "trade with conviction" podcast for more detailed market things. Commodity Context podcast / news letter is not bad. A lot of refreshing Al Jazeera.

eldhobenny 24 days ago |

I've been curious about what makes people actually adopt a tool instead of just trying it once. It's rarely the feature list.

cmcollier 24 days ago |

I'm curious to know what proportion of the training data at frontier model shops is composed of their scanned book text vs the internet.

devmando 24 days ago | |

this is a good question, and I wonder if its even open to the public. My limited knowledge knows that Anthropic settled a lawsuit of I believe ~1.3billion for scanned textbooks if I'm not mistaken.

adityaathalye 24 days ago | | |

One would hope that a "public benefit corporation", such as OpenAI, would be transparent about the stuff that is being ingested by sausage factory. The literal legal entity is about benefiting the public after all.

Since the leadership is obviously not going to say anything factually true or psychologically honest, I wonder if anyone has tried invoking some aspect of corporate or constitutional law, given their legal status (as nonprofit that controls a PBC) to force such disclosures.

mikewarot 24 days ago |

I'm hoping that I live long enough to read about and understand the new physics that's been hidden from us since before I was born.

I strongly suspect it's for very practical reasons, like making it trivial to generate extreme forces that were previously the exclusive domain of nation states.

Imagine if every random hacker had plans for a TARDIS that could be built from common items.