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/ )
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.
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?
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?
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.
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!
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.
The book Virtual Barrels by Ilia Bouchouev.
The details and mechanics of financial option pricing.
Any specific resources you're using?
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.
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.
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_...