Links - January 29, 2016

Random assortment of thoughts:

• I was sad to hear that Marvin Minsky passed away this week. I was exposed to his work by chance, as I picked up Society of Mind at a used book sale in Chicago during the summer I read GEB, and became obsessed with the seminal ideas of AI and consciousness. His book definitely helped me shape my views on intelligence.

• A couple of weeks ago I started compiling a list of resources worth reading/watching. They are mostly programming related, but we’ll see how the list grows.

• My resource list prompted my friend Leon to introduce me to Buster Benson’s Codex Vitae which is an awesome idea. I might do something similar in the future.

• Attention is a zero sum game. I have started using Twitter which is fun (follow me! @avyfain), but is super time consuming. Its hard to come to terms with the fact that the stream is infinite while time is not. Between that, and my new goal of reading 3 books per month, blogs and news have taken the back seat.

• Complex systems are awesome. I have been reading about them, and so should you.

Anyway, links for the past few days:

• How Facebook Squashed Twitter
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  
• Live Like a Hydra
  Buster Benson - Medium
  
• Analyzing 50k fonts using deep neural networks
  Erik Bernhardsson
  
• Farewell, Marvin Minsky (1927–2016)
  Stephen Wolfram
  
• Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer
  Benji Weber
  
• Don’t Mind the Share Price
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  
• The New York Times Introduces a Web Site
  Peter Lewis - The New York Times
  
• The world’s most important chart
  Matt Phillips - Quartz