Links #1

First, interesting things that I've read recently:

• In 5 Excerpts From JD Vance’s Emails to a Transgender Classmate, Vance comes off as a fairly moderate and thoughtful person — comforting if he ends up becoming VP.
• I found One Israeli Hostage’s Unusual Experience in Gaza fascinating — particularly Atzili's description of her captors. She described them as educated, English-speaking, highly religious members of Hamas who seemed protective and decent, and who hadn't known about the looting or taking of female captives.
• The Wikipedia article about Kurrent, an old style of German cursive.
• A Tweet about training GPT-2 to multiply better by starting out with CoT and then removing tokens.
• No One Expects Young Men To Do Anything and They Are Responding By Doing Nothing. I enjoy Henderson's writing on "luxury beliefs", and he points to something that I think is super important. Strong social norms can seem repressive but often make life better, especially for those who are predisposed by their genes or environments to bad choices.
• The Life of Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B. (I didn't know Linear B was used to write Greek until after reading!)
• The undercover agent who wasn’t chronicles the story of James Epps, who was accused of being a "false flag" government operative and instigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Very instructive and fascinating to see how quickly conspiracy theories can grow and become weaponized even against their adherents.
• America Has Too Many Laws

  If you were to sit down and read through all of our criminal laws and regulations—or at least flip through them—you would find plenty of surprises. You would learn, for example, that it’s a federal crime to damage a government-owned lamp in Washington, D.C.; consult with a known pirate; or advertise wine by suggesting its intoxicating qualities.

• A reunion, a vigil and reasons to celebrate discusses the life of Pacific Islanders in the U.S. and especially Utah. Interesting quote from the article:

  Feltch-Malohifo’ou believes some behavior problems could be addressed if officials understood Pacific Island culture better. “I’ve told judges that if you put a mother on the stand, a church leader, an elder and they would have to do community service for the offender, you would never have anybody else go back to jail. Because they are not going to let their mother paint graffiti off a wall. I’ve told judges they’ve got to use the cultural things that matter,” she said.

• The Case for Choosing Death, Not Immortality