July ’25 Links

I have an article on Bridge Winners that discusses an opening lead problem and tries to start a discussion about “How Bridge has changed as compared to what is taught in old bridge books,” but a lot of the comments are on the opening lead example (and subsequent cheating accusation). I also wrote a thread on the Nagoya ’25 Basho.

And what are the gyoji (Sumo Refs) saying, a guide. Spoiler — the most famous word “Hakkeyoi” (used to signal a good start to the match) has no clear/accepted meaning (apart from signaling a clean start).

Rick Beato quickly creates a song using AI (video)

I like Factorio, but I never made such a lovely aesthetic design (picture)

Can you stop anti-competitive mergers by forcing the merging companies to short their rivals?

Of course I’m linking to a video called “Londo and G’Kar: An Acting Masterclass.“

Neal Stephenson looking back on The Diamond Age and how it applies to modern AI.

Gwern suggests that that the reason LLMs have never made a truly stunning novel insight is perhaps … they do not daydream like we do (just kind of randomly mix and match thoughts to see what happens).

Also Gwern — Cats as Horror Movie Villains.

CCTV Captures the exact moment a slip-strike earthquake passes a house.

Physics used to predict that metals can’t be heated more than 3x their boiling point. I didn’t know that, but it turns out it was wrong, as they superheat gold to 33,000 F.

Betelgeuse has a (very dim) companion star, probably explaining a bunch of questions like “Why did Betelgeuse suddenly dim in 2019” (which people thought was a prelude to its supernova).

Eliezer Yudkowsky is interviewed about HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore