What I’ve been reading (and watching) this week ending 31 August 2025
The evolution of leader–follower reciprocity: the theory of service-for-prestige — PMC
“We propose that although leader–follower relations first emerged in the human lineage to solve problems related to information sharing and social coordination, they ultimately evolved into exchange relationships whereby followers could compensate leaders for services which would otherwise have been prohibitively costly for leaders to provide.”
Book Review: “Breakneck” — by Noah Smith — Noahpinion
“America is run by lawyers, and China is run by engineers.”
Open Source is one person | Open Source Security
“Open source, the thing that drives the world, the thing Harvard says has an economic value of 8.8 trillion dollars (also a big number). Most of it is one person. And I can promise you not one of those single person projects have the proper amount of resources they need. If you want to talk about possible risks to your supply chain, a single maintainer that’s grossly underpaid and overworked. That’s the risk. The country they are from is irrelevant.”
The Eighty Five Percent Rule for optimal learning | Nature Communications
“…we find that the optimal error rate for training is around 15.87% or, conversely, that the optimal training accuracy is about 85%. We demonstrate the efficacy of this ‘Eighty Five Percent Rule’ for artificial neural networks used in AI and biologically plausible neural networks thought to describe animal learning.”
Movies Need to Shut Up | Video Essay — YouTube
The Electric Slide — by Packy McCormick and Sam D’Amico
“China’s bet is that in a world where intelligence is free, whoever can turn ideas into things fastest and cheapest wins. And currently, they’re the best in the world at turning ideas into things.”
“According to the hedonic treadmill model, good and bad events temporarily affect happiness, but people quickly adapt back to hedonic neutrality. The theory, which has gained widespread acceptance in recent years, implies that individual and societal efforts to increase happiness are doomed to failure. The recent empirical work outlined here indicates that 5 important revisions to the treadmill model are needed. First, individuals’ set points are not hedonically neutral. Second, people have different set points, which are partly dependent on their temperaments. Third, a single person may have multiple happiness set points: Different components of well-being such as pleasant emotions, unpleasant emotions, and life satisfaction can move in different directions. Fourth, and perhaps most important, well-being set points can change under some conditions. Finally, individuals differ in their adaptation to events, with some individuals changing their set point and others not changing in reaction to some external event.”
The Neuroscience of Perseverance | Psychology Today
“The pleasure principle trumps willpower every time.”
Expanding the Window of Tolerance
“The window of tolerance is a model of autonomic arousal proposed by Siegel (1999) that focuses specifically on understanding the body’s nervous system regulation after experiencing trauma. The window of tolerance comprises a range of emotional and physiological states within which an individual is able to effectively cope with stressors.”
Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement
“Compared with those who attempt to calm down, individuals who reappraise their anxious arousal as excitement feel more excited and perform better. Individuals can reappraise anxiety as excitement using minimal strategies such as self-talk (e.g., saying “I am excited” out loud) or simple messages (e.g., “get excited”), which lead them to feel more excited, adopt an opportunity mind-set (as opposed to a threat mind-set), and improve their subsequent performance. These findings suggest the importance of arousal congruency during the emotional reappraisal process.”
“The Yerkes–Dodson law is an empirical relationship between arousal and performance, originally developed by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson and published, in 1908, in the Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology.”
“…we hypothesize that there are seven activities that each have different and beneficial effects on the mind that complement each other, providing together a well-balanced “mental diet” for optimal neurocognitive functioning and well-being. We propose that very much as in the case of food, people can do without some of these activities, but this lack of behavior will be associated with sub-optimal levels of functioning or ill-health.”
“Less than 2% of the income of the top 10% global earners equals the entire annual income of the poorest 10%”
Evaluating LLMs for my personal use case · Graham King
“It’s great that AI can win maths Olympiads, but that’s not what I’m doing. I mostly ask basic Rust, Python, Linux and life questions. So I did my own evaluation.”
Everything I know about good API design
- Good APIs are boring
- (published) APIs are hard to change
- Only use API versioning as a last resort
- “If your product is valuable enough, users will flock to even a terrible API.”
- “Poorly-designed products will usually have bad APIs”
