629: Mythos vs World: The Model Too Good to Release, GPU Rich vs GPU Poor Leaderboard, Meta's Back With Muse Spark, Greg Brockman, Artemis II, and Lady Bird
"How is the NSA looking at this?"
Don’t ask people for advice, ask them what they do.
—Cal Newport
📚📚📚🔍🤖 I’ve been tracking every book I’ve read since I was 16, and about halfway through, I started giving letter grades to books based on my enjoyment. Enjoyment ≠ quality. A book can be brilliant and not for me, or messy and flawed and exactly what I needed.
I took the whole list and gave it to Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4-Thinking, and asked them what they could learn from the patterns and for recommendations.
Many of the suggestions I already had on my to-read list, which in some ways was a good sign, but some were brand new to me and — based on the reviews and descriptions — seemed like things I should read.
I recommend you try the same.
For me, this was already a much better recommendation engine than the basic “People who read X also read Y” on Amazon, and what’s cool is you can have it go at it from different angles and explore deep into various corners of BookSpace.
For example: recommend more of what I already love (the grades help a lot here), or fill the holes in my reading and identify my blind spots. Or “recommend obscure things you think I’ll love, where there’s less than a 15% chance I’ve even heard of it but a 75% chance I’ll enjoy it.” (The % are just meant to guide the model. I know it’s false precision, but it works as directional steering.)
💊😴💭🌈 I have such vivid dreams when I take Ashwagandha.
It’s not a supplement I take daily. I mostly take it when I feel a little anxious (I’m lucky that my baseline for anxiety is pretty low), or before bed when I want a little extra help sleeping (if you’re curious: I take 600mg of a 12:1 extract, equivalent to 7,200mg)
I know the studies aren’t super strong or conclusive, but the evidence seems directionally positive, and it seems pretty safe. Subjectively, it seems to help me, for whatever that's worth. Maybe it’s placebo, but hey, I’ll take that too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The one thing that has been pretty consistent is the vivid dreams. Even if it didn’t help with anything else, I'd honestly be tempted to take it recreationally once in a while just for the dreams.
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