Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

Each second Sunday of the month, I post an "Ask HN: What are you working on?" thread. I can add this to that, since the idea is the same. What do you think?

I'm curious to know what proportion of the training data at frontier model shops is composed of their scanned book text vs the internet.

I randomly read an old book by John von Neumann I found in a thrift shop called “The Computer and The Brain”

It’s only like 70 pages and it’s basically just him comparing how computers and neurons work and speculating on some stuff.

The general takeaway seemed to be that the brain looks digital at first glance (binary activation of neurons) but is actually a lot more complicated and more like a mix of analog/digital.

Now I’m really curious if there are any other modern books that do this comparison more in depth, basically exploring how a brain works but the author has a CS or EE background

This book is from the 50s so I’m sure a lot has changed since then.

I am reading Letters from Birmingham Jail, and I'm stunned by how good Dr. King's writing is. I want to read more and learn how he managed to do it. I'm fascinated by the metaphors he uses and how vivid they are in my mind.

I am curious about impressionist paintings. It's my favourite art style but I struggle to replicate it on canvas. I'm glad that there are so many helpful YouTube art teachers now.

I have made elderflower cordial from harvested flowers, and it both got me into cocktails/mocktails, and tracking what else I can harvest throughout the year. Having garden flowers in the house and wild blackberry cakes is such a nice way to observe the passage of time.

The recent major geopolitical shifts and their intersection with energy commodity markets.

The book Virtual Barrels by Ilia Bouchouev.

The details and mechanics of financial option pricing.

I hadn't sat down to watch a concert on TV in a long time. It was Mozart and Vivaldi, performed in the courtyard of the Louvre. For a while, I kept wondering, "Where is the conductor?"

Then I noticed that one of the violinists was leading the other musicians while playing, through eye contact, body movement, and the music itself. Only after looking him up later did I learn that it was Julien Chauvin's ensemble, and that this was simply how they performed.

I ended up watching Julien Chauvin and his ensemble for a full hour. It went by in no time.

The great Egyptian desert. Those raised "lines" across the wadis - what is their function? The remote border stations near the Egypt-Libya-Sudan border: what is life like for the soldiers stationed there? What are all those trucks nearby on the Sudanese side of the border? Smugglers?

On the Eastern side of the Nile, what are all those small areas of bulldozing near the gold mines? "Artisanal" mining? Is that profitable?

What have you been curious about, adityaathalye?

I'm hoping that I live long enough to read about and understand the new physics that's been hidden from us since before I was born.

I strongly suspect it's for very practical reasons, like making it trivial to generate extreme forces that were previously the exclusive domain of nation states.

Imagine if every random hacker had plans for a TARDIS that could be built from common items.

I've been curious about what makes people actually adopt a tool instead of just trying it once. It's rarely the feature list.