Sam works on innovation policy at Progress Irelandan independent policy think tank in Dublin, and runs a publication called The Fitzwilliam. Most relevant to us, on his personal bloghe writes a popular link roundup; what follows is an abridged version of his Links for December.
Blogs and short links
1. I’ve finished my Notes on Taiwan. I have been pleased with the response. It made it to Marginal Revolution, The Browserand Conor Friedersdorf’s Best of Journalism list.
2. I appeared on Matt Teichman’s podcast.
3. What should middle powers do for compute strategy?
4. The scientific contributions of the Carlsberg beer company. Danish Guinness?!
5. We finally have Goodreads for academic papers.1 Predictably, Gavin Leech has already joined and makes up a significant fraction of all content on the website.
6. Pitches are now welcome for In Developmenta new Works in Progress-inspired magazine focused on the developing world.
7. From The Fitzwilliam: our essay about why most foreign aid never leaves the countrybut weirdly, this is fine (for now).
8. The Guardian on the life of Saul Kripke. Can’t a man army crawl in front of a group of undergraduates without it making it into his obituary?
By pure coincidence, I first learned about Kripke’s causal theory of reference in a philosophy of language class on the day that he died. Later that week, I suffered the greatest burn of my philosophical career, when a tutor told me that, if Saul Kripke had heard the argument I had just made, “he would come back to life, just to die again”.2
9. The beauty of giving things sustained attention.
10. Best of Wikipedia: The Glasgow ice cream wars.
11. Harry Law’s introduction to the history of AI and overview of the legacy of the Dartmouth Conference. It’s so funny that Marvin Minsky was the scientific advisor for HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Music and podcasts
1. Today in non-sequiturs: Why the War on Drugs is responsible for the wide availability of blueberries.
2. Hiromi, Sonicwonderland. Found via her appearance on NPR Tiny Desk Concert. My favourite song is Up. I haven’t had a chance to watch the interview with Rick Beatto yet, but Hiromi’s playing is electrifying. You can also listen to the duet with Chick Coreawhom (if Wikipedia is to be believed) she met by chance aged 17 and was invited to perform with on stage later that day.
3. The Marginal Revolutionaries on their favourite economic models. Listen for a good explanation of why monopoly, a priori, does not imply a lower quality of goods than would be socially efficient. I also wonder how many people in Ireland could correctly explain Harberger’s general equilibrium capital taxation result, despite it basically being the intellectual cornerstone of our economy.
4. Ulkar Aghayeva, Fugue Chahargah. My first time listening to Azerbaijani music. This is a piano fugue inspired by mughamthe traditional microtonal music of Azerbaijan. Ulkar also has a suite for cello and piano and a string trio. She is insanely talented, and I hope to make it to one of her concerts someday soon.
5. Dan Wang on what you should do if you want to become the leader of China. I found this most interesting for Sam Bowman and Pieter Garicano’s discussion of what ails European economies. The extent to which the US has much greater competition in banking is remarkable. I recently tried to open a new bank account, but there were literally only three banks in the country I could choose from. I found the experience so complicated and unpleasant that I eventually gave up. Meanwhile, around 80% of financing for European companies happens via bank lending, compared to around 30% in America – the quality of financial services really matters!
6. Soham Sankaran is building a vaccine company in India. This reminds me of many conversations I have had with Akash Kulgod about his experience scaling Dognosis from Bangalore. Akash would be a great guest for this podcast.
Books and Papers
1. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon, A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. This document is the first official usage of the term ‘artificial intelligence’, laying out the research agenda that would become the 1956 Dartmouth workshop.3 Is the significance of the Dartmouth conference overrated in the history of AI? Probably yes. Are we privileged to be alive in an era when we can read the original proposal, and ask questions of it using magic boxes that largely solved all the problems outlined in the proposal within a single human lifetime? Also yes.
2. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. Unless you count graphic novels, plays, poetryor autofictionthis is the only novel I read in 2025. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to read more fiction. In short, Gulliver’s Travels is A++, and possibly the greatest novel I’ve ever read. For more thoughts, you’ll have to wait for my Irish Enlightenment post.
Liberty Fund is hosting a virtual reading group on Gulliver’s Travels on March 4, 11, 18, and 25 from 4:00–5:00 p.m. EST. You can find more information here.
Films and video
1. Greg Kohs, The Thinking Game. A documentary about Demis Hassabis and the story of Google DeepMind. You can watch the full thing for free on YouTube. The main new thing I learned about was Demis’s role in developing the 1994 video game Theme Park.
This made for strange viewing. OpenAI, Anthropic, and ChatGPT are never mentioned. You could watch this entire film, and be under the impression that AlphaGo-era reinforcement learning is still the dominant paradigm. Significant sections of it could equally have appeared in the 2017 documentary about AlphaGo, which is one of the greatest documentaries of all time.
I was also disappointed that Demis’s side gig as the world’s fourth-highest-rated player in the world of the board game Diplomacy wasn’t mentioned.
2.Edward Yang, Yi Yi (一一). My first Taiwanese film, found by asking Claude Opus 4.5 “What is the greatest Taiwanese film of all time?” This was Yang’s last film, and is a major part of the Taiwanese New Wave. The title means ‘one by one’, and, when written vertically, looks like the Chinese character for the number 2.
I think this is one of the best films I have ever seen. It captured the ‘relentlessness’ of mundane family life better than any other visual media I can think of. I later learned this is one of the few times Scott Sumner has given a perfect score to a film:
[1] Thanks to Anuja Uppuluri.
[2] No, I can’t remember what my argument actually was.
[3] I also learned that the Dartmouth conference was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
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