Plutonic Rainbows

I’m wrapping up the year with three new reads. First is Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, originally published in 1988. In it, three editors — jaded from reviewing too many outlandish manuscripts about mystics and the occult — hear a wild conspiracy theory from a peculiar colonel and decide to create their own elaborate plot by feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer. What starts as a lighthearted prank quickly spirals out of control: people begin dying, and the trio scrambles for answers.

Next is The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, first published in 1895. It’s a collection of short stories centered on a cryptic play that supposedly drives its readers insane — a seminal work in both occult and weird fiction circles.

Lastly, there’s The Great and Secret Show, which debuted in 1989. I’m not typically a fan of Clive Barker’s novels, but on a friend’s recommendation, I’ve decided to give this one a try.

Chinese startup DeepSeek has released DeepSeek-V3. According to the benchmarks they shared, this is now the most capable open-source large language model currently available. It even achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models even though it was trained on a budget of just $5.6 million — a fraction of what major tech companies typically spend.

• DeepSeek-V3 was trained using just 2.8 million GPU hours, costing approximately $5.6 million — significantly less than competitors.

• The model achieves performance comparable to GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 on various benchmarks, particularly excelling in mathematics and coding tasks.

• The model's efficiency comes from innovative architecture and training techniques, including a novel approach to training called auxiliary-loss-free load balancing.

I managed to catch this new movie on Boxing Day. I’ve always been a huge admirer of this story — especially Werner Herzog’s 1979 adaptation. Keeping that film as my benchmark, I was pleasantly surprised by how excellent Robert Eggers’s new version turned out to be.

Matt Zoller Seitz at Roger Ebert.

Technically and logistically, this movie is an awesome achievement. The wind, the rain, and the darkness seem to do Nosferatu’s bidding. The force of the monster’s unknowable malevolence seems to distort the movie itself, making it shudder and break down. It’s made with the most modern filmmaking technology but feels like an artifact from another century, like one of those inscribed tablets that adventurers find in a tomb and insist on translating aloud even though there’s a drawing of a terrifying demon on it.

Many predictions suggest that AGI is approaching rapidly. OpenAI has announced that its upcoming model will be the first of its kind, with a planned release scheduled for the end of January 2025.