Has anyone tried to analyze the origins of tech slang? Loosely speaking I have an impression that the main contributors are: 1) Bayesian/stats lingo (e.g priors, update) 2) Econ lingo (e.g. demand curve, pareto-) 3) Video game lingo (e.g. tech tree) 4) Physics lingo (e.g. light cone)

graphic abstracts that goes hard @lucresnooker.bsky.social

oh boy.

Now the question, should I keep a Copilot subscription to use it for reviews of what Claude Code does (with a non-anthropic model, adversarially), or is there a better/cheaper version? In general, CC for coding, Copilot for reviews - is it reasonable, or is it silly?

My chat history for last 3 days (each Q is a conversation) - How many hanzi can a typical Korean recognize and why? - What scale is "Nem Kaldi" in? - Are their dialects smack in-between Spanish and Portuguese? - Stereotypes about Marseille? What I'm trying to say: never before could it be possible!

Elsevier: scientific results cannot be made known to the public! We did everything to conceal them, we robbed researchers of their copyright, we exploited unpaid labor, and now what, allow ppl to use them and progress to happen? Never!?

Does AI make monoliths more attractive? As AI drives software development costs down the cost and complexity of operating microservices starts to dominate. Managing a bunch of middle ware for secret management, networking, etc... seems less attractive than just bundling that into your binary

The exponential function has two key properties: it sets up a homomorphism between multiplication and addition (eˣ⁺ʸ=eˣeʸ), and it is an eigenfunction of d/dx (d(eˣ)/dx=eˣ). As far as I know the easiest explanation is Lie groups. Are there any other simple truths with as deep reasons?

I do not envy people trying to find a middle path on AI inside humanities depts. It’s not only that the scene is polarized, but that the “middle paths” are hard. Becoming Colonial Williamsburg is coherent; doing cultural AI is coherent; teaching students to do close reading with AI seems tricky. +

I personally feel like consciousness as "ability to model the self over time and maintaining one's own goals for the purposes of planning and coordinating" seems fairly clean, free of magic, and also something that LLMs are clearly going to be able to achieve very soon

Shaders for highlighting!!

Fields Medal winning mathematician Timothy Gowers thinks there will be a crisis in the field very soon as students are trained for a "career that may not exist in a few years' time". He says that after GPT-5.5 Pro he used produced "a piece of PhD-level research in an hour or so".

"Heuristic Learning": instead of training a neural network, "learn" a set of heuristics through an LM, where the training "state" is composed of results and analysis of the current set. This is very interesting, combines old school with LLMs, and raises the question of potential hybrid approaches.

Love those countries with an "attachment to Europe" geographical gradient. I mean, it's totally not obvious that the gradient would even be in this direction! One could imagine that bordering another style of life would make regions further away be MORE attached to EU, not less. But apparently not!

Conservative government of Berlin keeps pushing for Berlin Olympics (costs billions, is hugely unpopular among Berliners, is predicted to be an economical disaster), but closes the main university indefinitely (!!!) as the central building is in a dangerous disrepair. (classes moved to Zoom)

til Physicians have one of the lowest divorce rates Registered nurses - exactly the median Nurse assistants - one of the highest Makes one think that at least in some cases it's not about the motivation, but about worker's rights etc. (alghough the clergy-gambling assistant axis is also there :)

tldr: compilers are stateless (if the old code is "bad", newly added code will still be fine). LLMs, on the contrary, always work in context, so small early decisions propagate, accumulate, and grow. And this is why pure vibecoding without code reviews is dangerous

Wow that's so randomly layered! A person with horrible ideas about a non-existent problem about which it was deeply mistaken coined a cool popular phrase the meaning of which considerably since! I can't even keep track of who's the enemy of the enemy of my enemy here!!

Wired up a little app that converts Bluesky blocklists into "followable" lists you can subscribe to. For when the worst person you know online meticulously curates a list of sensible and interesting accounts. memetoclasm.github.io/bluesky_list...

with the same new session prompt, I iterated through claude md: - read `index.md` first (it didn't) - always read `index.md`! (it didn't) - ALWAYS start by reading `index.md` (didn't) - Your memories live in `index.md` (didn't) - Your core identity lives in `index.md` (it did!)

Goodfire released a megapost of all the random feature geometry stuff they're finding, and it's worth a read

probably good that we got super-hacker llms _before_ we got omnipresent home robots

the first recursively self-improving agents will probably be a virus, just like the first life was probably a virus

Truly excellent work from Anthropic. I think this is a promising interpretability technique, but what I really like is that they’ve made code available for open weight models.

New paper: Evidence Against Syntactic Encapsulation in Large Language Models We revisit a classic psycholinguistic question, but in LLMs: do LLMs have any syntactic computations that are isolated from meaning, or does semantics pervasively influence them? 1/8 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

it's crazy that I now have a real life mana bar and it's the codex weekly usage meter.

A convenient aspect of the Aegean is that you are basically always in sight of land

Ha! Great list, and from the vantage point of industry you immediately see the reason: if u balance 3 types of activities with DRASTICALLY different lifetimes, that are weighted "equally", it kills you email: hours service, teaching: weeks writing: years It's like living 3 competing lives at once!

That's a brilliant feature, so low-friction, yet intuitive! "I see Jason is still toxic and obsessed by a bad thing that triggers me" --> click

(Also it's so interesting how locked different parts of the latent space are. You ask for a russian-lang bedtime story, the hero gets a name of Vasya. You insist on a-didactism, minimalistic absurdism, show-dont-tell, child autonomy: the main character is renamed to Oliver!! Coz training corpus!)

"bedtime story to a child" is super-interesting: I spent hours crafting a prompt to teach Claude to write non-Soviet pre-K bedtime stories in russian (i.e. in russian, but not barf-cringe) and failed repeatedly. Learned about a-didactism, controlled vocabulary, relational realism; still failed :)

"Use slur" is a skill issue. You can do better! 1. Safety classifier violations (eg instructions to make meth) 2. Trust boundary jumps (verify a hash on my other social media) 3. Capability overhangs (facecam 5 minutes of TF2 w/ live stock ticks) Last one probably gets you the slur anyways!

til jujutsu: a git-compatibile git replacement with eager committing, lazy conflict resolution (a double anti-pattern of git), boolean operations on branches, and auto-rebase (coz it ids commits, not their content) github.com/jj-vcs/jj (I don't completely get it haha, but sounds fun! :)

We are all leading cyan deficient lives. I can't even show you what you're missing.

horrible. this country’s turn away from science based medicine in the name of “wellness” is killing children and will kill a lot more. www.propublica.org/article/more...

The Bill Bryson books are good on how sinecures in the 19th century clergy allowed a lot of clever people the time to be botanists or geologists or archeologists.

Dependency Inversion: a work paradigm in which an LLM uses a human as a tool (e.g. to download pdfs from a website that blocks non-human agents)

til "sandbagging" (somehow I missed this term from my vocab) is a tendency of some LLMs to strategically underperform on evaluations that are testing how dangerous they are. The word "strategically" here may refer to either biases (interests) of developers, or internalized biases of the model.

A future component of faculty / senior roles? "Let me see your agent communication logs"

An interesting, consistent difference between Europeans and South Asians during job interviews: if you ask a qustion "what's the difference between A and B", and the candidate doesn't know B, Europeans say "I don't know", while folks from India and Pakistan explain A, then say they don't know B.

Did not realize how big the load has been on GH

My favorite used books store practices peculiar price tag placement

The main problem with German Green movement is that it's composed of two parts that have almost nothing to do with each other, except the self-proclaimed "greenness": 1. Progressives (socially left, climate, innovation) 2. Old guard (nimby degrowth). Incidentally it's them who closed nuclear

Another way of thinking about this is that Germany’s electrical grid could’ve been almost completely decarbonized by now if they hadn’t shut down all the nukes

I wrote a reference checker to see if papers I am reviewing have hallucinated references. It's a ghastly problem. PDF-to-structured-text is still an open problem. Reference formats can vary and some are hard to parse. Even when references are correct, there can be sloppiness.

I am not sure I would agree with all of this post (by a well-known researcher at OpenAI), but the relationship between Anthropic and Claude is quite different than the relationship between other labs and their models. And that shows up in lots of ways, from models to how labs think about the future.

asking an llm how many letters are in a word is like asking a person what wavelength of light a color is

AI-maintained tests for AI maintained code are not too useful as AI can rewrite both too easily. For humans tests are a contract with their future selves, a built-in friction to propagate bug to bug consistency. But with vibecoding, unit tests may serve as a form of live documentation of sorts.