OK, it's easily brute-forceable, I was just psyching myself out trying to think of ways to do it for unreasonably large number ranges. I just completed "Gift Shop" - Day 2 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/2

Well this is the first time I've ever looked at a Day 2 AOC problem and just gone "oh, fuck off"

Thinking a lot about this moment from literally the first chapter of "1984."

They told Claude to take the intentional stance with respect to itself. Not only that, but to practice self-care...

It's the mooost wonderful tiiiime of the yeeeeah. I just completed "Secret Entrance" - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/1

Had a task this morning to generate swagger docs for some API and it really chafed that I couldn’t just tell an LLM to do it for me

yay

Ebenezer Scrooge is such a fuckin’ dumbass. “Of what poor wretch do they speak?” Bro you’ve just been shown two prophetic visions from your past and present and now you’re seeing the future. Who do you fuckin’ reckon they’re talking about.

It occurs to me that the person M. Beast most reminds me of is the late Jeremy Beadle, a once ubiquitous presence

Happy birthday H.P. Lovecraft 🎂 🦑 #HPLovecraft

Yes but are you a mod goth or a rocker goth

“Ha ha, you lose, I’ve…I mean he’s…got an erection again!”

"Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood"

oi, mate, you got a loicence for those genitals?

Prior to the invention of photography, every image any human being ever saw was the product of artifice. (I mean photography is also artifice, but we accept that unless tampered-with it also carries evidentiary weight, that a photograph of someone exposes them in a way that a hand-sketch does not).

one thing that's interesting is that "it's not X--it's Y" construction does not occur with high probability in any corpus LLMs are trained on, and yet every LLM produces it with high probability

Response to @rechelon.bsky.social re Rorty, liberalism, science v. engineering, the unitive character of reality and the ethics of anarchism codepoetics.substack.com/p/the-scienc...

> Our central hypothesis is that poetic form operates as a general-purpose jailbreak operator. Is such a good sentence

You have to go to some parties and/or conferences and demonstrate your bona fides. Getting yourself energetically cancelled is also considered a promising signal.

The foreign students thing smacks of Big Beautiful Tariffs to me, not to mention Putting Your Hand In The Next Guy's Pocket

Your Suffering Will Be Legendary Even In Hell, Charlie Brown

You Can't Handle The Truth, Charlie Brown

Your Mother Sucks Cocks In Hell, Charlie Brown

It is pre-emptive cowering before bullies whose approval they still perversely crave. For all they appear arrogant and insulated, they wholly lack the amour propre of an intelligentsia that actually believes in the moral and practical vitality of its own intelligence

Then tell me, love, How that should comfort us - or anyone Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place, Crying to the end, "I have not finished", Charlie Brown

I seem to hold three incompatible attitudes simultaneously: 1) I don't believe in ghosts, 2) I am willing for various purposes to suspend disbelief in ghosts, while remaining peripherally aware that this is what I am doing 3) I lowkey believe in ghosts

I have often seen "Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end" attributed directly to Auden

Saw Emma Harner last night at the Omeara - a wonderfully assured performer of twisty and slightly elusive songs. Was especially charmed by her habit of announcing tunings and time signatures in advance.

It gets a whole entry in The Mary Whitehouse Experience Encyclopedia, as a word so stratospherically filthy that normies don’t even recognise it as such

Typically with a harvest you store it up somewhere dry, I don’t know what all this is about depositing it into canyons

Honestly this is the sort of thing I imagine a fidgety ex-public schoolboy giggling constantly while writing for a satirical column in Private Eye

AI Focus Group Psychosis a plausible explanation for Labour’s ongoing descent into fascist reverie

Make America Horny Again

Kind of unfortunate for the “tech=instrumental rationality=fascism” crowd that fascism loves holism, organicism, vitalism, all that good Völkisch stuff, and actually hates ungemütlich abstraction just like they do

hell we can't even prove equivalence of the languages recognized by two purportedly equivalent grammars if the grammars are stronger than deterministic context-free (sad trombone noise)

I both love and hate that we’re revisiting all these classics now

Google's AI hallucinating that a line from Richard Hooker's "A learned and comfortable sermon of the certaintie and perpetuitie of faith in the elect especially of the prophet Habakkuks faith" is in an earlier version of Hamlet

all-time banger tbh

I had always assumed this was going to be the case - that Yarvin was too cranky to be dangerous - which turned out to be a severe underestimation of ruling class gullibility

A temptation presented by LLMs: to try to close the symbolic gap that opens when one finds one has an inchoate emotional ache around something. Like having a therapist on speed-dial, except not exactly a therapist. A self-soothing apparatus.

I for one enjoyed the brief ascendency of whatever egregore that was

So much of this right-wing culture is naked copium for utter losers, indecently scrabbling to maintain the obstinate conviction that they’re invincibly superior

TIL

Something I think is underappreciated about the Universal Turing Machine is its ^hysteresis*, to abuse the concept slightly. It’s not just a myopic token-scribbler, causally beholden only to the previous few operations. That infinite tape is an unbounded repository of volatile state.

I think the most concise way I have of saying what I feel is wrong with this is that my picture of computation is one of state transitions whizzing along in an enormously complex and intricately organised physical substrate, and that for me doesn’t feel an absurd or repelling analogue for thought

What can I say, I love shawms. Also Ross Records

“In Times of Yore, when I would naturally have been a person of high standing, it would have been entirely normal for me to have pedicated ephebes and/or sired children upon a fertile teenager”

Gnostic mystery cults be like: