some light readin’

Cynar Spritz with a couple of dashes of Végétal de la Grande-Chartreuse:

cold summer borscht + a dirty gin martini

Stanislaw Lem, _His Master's Voice_:

I’ve been watching the Last Meal series on the Mythical Kitchen YouTube channel, and so I got to thinking: what would I want for my last meal on Earth? Here goes: * extra dry gin martini with three olives and the trio of snacks from Bemelmans * traditional Greek salad

One can always count on @jwherrman.bsky.social to make good sense of what’s happening in and around AI:

Today marks my three years of substacking: realizable.substack.com

So apparently my soon-to-be-12yo daughter can do the prefect bene gesserit voice. Achievement unlocked, I guess?

I was in the Bay Area over the weekend, and Alyosha Efros twisted my arm to give a talk in his weekly research group meeting and to "keep it entertaining." I took this as an opportunity to think of five philosophy papers everyone working on AI/ML should read. realizable.substack.com/p/five-philo...

This made me chuckle, but Stanislaw Lem had done this sort of thing much better and with more humor.

Reading Word and Object and nodding vigorously the whole time so the people on the bus know, from my overt behavior under publicly recognized circumstances, that I agree with it

Yifeng Chu and I just posted our paper on chaining-type bounds for expected soft maxima of Gaussian processes. The analysis makes use of a nice blend of ideas from probability, statistical physics of disordered systems, and information theory. arxiv.org/abs/2606.22611

Why does Dwarkesh sound like he’s always speaking at 1.5x speed? I was listening to Ada Palmer on his podcast, and the contrast is so noticeable.

my version of Hugo Spritz St. Germain lemon juice magnolia pear shrub prosecco seltzer lemon, mint

"We are bound to adapt any alien pattern to our own in the very process of understanding or translating the alien sentences." (W.V.O. Quine, "Speaking of objects")

Can I write a critique of the splendors and miseries of emergence using hipster music references and the phenomenological concept of Fundierung? Only one way to find out!

Can I write a critique of the splendors and miseries of emergence using hipster music references and the phenomenological concept of Fundierung? Only one way to find out!

carnitas time

Peter Winch, writing in 1958, prefigures a lot of the current obsessions at the intersection of AI and language:

4 dashes angostura bitters 2 dashes chocolate bitters 1/2 oz falernum 1 oz Batavia arrack 1 oz Appleton Estate 12 Jamaican rum

Excellent essay by Leif, Tyler, and Ben. Interestingly, reification of “internal states” is one of the pitfalls of the intentional stance of Dennett, something we are seeing a lot of AI interoperability research succumbing to.

waiting out the rain

I came back

This was an excellent episode, very dense in ideas and concepts. Highly recommended.

White Negroni, Mood Indigo edition 1oz Empress 1908 indigo gin 1oz Luxardo bitter bianco 1oz C. Comoz vermouth blanc

Video of the talk I gave at the Cultural AI conference at NYU back in March is finally up (thanks again to @leifw.bsky.social and @t-shoemaker.bsky.social for having arranged this excellent event). www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYu9...

Stopped by a new bookstore (opened this Friday): Spineless Books. They have a small, well-curated selection, books are alphabetical by author but not arranged by genre. I browsed for a bit and spotted Italo Calvino, Brian Eno, Stanislaw Lem, Georges Perec, John Wyndham, etc. www.spinelessbooks.com

One hilarious thing about Magnifica Humanitas is how hard it seems to have triggered the rationalists. "But the Pope doesn't talk about instrumental convergence!" "Has he even read the Sequences???"

Good piece by Bertrand Meyer about AI for software engineering:

I re-read Turing’s “Computing machinery and intelligence” recently, and it bears pointing out that Turing rejected the view that thinking *requires* phenomenal consciousness or emotion or subjective experience. Parts of the paper are loopy (eg the ESP bit), but he was correct on the above.

If it takes The Pope to point out the obvious idea that AI systems don’t undergo subjective experience or have emotions or moral conscience, then we have much bigger problems.

Pope Leo on “AI alignment” — whose values will these systems be “aligned” with?

visual analogies

I've been on a Gian-Carlo Rota reading binge lately, and this resonated:

More bangers by Rota: “It is well known that statistics is that branch of applied mathematics that is expressly designed to reinforce conclusions previously decided upon.”

Happy Steely Dan Day! youtu.be/TPCusTTV8PI?...

Emergency morning deep frying session: making patacones to go with the kiddo’s presentation on Ecuador in 6th grade Spanish.

“When a philosopher writes well one can forgive him anything, even being an analytic philosopher.” (Gian-Carlo Rota)

did I also drop by the Seminary Co-op Bookstore? yes

$33 at Powell’s

For those interested in things at the intersection of information theory and machine learning, here is some recent work done in collaboration with Abbas El Gamal from Stanford (a true Renaissance man of engineering). One is a chapter Abbas wrote on information theory and ML. arxiv.org/abs/2605.02989

Where I’ll be this week: www.imsi.institute/activities/t...

Topical, all of a sudden.

That was a deep cut. Apparently no one here has heard of the Port-Royal grammarians?

Open postdoc with the amazing Sarah Marzen (Scripps College, Claremont, California). Intersection of information theory, biophysics, neuroscience, and machine learning. Please RT theclaremontcolleges.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/SCR_C...

The cover of “Wichita Lineman” on Flea’s “Honora,” with Nick Cave doing the vocals, is a perfect 10/10.