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.

Tonight feels like a 100 Year Old Cigar kind of night.

Spent almost the entire day on revisions, the response to reviewers is almost as long as the paper. Time for some actual R&R:

Caviar bumps might be one of the most déclassé things at the moment. Just sayin’.

Advertise your account with a Simpsons image

New book by Volodine, which I somehow missed when it came out:

Deep interpretation: what if Anthropic's Claude is named not after Claude Shannon but after Claude Lancelot?

second tornado warning of the day, that’s Central Illinois for you

TIL that E.B. Dynkin had a paper in 1976 on the existence of general economic equilibria under stochastic uncertainty. ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull...

malört negroni

Mine was about quantum mechanics of lasers.

"The self as a narrative center of gravity" is, actually, a very Nietzschean take by Dennett -- per Nietzsche, all language is metaphorical and figurative.

"Left to itself, the "I" of the cogito is Sisyphus condemned, from one instant to the next, to push up the rock of its certainty, fighting the slope of doubt." (Paul Ricoeur, _Oneself As Another_)

Boards Of Canada have announced details of their much-anticipated new album Inferno buff.ly/ClKdmJy

After grumbling for years in our substacks about uses and abuses of probability in machine learning, @beenwrekt.bsky.social and I decided it's finally time to put down some concrete ideas in a manifesto with a DOI. Here it is, give us your best feedback. (1/4)

New post: history of ideas from control, decision theory, cybernetics, and psychology, with some Stalin-era academic politics in the USSR thrown in for good measure. realizable.substack.com/p/feeding-ev...

"I am free only when I feel that I am free; but I feel that I am free only when I imagine some restraint, when I begin to think of some state in contrast to my present state." (Paul Valéry, _The Outlook for Intelligence_)

Ivan Krastev is always worth reading, and this is characteristically good: www.equator.org/articles/the...

white negroni: Roku gin, Luxardo Bitter Bianco, Dolin Blanc vermouth

Discussing important matters with students:

I could go for a slice of Esterházy torte right about now.

Expert systems are alive and well. In fact, since the expert systems in question are humans, we better keep them alive and well so we can keep mining them for automatable expertise.

real patterns

Tesla coil concert at the UIUC Engineering Open House last night:

Attention to electrical transformers is all you need.