There is this very Silicon Valley phenomenon of LARPing an engineer/philosopher type, where the engineer part is "everything is computer" and the philosopher part is "everything is Bayes rule." Many such cases.

@supermeyn.bsky.social is a skilled cocktail photographer

The new Divine Comedy record: a perfect 10.

uh .... doge.allen-zhu.com

I saw this circulating on twitter, I thought it was a joke but it’s real

I found a clinic for ailing AIs

I was giving a quick intro to Kolmogorov axioms of probability in my stochastic control class today, so I said that the sample space Ω consists of Kantian things-in-themselves, and random variables defined on it are our access to phenomenal reality.

We are now faced with the truly Heideggerian question: what does it mean to authentically live on the internet?

How much more Midwest can we get? The answer is, none. None more Midwest.

News in the history of molecular biology. The Science History Institute in Philadelphia has acquired a huge archive of correspondence and other scientific material from the pioneers of molecular biology (Franklin, Klug, Perutz, Delbrück etc, with items from Crick and Watson, too). 1/n

Excellent review by @ositanwanevu.com in NYRB of Sam Tanenhaus' tome on William F. Buckley: www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

More Stochastic Gradient

I’m for bourbon abundance. Just sayin’.

This book has never been translated from French. Time to bite the bullet and learn the language of Diderot and Voltaire? www.amazon.com/querelle-uni...

Bergson: "We instinctively tend to solidify our impressions in order to express them in language. ... we are now standing before our own shadow: we believe that we have analyzed our feeling, while we have really replaced it by a juxtaposition of lifeless states which can be translated into words."

what we do in the shadows

Lunch of champions: p’tit basque, roasted almonds, and chilled Crenshaw melon.

Also, it is worthy of note that, for the AI safety people, the ends (preventing the emergence of skynet and bioweapons) justify the means (among other things, immiserating huge quantities of people by normalizing runaway gambling in the guise of "predictive rationality").

let’s go

Ben is right. The "AI Safety" cult is all bent out of shape about the hypothetical harm from AGI shoggoths, but the real, tangible harm is happening right here and now. I used to think the late Dan Dennett was too alarmist about the danger of "counterfeit people," but he was spot on.

Pourover of the Beast

Vapnik-Chervonenkis candy bar

your daily dose of prog weirdness, enjoy www.youtube.com/watch?v=zflp...

Two different days, two different places to go for breakfast, and both are playing “Come on Eileen”? Reset the simulation please!

read theory

Yury Polyanskiy gave an interesting set of lectures on quantization and tokenization in AI at the 2025 Princeton Machine Learning Summer School. Here are his lecture slides if you can read his handwriting: people.lids.mit.edu/yp/homepage/...

"Despite all the slop, I am still just a sequence of flops."

Note to self: Alain Berthoz's idea of "simplexity" [1] seems closely related to (or possibly the same as) Kirschner and Gerhart's "constraints that deconstrain" [2]. [1] www.odilejacob.com/catalogue/sc... [2] yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

I accidentally stumbled upon this, now you have to suffer too

Kiddo wanted to learn how to pull espresso shots. Proud dad moment, followed by a superb cup of coffee.

galette de sarrasin with pear cider from Door County, WI

I appreciated the wide range of references here, from Edith Wharton to the Buddhist Pali Canon. However, this essay resonated most with my recent reading of Richard Wollheim’s _The Thread of Life_, which presented a vision of what it means to lead a life …

I’ve been saying this for a long time.

*chef’s reactions guy voice* mmkay …

summer reading

beach time

A critical look at intelligence explosion arguments, with references to I.J. Good, Jimmy Savage's small and large worlds, Kathleen Wilkes' argument against thought experiments in psychology, and Tolkien's theory of subcreation (+ some Sabbath references): realizable.substack.com/p/supertzar-...

Transatlanticism is a good song. That is all.

maybe we are living in a simulation after all

there’s a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong

breakfast of champions

coffee and book break

lfg

This is a difficult book, but has been very rewarding so far.

this is good okonski.bandcamp.com/album/entran...

oh yeah

nerdposting will continue until morale improves

American sublime

Kathleen Wilkes: “Whereas the sciences on the one hand aim for clarity, economy, and the absence of ambiguity in their conceptual apparatus, common sense on the other revels in the riot of Roget's Thesaurus.“

RIP www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3-h...