This alt history idea is really cool. Most alternative history deal with political or technological changes, but cultural/human alternatives are rarely explored. And this one is a really contingent big change.

06/06/2026 vitruvian man

Visar sig att 2/3 av tillfrågade svenskar är positiva till livsförlängande teknik. Här är en replik till Fonus debattartikel som fokuserade på den negativa tredjesdelen: longevitysweden.substack.com/p/tva-av-tre...

This is very cool. A large bunch of thinkers, from the very reasonable to crazy, with explanations of how their Big Explanations work, and what critics say. Great work, Spencer Greenberg and team! society.clearerthinking.org

XKCD today xkcd.com/3253/ is totally right. Being aware of the geometry around us and that the sun moves 15 degrees per hour has helped me select seats many times.

Apropos citogenesis and how repeated copying generates cultural artefacts, here is a neat example of human text evolution. You don't need AI to accidentally make something "meaningful" that acquires a life on its own. Lorems are technological transposomes. youtu.be/kL1PDqzqhM4?...

Claude argued that faciendum curavit ("saw to its being made") would be slightly more accurate in a supervisory-magistrate register, implying real oversight (especially if we add "idemque probavit", "and also approved/certified it").

(My modest proposal for how to acknowledge AI work is to use the Latin phase "Fieri Iussit," which means "commanded to be made," a common phrase on Roman Empire buildings.)

Please, when you design a conference website: do not use lazy loading of the agenda! Attendants like me want to Ctrl+F search for sessions, and if they are not yet loaded they will be impossible to search. #InfiniteScrollConsideredHarmful

How lucky are you to have been born when and where you are? Had Opus 4.8 in Claude Code whip up a new visualization of all humans who ever lived. In addition to being neat to try, it is an interesting test for an AI that combines research, code, design and stats together veil-of-history.netlify.app

Opus 4.8 also managed to rather deftly disprove a favourite idea of mine (Wigner crystal CAs held in artificial neutrino stars for postbaryonic computation) but gave me an equally weird new one (positronium cavity quantum computers around SMBHs). Claude taketh, Claude giveth.

The current bonfire of the US research system looks incredibly shortsighted for US interests, unless one thinks that AI might soon fill the hole. I doubt that's an actual reason for any policy.

When setting up organisations, I think three overlooked parts is making initiation and graduation rituals, and a plan for how to fold it up properly when it ceases.

Seeking teams to test whether AI-enabled formal methods can make high-assurance cyber defense practical, at scale, through building production-grade software components backed by machine-checked proofs and validated through coordinated red-team exercises. https://bit.ly/49Wif30

This is impressive: it is a problem I had actually heard of. It looks like the solution approach is surprising to mathematicians. It was a general reasoning model rather than a specialized one: bitter lesson time. I think the stochastic parrot is now nuked from orbit. openai.com/index/model-...

Melolontha melolontha, the may bug. We ran into each other as we went about our business in the early morning. I love the characteristic leaves on the antennae: this is a male with seven leaves, females have six.

As part of Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Nuclear winter” series, Florian Jehn and ALLFED examine how nuclear war could disrupt global food trade. thebulletin.org/2026/05/how-...

The fact that so many of James Miller's interlocutors refuse to see academic citogenesis or copying erroneous claims as a big problem is telling. The literature is lousy with it (and shibboleth citations, citation circles, and plain errors). x.com/JimDMiller/s...

Thanasimus formicarius, the ant beetle. A tough predator on bark beetles. This one was inspecting the wood at a marina in Åland.

Nice post building on Toby Ord's work to explain the lack so far of really transformative AI-generated ideas due to weakness in hyperpolation. It looks like it is really a structural problem with current AI architectures.

I think this post from The Other Site encapsulates sanity well: we should be able to use AI in research, but we should be held accountable for the quality of our work.

I ended up making a version of the "two wolves" meme-clade picture as t-shirts for my husband and me on his birthday.

It is EuroVision, so of course I had to make my own AI twist/parody/homage: an Eurovision contest for the factions in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Here are the contributions:

Forskning når oftast fram till beslutsfattare. Problemet är att ingen har mandat att agera på den — eller möjlighet att bära risken. Det diskuterar jag i ett seminarium den 21 maj: www.miun.se/Forskning/fo...

För 22 år sedan fnös jag åt idén att matematiken stod inför ett nära förestående paradigmskifte. Nu är mitt budskap ett annat. (Som Keynes sade: When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?) haggstrom.substack.com/p/a-paradigm...

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?

What does "succession planning" even mean in this context? Treating oneself as a process rather than a thing leads to interesting places.

If you are in the Boston area in June, join us to discuss brain-computer interface ethics. June 5-6, 2026 www.eventbrite.com/e/the-philos...

New preprint: Whole-body 3D kinematics of freely behaving 𝐷𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎 New tech from @blobology.bsky.social & others at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social, which @ispizua.bsky.social and @elliottabe.bsky.social used to gain insight into 3D structure of locomotion & courtship www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's Pancake Day! Time to EAT PANCAKES in HONOR OF MACHIAVELLI! What do pancakes have to do with the founder of modern political science? Our boy Nick was obsessed with pancakes! & wrote about them at length in his "Art of War." Why pancakes? He'd been studying the ancients of course! 1/?

I have also reached the stage where I am walking around in the office with the laptop open to give Claude Code time to work.

I am a libertarian. I want the government out of my bedroom and my wallet. And I want to eat lab grown meat if I want to.

TIL that 2x2 games live on a torus (Robinson and Goforth 2005) if we just care about orderings of the payoffs and connect single payoff swaps. Here is one visualisation from arxiv.org/abs/1010.4727

Americans are more longtermist than they think they are. theconversation.com/americans-ca...

This is the future postgenderists want

This paper is really promising, but also confuses me: like most AI evaluation papers in traditional peer-reviewed journals the models are ancient due to the publishing process. But here they do pretty well unlike some of the other papers? www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Today's practical rule of thumb: "Any gas that has a visible color is toxic." Sure, there are toxic transparent ones too, but unpaired electrons, extreme oxidation states and weird bond configurations often produce color.

TIL about the telephone-pole beetle Micromalthus debilis, which has vestigial adults and vestigial males. They reproduce parthenogenetically as larvae, with sterile (but sexual) adults only developing by accident or via environmental stress. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepho...

In this keynote, @arenamontanus.bsky.social explores cryonics through the lens of medicine, technology, and long-term institutional planning. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLBg...

New preprint from me and Chris Percy: "What do anti-pain algorithms imply for computational functionalism?" Brain emulations meet reversible computation and really weird qualia.

What if cryonics matters less for revival and more for organ preservation? In this clip from the @futures-studies.bsky.social conference @arenamontanus.bsky.social links cryonics to cryobiology and cryomedicine — where advances could transform transplant care. youtube.com/shorts/CRi3c...

Striding forth on the top of the staircase I think: "Life. Glory. Transcendence." And promptly trip hilariously. So now today's slogan reads: "Life. Glory. Transcendence. But mind where you put your feet."

Here is an essay that shows the actual usefulness of history. www.noemamag.com/the-rise-and...

Sometimes philosophical jargon turns into pure humor. Maximal vulnerability to Egyptology!

OK, I am starting to think "Operation Unrelenting Furry" was not a typo.

När människor och forskningsfinansiärer börjar fatta beslut som om kryonik kan fungera, blir det en fråga för vård, juridik och samhälle – här och nu. @arenamontanus.bsky.social visar hur nära den gränsen vi är. handelsbankenfoundations.org/sv/frysas-i-...

Lite optimistisk AI-doom från min sida i Vetenskapsradion. www.sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/var-...

Here is the @futures-studies.bsky.social "Where's Waldo?" ChatGTP picture. Not bad, although we have cooler offices.

En liten essä i @futures-studies.bsky.social nyhetsbrev om en av mina senaste artiklar. www.iffs.se/nyheter/att-...