Every time I reread Thinking in Systems I highlight more text. Eventually it might be a good idea to start over and only highlight the parts I can forget.

Matsuri's Grown-Up World—a tragedy. "The difficulty level will increase even more with the new season." aethermug.com/posts/matsu...

What non-aphantasics look like to people with aphantasia

Yoshida Hiroshi is such an underrated artist, even in Japan

Sunset, Canyon de Chelly - Edgar Payne (American, 1883-1937)

Isn't the point of language to allow you to express any idea by stringing enough predefined words together? Well, language can do that, but its power is overrated. The words need to fit the ideas, not the other way around.

Metacognition bridges the gap between basic thought and effective action by acting as a feedback loop that monitors and regulates our internal… Metacognition by Joelle Proust https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.c403b8e7 #CognitiveScience

Expertise does matter when using LLMs. I've written about the Magic Wand Illusion: the belief that you only have to want something, pronounce a couple dozen magic words into a chatbox, and a miracle will happen. bsky.app/profile/mar...

There's a gap between how people imagine using AI and what actually happens when you try to do good work with it. The reality has three parts: learning curve, increased fatigue, and some tasks are honestly better without it.

#Poetry #Painting #Nightime Good night, sweet kitty. It is time for us to sleep. The moon is out, the day is done, It's time for us to dream. Brandi Reynolds 🎨 Kaori Yamada

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

The AI debate has split into two camps, but both suffer from the same problem: I call it the Magic Wand Illusion. One side hammers us with real or imagined benefits. The other warns we'll all lose our jobs, go dumb, or drown in slop. Maybe both miss what's actually happening?

Fable's implementation of Borges's Library of Babel, finished posthumously by Opus 4.8. Quite accurate to the story. It is multiplayer (others appear as ghosts). You can locate key volumes, like the weights of GPT-1 & the code to the Library sim itself: borges-library-of-babel.netlify.app

Monet painting Water Lilies

These auto-generated plan names in Claude Code are getting out of hand

@quantabooks.org just released their first book, on the story of Lean by @kevinhartnett.bsky.social. It's a great story, about a pretty significant part of what's happening in math right now. www.quantabooks.org/books/the-pr...

The rebellions continue! The publisher Springer put pressure on a journal's editors to accept more papers, just to make more money. The editors resigned and started their own journal, which is peer reviewed and 'diamond open access'. That means FREE to publish in and FREE to read! (1/n)

Can we all agree that self-conscious is the new sexy? Please?

How much or how little modification of your looks is a good idea? Excellent, balanced analysis by Louis Zhao www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwK...

I keep returning to Bertrand Russell's Nobel speech about the four desires driving all human behavior – explains so much in our world today, from our politics to our personal relationships www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/21/b...

Random prediction: soon we won't be able to tell when a video had been edited by cutting in-between segments, because AI can smoothly interpolate to erase any jumps. Is that a good thing?

Scientists stunned by ‘fundamentally new way’ life produces DNA | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

I just got an international driver's license at a Japanese government office. Took 7 minutes total, and I did not have to wait. Super efficient, right? The funny part is why I had to do this in the first place.

My website has light/dark mode, and it's hard to find accent colors that work well in both modes in terms of contrast and visibility. Claude made this neat tool based on color theory. Easy! Sharing in case it's useful for others. claude.ai/public/arti...

If it can't sustain itself without ads, maybe it should not sustain itself.

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

If it can't sustain itself without ads, maybe it should not sustain itself.

Last week I put out a new episode of Experience.Computer with @marco-giancotti.bsky.social. We explored aphantasia, SDAM, and spatial memory. We also wondered why looking at a picture of a sour fruit (Umeboshi) doesn’t make everyone’s mouth water. experience.computer/p/marco-gian...

"Before language men did not know that other men dreamt." Cormac McCarthy

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." —Philip K. Dick Sounds airtight. But what happens when science itself keeps replacing its own version of what's real?

I was recently interviewed by Jay Springett on his podcast Experience.Computer, all about what it's like to imagine things when you have aphantasia. It was a lot of fun.

I was recently interviewed by @thejaymo.net on his podcast Experience.Computer, all about what it's like to imagine things when you have aphantasia. It was a lot of fun.

New Experience.computer is out! In this episode I lead thinking-tool artisan, writer, and engineer @marco-giancotti.bsky.social (Aether Mug) through a series of imaginative exercises. experience.computer/p/marco-gian...

Amazing footage of a living foraminiferan, a type of single-celled ocean plankton that extends long thin gelatinous tendrils of cytoplasm through its shell to forage. Like some cosmic dandelion, drifting through the ether, shimmering and electric

any metacognition people looking at the effect of LLM usage on metacognitive sensitivity? (in any context)

Nothing feels as hollow as an LLM saying "I deserve that. Sorry I deleted your data."

An LLM talks not as a sentient machine would, but as a human who was thoroughly gaslighted into thinking they're a machine would.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a whole page about holes. Should we consider a hole to "be a thing" in the same sense that street lamps and airliners are things?

The "publish or perish" culture must perish. Scientists need time to think. We just published our Slow Science Manifesto, where we argue that huge changes are needed in the way we fund, publish, and evaluate science. Read more and sign here: www.slow-science.com

To think better, you need to understand how thought works. But it's one thing to theorize about its building blocks, and another to see them in action, real-time.

Thinking is an action.

Happy 462nd Birthday to Galileo Galilei, born #OTD in 1564 -- a crucial figure in the early stages of what we now call the scientific revolution. Here are photos that I took in 2009 of his (rather humble) birthplace in Pisa, and his ornate tomb in Florence: #science #history #histsci

In Ikebukuro Station, Tokyo, commuters form double queues at each train door. One line boards the next train. The other waits for the train after that. No one directs them. There are no detailed instructions. People just seem to know.

On Darwin's birthday, the charming doodles his kids left all over his manuscript of "On the Origin of Species" www.themarginalian.org/2016/04/06/c...

Great apes may use playful teasing to learn about their social relationships. In a new paper, Erica Cartmill & I propose a bond-testing hypothesis for ape teasing. Out today in Phil Trans Biology: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...