'She's fucked up but you gotta understand she had a hard life, her family is extremely rich'

I sometimes get spasms thinking about how lonely I was in Berlin from 2018 to 2023

Me tooooo

The 3 philosophy concepts that have a feverish hold on me are aesthetic Ideas (Kant), eudaimonia (Aristotle), and dialectics (Hegel). I formalized aesthetic Ideas in 2016-2025, formalized eudaimonia in 2022-2026, and dialectics can't be formalized, so I'm pretty much done

New Pynchon character just dropped

The term 'slow cinema' has weird 'if you like making love at midnight' energy

I don't understand how Nuri Bilge Ceylan got the apple to roll in a way that's not reddit youtu.be/SEgkppTEfTc?...

The Snow Man is the first poem I ever liked so I've read it hundreds of times since I was 12, and now is the first time I've noticed it barely has syntax

Desperate to not think/talk about AI anymore. If by the end of 2026 the world isn't in AI-chaos I'm never thinking about AI again outside my day job

My soul's getting malnourished from not working in the arts enough

My soul's getting malnourished from not working in the arts enough

Compared to @littmath.bsky.social I'm more open to the possibility of a 'glass fence' for RL-LLM performance. Could be that just like GOFAI is good for Chess-complexity tasks but not for Go-complexity tasks, big data neural nets are good for Go-complexity tasks but not for all tasks

My essay 'After Orthogonality,' the culmination of 4 years of work on virtue-ethics, rationality, AI, decision-theory, and praxis is out on The Gradient

Hypothesis: AI writing is bad primarily because in general what makes writing good is the specificity of what it communicates and its information density, so the prompt that produced good AI writing would be as long as the output.

oh bravo

I know White Nights (1985) must have a garbage script because every dance scene from it I see on youtube is the most beautiful thing I've seen in my life but I never heard about it

My essay 'After Orthogonality,' the culmination of 4 years of work on virtue-ethics, rationality, AI, decision-theory, and praxis is out on The Gradient

It's interesting that the language of software engineering had almost no influence on the humanities compared to the language of telecom engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering

I need Claude Lévi-Strauss to explain the middle film of Kinds of Kindness to me. It tbh haunts me

I do think in a better world AI would only exist in the lab (research about AI) and in the lab (AI for medical research)

God put Wittgensteinians on this earth to show us that the reason Marxists are so rude isn't the revolutionary stakes but that some people just are like that

There's a fun existentially-best-case-scenario for AI where it turns out big data gradient descent neural nets are inherently "local" generalizers and we come to see AI as collective implicit-knowledge memory

Whenever I've talked to German people about Büchner, Polish people about Lem, or Portuguese people about Pessoa it's always either 'he is literally God, I'd die for him' or 'it's pablum for school-kids'

Everyone well-informed should imo agree that by the end of '26 we'll know whether AI is a normal technology or not

The old story was that if you've got human-level AIs that can collaborate you get instant ASI by running a million of them together at really high speeds. If Claude agent teams isn't ASI does that mean individual Claudes aren't as human-level as they seem

My pithy take remains: 'systems designed to create coherent outputs by generating predictable ones struggle to produce unpredictable outputs that aren’t incoherent.'

If your line on AI is 'AIs trained by gradient descent on big data aren't capable of true originality, which is a real thing' you're still doing pretty good

Watching The Great... more like The Really Good So Far

I can't watch Schitt's Creek because it makes me so mad that the family "owning Schitt's Creek" has no literal meaning

I really do like Whiplash. 'Abuse may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people play more technically proficient jazz, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not' is an amazing thesis for a film to have

I have a noble savage view of noise musicians but it's right

'I took another man's name and made nothing of it' from Mad Men is, to me, a solidly top-20 line in English drama (if you're limiting to one per author)

By law, I cannot step foot in Palestine. Say what you will about US settler-colonialism but a Cherokee citizen of the US can live anywhere they want in the US.

Bridgeton's kind of an incredible achievement because human language naturally creates subtext, tension, ambiguity and implicature but they successfully irradiate all that

Helen of Troy looking like Lupita Nyong'o is incredibly unlikely, would require a black swan event

Helen of Troy looking like Lupita Nyong'o is incredibly unlikely, would require a black swan event

Reading a French comic book called Samaris that's like 'what if did a version of Last Year in Marienbad that's so scary it makes you cry'

The ways in which I am emotionally and socially over+under developed are exactly how you'd roleplay a high wisdom, low charisma character in D&D

Looking for extra contract-work in AI alignment this winter. Was an 80,000 Hours fellow, MATS fellow, Cosmos Ventures grantee, SFF Speculation grantee. Have my own lightly-funded alignment theory project but still do external work (e.g. helped ACS Research get a paper into PNAS)

Writing an alternate-timeline A:TLA fanfic about the Avatar's life 50 years after he kills Fire Lord Ozai and takes over his campaign of worldwide conquest

After a lifetime as the Enlightenment's strongest soldier I am giving in to cultural particularism (will not check out Geese because I live in a big artists' loft where everyone hates Geese and I respect our cultural traditions)

What makes a Shakespeare director great is always asking 'are the characters themselves composing poetry rn' and giving different answers in different moments

Emma Stone's overall career achievement of combining Julia Louis-Dreyfus style microexpressions-acting and silent-film mugging into one coherent form makes her imo an actual genius artist

Leonardo DiCaprio is a pretty good actor who is GOAT at what we'd call 'dynamics' in a singer. Has a huge repertoire of energy-gradations and can move between them super smooth or with bracing discontinuity

Man goes to Borges. Says he likes hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee, Stevenson. Borges says 'great writer Borges shares these preferences.' Man bursts into tears, says 'but in a vain way like attributes of an actor'

My core belief is that the world of everyday experience has underlying structures that are themselves 'feelable,' and that to feel these structures is to stand in a kind of explanatory relation to (the world of) everyday experience

Coding might be unique among knowledge-work fields in how easy it is to keep LLM inference-costs low

The comedy in Arrested Development folds in on itself so much it gets to a point where we no longer process it as funny but as beautiful

I got very choked up in class today showing my students what James Baldwin had to say about Shakespeare: “the greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. he could have done this only through love…”

Are there art-forms you super trust your ear on, in a 'give me 10 seconds with a piece and I'll tell you if it's something or nothing' way? For me it's sitcoms and experimental poetry