a very significant part of Schmitt's "Nomos of the Earth" is about the Monroe Doctrine, btw

Carl Schmitt is fun to read because he engages with his ideological adversaries on the left seriously, in particular Marx & Lenin (anarchists maybe less so). He is not trying to just refute them, but also to learn from them. Compare this to how people on the left & right read each other today.

“P(doom)” now makes me think of corporate bankruptcy rather than AGI apocalypse

"Devs" just might be the best example of Laplace's demon in pop culture

1999 really was the year of the anti-work movie. Office Space, The Matrix, Fight Club... anything else?

it's funny that GPT models are called "decoder-only" when almost all of the computation is actually about encoding the input sequence ("the cat sat on the") into a contextual representation–and only the very last matrix maps that representation into next-token predictions ("mat").

gather around, kids, and i'm going to tell you about a time when people used to develop models that they understood the inner workings of, and they would use those models to test and evaluate their understanding of complex systems...

We recently released OlmoEarth—an open spatio-temporal foundation model for planetary intelligence, trained on multimodal Earth observation, OpenStreetMap, & other open data. It sets a new accuracy/efficiency Pareto frontier and powers our OlmoEarth Platform. Technical report now on arXiv. 👇

is there anything interesting written on how LLM alignment techniques implement microeconomic utility theory?

Anna's Archive is great, but why do half of the downloads consistently fail?

the Notes app autocorrects "nomos" into "gnomes"... on the other hand, I guess both concepts are kind of "earthy"?

I wrote a comprehensive introduction to basic information theory, with added context from social scientists of the cybernetics movement (Gregory Bateson) & later (Katherine Hayles). It covers everything from bit encoding to comparative metrics like cross-entropy. mikaelbrunila.com/information-...

"world model"

Chapter three from my thesis is finally out in @bigdatasoc.bsky.social! I explore the parallels between the "bit" and the "embeddings" that are a foundational structure in Large Language Models, showing how the latter endow tech companies with what I call "cosine capital." bsky.app/profile/bigd...

Cursor is great for greenfield coding a new project, especially if you're not very fluent in that language, but the autocomplete is surprisingly bad

Why is this horrible for Universities? Just about everyone who isn't a citizen or green card holder already who's hired for a tenure track faculty position is hired through an H1B and then, after 3-5 years, applies for a green card. This is literally "No more foreign professors can be hired"

In a stunning moment of self-delusion, the Wall Street Journal headline writers admitted that they don't know how LLM chatbots work.

IDF soldiers have now themselves admitted they have been ordered to murder aid-seekers in Gaza. Truly an atrocity built on atrocity. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

it seems like almost every Silicon Valley adjacent book needs to mention Dunbar’s number. Alex Karp’s (Palantir) ”The Technological Republic” was no exception

the problem with most continental theory today is that it’s a lot of ”tell” and almost no ”show”. Incredibly tedious to read.

existence of tensors implies existence of relaxors

The key chart right now: Usually US economic pain is cushioned by falling bond yields and a strengthening dollar, which mean lower interest rates and more spending power for consumers. This time we’re seeing the opposite, meaning the pain will be amplified.

Evidence of US brain drain? US scientists submitted 32% more applications for jobs abroad Jan-Mar 2025 than during same period in 2024. US-based users browsing jobs abroad increased by 35%. Data from Nature Careers global science jobs platform. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

With all respect to the sanguine predictions from fellow economists: Standard quantitative trade models don’t seem to capture the loss of global public goods, such as the rules-based international order.

I just don't think there's evidence that the direction of LLM ability-increase is towards human intelligence or a superset of human intelligence. Really seems like they are their own thing that partially overlaps with human intelligence

Being a historian, people ask me if I think the US is living through Germany 1933. I answer no, analogies are always imperfect but to me it feels more like Russia 1999: a blatant theft of state assets and liberals in a fugue state, refusing to believe the arc of progress is bending against them.

the mistake of Canada and Mexico was to think what he said he wanted was what he actually wanted

Ennen: vapaa maailma Nyt: vapaa pudotus

Naamiot on riisuttu lopullisesti. Trump ja Vance osoittavat selvästi kenen puolella ovat - Putinin. Tätä videota on vaikeaa katsoa, niin ala-arvoisesti käyttäytyvät.

Now this is some unambiguously funny stove touching

Just watched the Trump Gaza video and whoever wrote a couple weeks ago about generative AI being the new aesthetics of fascism could not have asked for a better case in point

in the future, the most literate people will be inmates *with* access to a prison library but *without* access to smartphones or AI.

I have Ollama vibe coding plugins for Jupyter and VSCode, but I'm unsure how to integrate an AI coding assistant into RStudio. Is there an obvious way to do this? If not, RStudio better come up with it quickly, because the paradigm is shifting, and they'll be left in the dust.

In this week's column, I explore what I see as a very real prospect of systemic collapse, caused by Trump's actions, and suggest we start preparing. I try to explain how complex systems fail, and suggest some of the failure paths we could be on. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

just wrote a brief text that discusses penguin shit and spy satellites

SCOOP: A group including Columbia alumni, professors & parents is trying to get students deported & arrested and urged people to tip off FBI. They’ve also disparaged Jewish protesters & tried to compile lists of JVP members. W/ @natashalennard.bsky.social theintercept.com/2025/02/15/c...

I wasn't happy with the material I found to really break down Moran's I, so I wrote this tutorial for my #GIS students. It's primarily a visual explanation, with optional Math blocks. mikaelbrunila.com/posts/unders...

What are some good textbooks for spatial statistics in R that would be friendly for non-technical students? Teaching GIS and finding that using almost any Math notation can overwhelm people.

This is such an excellent and perceptive essay on the politics of AI. Historicization and politicization in one package. Highly recommended!

A convergence between AI & cryptography is necessary to break with AI as surveillance. The key metaphor is "tunneling": Cultivating many models & peer-to-peer training strategies, small models, encrypted models... How do we build this? How do we direct funds here? www.e-flux.com/journal/151/...