“Naruhodo, Jeeves.” is just so perfect

me (happily as i begin this column): gosh guess i can't write a book about sandwiches without including some facts about mayonnaise! me (weeks later, having trawled catalán webpages, read the duc de richelieu's memoirs, & the 3 major bibles of french cuisine): What Is Truth. Is Knowledge Real

@gruber.foo I've noticed a surprisingly jarring side effect of Memoji that I thought you might be amused by. I tried the feature out at launch and haven't used it much for actual messaging, but one lasting effect is that the Memoji face is now present and animated on the login screen.

Useful perspective, from one of the very few people I would trust to say “calm down, this $megacorp privacy change may not actually be so bad.” The point about app stores as “attestation 1.0” is especially well-taken. (1/3)

I’ve always wondered how far “up to 50% off” has been tested in court. Can you bring in a logician to testify that 0% is a magnitude satisfying “up to 50%”? Do you need at least 1% for it to qualify legally as a discount? Must at least one thing be at 50% off to make the number non-arbitrary?

Yes. And fresh vistas of horror open up when you realize that people are almost always *unaware* that they’re answering questions about their own decisions via inference from background knowledge rather than via direct introspective access. So …

Strong candidate for most brutal skeet of all time

I went a little overboard with this and a little bit insane. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/t...

this is a very good summary of a particular set of tells. this is why it is often (ironically) hard to tell what the main point of an AI-written article is or when it gets there. it is constantly doing things to go "here's my main idea" that human writers do once per piece.

“LLMs will make hacking into a black box a little bit easier and make protecting a white box WAY easier” I hadn’t thought about it from this angle before, but on reflection there are multiple asymmetries that should favor defensive use: info and time, but also the generalizability of the task.

Considering that product recommendation is a very long-running and data-rich area of AI/ML research, it’s baffling that actual deployed systems don’t seem any better than they were c.2010. If anything, the last 5yrs have felt like a retrogression at Spotify, Netflix and Amazon.

What’s most hilarious to me is the attempt at “subtle” implicit political positioning. “When you think of us, think of FREE USERS in TEXAS!” “When you think of our competitor, think of people in SAN FRANCISCO and DAVOS who want to CONTROL you!”

This is exactly right. Role-based ethical principles are important, but they can’t exempt you from considering the broader consequences of your actions.

It’s been at least a decade since I last poked my nose into Fallen London, but it warms my heart to see that it’s still out there and still … … still … … hmm. Is there a word at the semantic midpoint between ‘glabrous’ and ‘feisty’?

Explaining the strategy of peaceful protests to a gamer: "okay so instead of spamming the basic attack, if you tank enough hits and build public anger, you can do your ult"

So what you’re saying is that the epiphany marks the ban-date of heaven?

「白馬と黒馬」 左は白い馬、右は黒い馬に見えるが、画像の輝度は同じである。 “White Horse and Black Horse” The left side appears to feature a white horse, while the right side displays a black horse; however, the horses are the same luminance.

dark gritty santapunk world where the Great Powers of Europe both mandate celebration of Christmas and encourage their subjects to be as naughty as possible to preserve unlimited access to coal and continued industrialization.

I’ve long thought that Scrofula would make a great name for a pet. It sounds so cute and fluffy!

This is a great slow burn of a piece.

Gauntlet but Alan Watts is the voice of the Dungeon Master: “Red Warrior is about to die. But is not death one of the great events of life? Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to s—Elf shot the food."

Space news is the best. Like, what do you mean there's a runaway supermassive black hole 10 million times bigger than the sun moving through space at 2 million miles per hour www.space.com/astronomy/bl...

In that third pic Epstein appears to have EIGHT pairs of glasses within arm’s reach, including two ornate trays holding three pairs each. Is this a They Live scenario? How do these people get so weird?!

It’s funny how reliably you can tell where someone grew up by (1) the shape of their campaign’s main continent and (2) where the main cluster of named towns is located.

Nothing will ever beat the science center where we saw a display on the Smart Toilet of the Future … and the demo toilet had BSOD’d. An inadvertently valuable lesson!

i asked chat gpt to fact check an article for me

Did not expect a capybara explaining brexit to be so affecting

Grateful to The Verge for publishing my essay on why large-language models are not going to achieve general intelligence nor push the scientific frontier. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Narratively perfect. It also has me mentally compiling a list of other organizations whose election mishaps could be predictably comical.

Truly smart devices would choose not to connect to the internet.

these charts show the relationship between zip code-level average income and individual probability of voting for democrats in different regions of the country. one of my favorite group fo charts, lots of stories to unearth

Been reading "What is Innateness?" by Paul Griffiths (2002) philpapers.org/rec/EGRWII in which he offers this very sound advice:

I instinctively respect anyone who has 1) a good natural smile and 2) a range of other smiles they can deploy that are plausibly polite yet unmistakably *not* smile #1. Zero interest in popes generally, but certain kinds of skill say a lot about the mind behind them, and so far I’m impressed.

OK done with meetings! Gonna take a nap

<creaking and bubbling sounds fill the darkened woods as my undead legions hasten to fill their quivers with fluoride-tipped arrows>

I’ve always wanted to do an eye-tracking study of academic/literary very-fast readers. My strong impression is that our eyes flick around the page (including back/up) in a way that would look insane if plotted against the linear text.

BBC Model Linear B

I watched this right before falling asleep, and wound up in an extended hypnagogic reverie about CONCEPTUALLY PALINDROMIC MEMES,* which are apparently a fitting thing to post on Michaelmas. ... so uh, thanks for that, @misterabk.bsky.social ?

@gelliottmorris.com with the best explanation I've seen for the puzzling tendency of big legacy media outlets to keep boosting and sanewashing the party that hates them. It's a cousin to the usual "owners are Republicans" and "can't quit bothesidesing" theories, but more grounded and plausible:

Extremely obvious level design in Shoreditch. It's a side quest, we get it.

This statue is amazing. My first of many questions would be: why does the devil look like he’s been *oiled*?! Also, read downthread for a twist that you will not have seen coming.

"oh wow Daniel Day Lewis is so good at acting" - sure, could he maybe play the role of an actor who picks better films then

Slightly diminish a book Nine Princes in Resin

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

I played Ultima Underworld on release, but would have gotten this sequencing very wrong. It predated Wolfenstein 3D by two months?!

At a base level this sounds like what you'd probably imagine ... but then it's executed with mad inspiration. I counted at least five or six separate, unrelated feats of brilliant, unexpected-yet-indisputable synthesis. You really need to give this one undivided attention for 3:44. It's worth it.