I still have the account, but I only use it when someone links to a paper announcement

There are a bunch of research conversations that unfortunately are still only happening on the other site. I get most of what I need from this place and an Arxiv RSS feed, but there's still room to improve

My school library had a card catalog in 2005

Imagining ASI Claude that refuses to help you unless your problem is sufficiently interesting

If tweets could win a "test of time" award, I would nominate this one from Kristian Lum

Ok, the map isn't the territory, got it. But what about a countable sequence of maps that converge uniformly to the territory?

1. LMs as they exist are terrible for students

2. I understand why this problem causes such existential dread in educators

3. This seems like a solvable problem. It will require our institutions to adapt, but it is so unlikely that we will lose the ability to teach kids shit

This is very much my opinion - at this point in history if you are still doing the NormieLibs Won't Show Up routine then you are either not updating on the last decade of political action _or_ you are just so misogynist that you are unable to recognise the plain evidence of your senses.

Many philosophers & laypeople encounter the concept of computability and think it means "anything I, personally, can imagine my laptop doing"

This has at least two problems:

(1) Most don't understand how computers actually work and what they are capable of,

(2) Most people have weak imaginations

Even enshittification is a two step process. The first step is making something really good that people want to use

My lesson from the metaverse is that tech monopolies have a limited ability to force us to use technology that fundamentally sucks

Thinking about math

I spent the entirety of 2025 as an unpaid caretaker for my grandmother with severe dementia, so I am aware of how caretakers have different needs

Plenty of middle of the road opinions exist, but those of us who hold them don't like arguing on the internet

Even a small UBI would be a huge expense on the government's books. A four day work week's costs are all implicit, and can be defrayed in more targeted ways

I also think that for a variety of reasons there'd be less pressure to pair it with rolling back the rest of the safety net. We'd still want SNAP and section 8 with a UBI, but people would push really hard to cut them

Think about how sticky the weekend has been. Shortening the work week would make leisure instead of consumption thr default choice and would be basically impossible to roll back

Is it crazy that I like the idea of a four day work week better than UBI?

It's a useful frame for researchers and engineers tbh. I think about "to light a candle is to cast a shadow" all the damn time

I have spent my entire career trying to automate myself out of a job and I sure as hell am not going to stop now.

Some people showcase intelligence not by discussion but by playing a game called "find the flaw". It is a very easy game but irresistible to junior paper reviewers, critical theorists, and terminal posters. If you know who's playing, it explains everything from reviewer 2 to "you hate waffles".

I've never bothered digging into why cuda sucks so much to build. What the fuck is going on?

I keep wondering if we will ever again have children growing up in the same social / technological landscape as their grandparents

a big chunk of my job the last few months has been having very intense meetings with coworkers from other disciplines, listening intently as they describe their processes and pain points, and building custom ai tools to help them. these are complex, varied jobs.

I have a 100% success rate.

I don't have hand it to Anthropic, I want to

I hate you so much for putting this in my brain

Send a letter, maybe the 2nd edition will have an ice cube

Yeah, I get this behavior in the web app by just being really nice and signaling my genuine uncertainty

I can get it to politely tell me I'm wrong with some regularity. "This is a terrible question" would be nice and novel though

I don't really know what to tell the people who are annoyed at Anthropic for saying, "we don't know." Anthropic is being honest! No one knows what's going on, we have built things we don't understand. Welcome to the discomfort of the truth