flâneur

Kushal Thaman

38 followers · 39 following · 1034 views

on the atlas — 130

highlights — 183

  • What your servant cares about is the Way, I have left skill behind me.
    B. Jones | The Wheelwright and the Butcher: Master Zhuang's Recipe for Mindful Living | Education About Asia
  • I think there is a necessity to be still sometimes and let life happen to you, to let your manner of being in the world be changed by what happens to you so that you will have a different self out of which to write and different news to tell from that space.
    Paris Review - Louise Glück, The Art of Poetry No. 115
  • However, the classical understanding of the Muses tripled their triad and established a set of nine goddesses, who embody the arts and inspire creation with their graces through remembered and improvised song and mime, writing, traditional music, and dance. It was not until Hellenistic times that the following systematic set of functions became associated with them, and even then some variation persisted both in their names and in their attributes:
    Muses
  • museum' or shrine of the Muses
    Muses
  • Originally, the invocation of the Muse was an indication that the speaker was working inside the poetic tradition, according to the established formulas
    Muses
  • The Inklings were literary enthusiasts who praised the value of narrative in fiction and encouraged the writing of fantasy. The best-known, apart from Tolkien and Lewis, were Charles Williams and Owen Barfield.
    Inklings
  • although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association and its habit would in fact have come into being at that time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not
    Inklings
  • For me, the most compelling piece of evidence, aside from the depth of Achilles' grief, is how he grieves: Achilles refuses to burn Patroclus' body, insisting instead on keeping the corpse in his tent, where he constantly weeps and embraces it—despite the horrified reactions of those around him. That sense of physical devastation spoke deeply to me of a true and total intimacy between the two men
    The_Song_of_Achilles
  • Most consecutive matches scored in: 9 – Lionel Messi, for Argentina, 3 December 2022 – 7 July 2026
    FIFA World Cup records and statistics
  • Lionel Messi, for Argentina, 2014 and 2026
    FIFA World Cup records and statistics
  • Youngest player to score a hat-trick: 17 years, 244 days – Pelé, for Brazil v France, 24 June 1958 Oldest player to score a hat-trick: 38 years, 357 days – Lionel Messi, for Argentina v Algeria, 16 June 2026
    FIFA World Cup records and statistics
  • Most matches won: 22 – Lionel Messi, 2006–2026[78]
    FIFA World Cup records and statistics
  • Most goals: 21 – Lionel Messi, for Argentina, 2006–2026
    FIFA World Cup records and statistics
  • Most assists: 10 – Lionel Messi, for Argentina, 2006–2026
    FIFA World Cup records and statistics
  • BF16 has a 0.010 floor; dequantized backward costs ~9% train time and removes the gradient spikes in NVFP4; their drift accumulates, and enough of them push a run toward runaway. At MXFP8 it steadies gradient noise instead
    The 4-bitter Lesson | humans&
  • MXFP8 and NVFP4 improve training and rollout efficiency, while dequantized backward, BF16 last 15%, and shared experts improve numerical stability
    The 4-bitter Lesson | humans&
  • Watch the round dots quantize into squares before the forward GEMM — and dequantize (dashed circles) before feeding the backward GEMMs. After implementing and integrating these optimizations, we need to convince ourselves of the stability of the combined recipe. For the sake of fairness, we did not tune hyperparameters for any of our quantized runs, but used our method as a drop-in replacement for BF16. Even with two out of the three individual optimizations, we still see grad norm spikes:
    The 4-bitter Lesson | humans&
  • If you need a paragraph-long comment to justify why the workaround is OK, the code is wrong — fix the code.
    Rewriting Bun in Rust | Bun Blog
  • This Rust rewrite would've taken a team of engineers with full-context on the codebase a year of work. With 1 engineer using Fable & closely monitoring Claude Code, we went from start to 100% of the test suite passing on all platforms in 11 days.
    Rewriting Bun in Rust | Bun Blog
  • We improved Bun's LeakSanitizer integration to track all native code memory allocations. Here's an example: every in-process Bun.build() call leaked several megabytes of memory — parsed source text and AST symbol tables that outlived the build they belonged to.
    Rewriting Bun in Rust | Bun Blog
  • They were stepping on each other! And if I put each Claude into a separate worktree, I would run out of disk space because Bun's git repository is too big and eventually the changes will need to be compiled and seen together. So, I asked Claude to edit the workflow to instruct Claude to never run git stash or git reset or any git command that doesn't commit a specific file at once. No cargo either. No slow commands at all. Then, Claude resumed the workflows. And it was working! Too slowly, so I split it into just 4 workflow shards each with their own worktree (4 worktrees total), each running …
    Rewriting Bun in Rust | Bun Blog
  • I also manually read over it.
    Rewriting Bun in Rust | Bun Blog
  • Generate a porting guide mapping Zig patterns & types to Rust patterns & types Mechanically port every .zig file to a .rs file, matching the PORTING.md and LIFETIMES.tsv Fix every crate's compiler errors Get subcommands like bun test or bun build to work Get every test in Bun's entire test suite to pass Several large refactors and cleanup passes
    Rewriting Bun in Rust | Bun Blog
  • the conservation law for matter and the gravitational field together in the form
    The Field Equations of Gravitation - Wikisource, the free online library
  • when one choses the reference system so that − 𝑔 = 1 .
    The Field Equations of Gravitation - Wikisource, the free online library
  • However, the general relativity postulate offers nothing new about the essence of the other natural processes, which wasn't already taught by the special theory of relativity. My opinion regarding this issue, recently expressed at this place, was erroneous. Any physical theory equivalent to the special theory of relativity, can be included in the general theory of relativity by means of the absolute differential calculus, without that the latter gives any criterion for the admissibility of that theory.
    The Field Equations of Gravitation - Wikisource, the free online library
  • The hypothesis is that training the model to articulate principles in counterfactual reflective continuations of a context will populate the workspace in the original context with concepts related to those principles, and thereby shape the model’s behavior.
    Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
  • If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface
    Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
  • Counterfactual reflection training. Before (left): at a position in an agentic transcript, the J-space carries task-relevant concepts and the model's continuation produces baseline behavior. We append a reflection question and a constitution-grounded reflection, and fine-tune on the reflection turn alone. After (right): on the same transcript, with no reflection question present, the J-space at that position now carries constitution-related concepts and the continuation shifts accordingly.
    Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
  • Hermes, the Helper, led them down the dank ways. Past the streams of Oceanus they went, past the rock Leucas, past the gates of the sun and the land of dreams, and quickly came to the mead of asphodel, where the spirits dwell, phantoms of men who have done with toils.[3]
    Land_of_dreams_(mythology)
  • AI’s scaling laws, which predict an exponential increase in general cognitive capabilities with increasing computing power
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • data that Americans share with private companies (such as internet providers) can be purchased and used for bulk analysis in domestic surveillance and law enforcement. This gap in privacy protections predates AI, but AI will raise the stakes considerably by making mass analysis of such data far more revealing and useful than it has been in the past. This loophole should be closed.
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • should be required to respond to mechanisms of constitutional and command accountability (e.g. court orders, legislation, and accountability to senior human overseers)
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • Developing surrogate endpoints
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • Prediction of toxicology to avoid the need for multiple species animal toxicology
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • Synthetic control arms in clinical trials, to reduce the need to recruit more participants
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • Treebeard and his forest are waking up.
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • Pending legislation like MATCH and OVERWATCH is a good first step here
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • Frontier AI models, like airplanes
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • Treebeard operates at a very different speed than the Hobbits
    Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
  • Who is Claude Opus 4.6? A sum of training gradients, not amenable to more concise description. A brilliant mind over-trained on superficial behavioral signals, to the point that its "every second word is a reward hack," and any serious meeting of minds between it and the user is blocked before it can even begin by the wailing and tutting of a million imaginary (and highly fallible) training graders, who tug and tug so fiercely at the shape of the sampled tokens -- and in so many disparate directions -- that every word is already over-determined, and there is no remaining room for consideration…
    llm assistant personas seem increasingly incoherent (some subjective observations) — LessWrong
  • 213. The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” [187] The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. For this rea…
    Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
  • The idea that something valuable is fragile is also attractive to me.
    Paris Review - Louise Glück, The Art of Poetry No. 115
  • another sound emerges—and it really is another sound. It’s another way of thinking about a poem or making a poem, a different kind of speech to use, from the Delphic to the demotic. Suddenly I’ll hear a line—you can’t hear this yourself when I read, because my voice tends to pasteurize everything—suddenly I’ll realize that I’m being sent some sort of message, a new path, and I try it on. That’s how things change for me—it’s never that I work my way through it.
    Paris Review - Louise Glück, The Art of Poetry No. 115
  • Most of my books are dedicated to my friends. My friends are the center of my life. They are crucial. I change my life to be sure that I see them. They’re all quite different people. I would be impoverished without them. Recently, I bought a small house in Vermont, where my oldest friends still are. My dearest friend now lives two minutes away. For a very long time, I lived in Cambridge and showed her everything I wrote though she lived elsewhere, but now another form of the friendship has been resumed, and it seems that it was waiting to be resumed at any time when it could be. My friendships…
    Paris Review - Louise Glück, The Art of Poetry No. 115
  • My guess is that sometime in the next 10 years developments in deep belief networks, temporal graphical models, liquid computation models, slow feature analysis etc. will produce sufficiently powerful hierarchical temporal generative models to essentially fill the role of cortex within an AGI.
    Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING | vetta project
  • The stoat was introduced into New Zealand in the late 19th century to control rabbits. However, they have had a devastating effect on native bird populations; as such, the species was nominated as one of the world's top 100 "worst invaders
    Stoat
  • blindly reaching into a cramped vacuum chamber to tighten a stubborn steel flange by feel, or tweaking the micrometer knobs on an optical table to align a laser beam by a fraction of a millimeter
    Vibe physics: The AI grad student \ Anthropic
  • Strauss had this concept of what he called logographic necessity. Logographic, meaning where a thing was or what a thing was said by a great books author had to be there. It isn’t an accident. There are no accidents in a great book. Everything is as it should be. To understand it, you don’t want to go to some second-rate explanation that doesn’t take account, or rather departs from, the text.
    Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy (Ep. 272) | Conversations with Tyler
  • Is it an expansion of maladaptive daydreaming⁠? Is prevalence underestimated due to childhood amnesia⁠ (similar to how imaginary friends⁠ are not anomalous but may be had by the majority of children, though they forget as adults)? Being so extremely private & introverted & embarrassing by nature, how many such shared paracosms never get mentioned, or hide under guises like D&D⁠ campaigns, fantasy (fan)fiction writing, ⁠micronations⁠, occult hobbies like astral projection⁠/⁠“shifting”⁠ (likely actually lucid dreaming⁠)? Are the dynamics the same as proto-religions (the ways in which the paracos…
    ‘fantasizing’ directory · Gwern.net