flâneur

Vincent Huang

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on the atlas — 471

highlights — 1729

  • If sustainability is to be pursued state-by-state, as the recent decline of multilateral nation-state cooperation suggests, then it is no surprise that each country shall tend to its own garden. But tending to a garden and conscientiously exploiting it are the same act, and it is this mindset of exploitation that makes the Chinese vision of aquaculture possible. The distant-water fleets and the oyster rafts come from the same attitude of industrializing the ocean, maximizing its yield. Industrialized fish farming promises a future in which wild stocks cease to matter, in which we can produce a…
    China is Building a Blue Granary
  • With mass famine still in living memory, the party-state has a strategic interest in food sovereignty; China holds a sixth of the world’s population on less than a tenth of its arable land
    China is Building a Blue Granary
  • How has China achieved such immense strides in aquaculture? Start with the Chinese tertiary education system’s throughput of STEM graduates. Their sheer numbers depress wages and ensure that some highly capable workers take up unglamorous fields like fish farming. The same abundance feeds Chinese shipbuilding
    China is Building a Blue Granary
  • Just as many late-stage adulteries are less about having sex than feeling sexy, libraries can be as much about reading as they are about giving you (and your online followers) a sense of being well-read. Even the New York Public Library—with all respect to the NYPL—feeds such desires by issuing limited-edition membership cards and selling tote bags (which ‘only’ cost 25 dollars each), and allows even the less-than-rich to project affiliation with the august cultural institution.
    The Humanities: The Next Frontier for Korea's Chaebol
  • As a relatively young member of South Korea’s chaebol set, he has presented himself as being different from the more aloof business tycoons of the yore. He often posts seemingly casual photos of food and his dog on Instagram, to which his nearly 190,000 followers respond enthusiastically. Since 2014, Chung has also given lectures at some of South Korea’s most prestigious universities about the importance of studying the humanities. (The irony is that Chung himself dropped out of Seoul National University’s Department of Western History to study economics at Brown.) In these lectures, he emphas…
    The Humanities: The Next Frontier for Korea's Chaebol
  • It may be no coincidence then that in 2013, Samsung Electronics opened up a niche job application track called the Samsung Convergence Software Academy to hire humanities majors and train them to become software developers
    The Humanities: The Next Frontier for Korea's Chaebol
  • Only then did it dawn on me that Starfield Library functions much like movie theaters inside suburban shopping malls: honeypots that draw customers first and then naturally lead them to other spending options inside the mall, providing an unconscious and unplanned segue from a cultural activity to a consumerist one. Worse, it is no real library in the usual sense, unlike movie theaters where at least movies can be watched as they are meant to be. It unabashedly symbolizes how capitalistic desires are being imposed even on something as innocuous as a library in contemporary South Korea. And it’…
    The Humanities: The Next Frontier for Korea's Chaebol
  • We also gave two Codex agents with GPT-5.6 Sol access to the Pangram 4 API for 24 hours and put them on “Goal” mode with Full Access to attempt to fool Pangram 4 . One agent was tasked with finding false positive gaps in our evaluation: kinds of text that are not explicitly present in our evaluation sets that could systematically have an elevated false positive rate. The false positive search covered a wide variety of historical and contemporary literature, official and legal records, patents and filings, public minutes, engineering and incident records, medical reports, field notes, learner w…
    Pangram 4 Technical Report
  • We select the clause as the unit of the labeler after observing that the clause is the smallest atomic unit corresponding to a single expressible “idea” whose provenance can be traced. We begin by splitting the target T into clauses using Claude Haiku 4.5 ( Anthropic , 2025)
    Pangram 4 Technical Report
  • We formulate humanization detection as a four-way, document-level classification task over human , ai-generated , humanized-ai , mixed-authorship . This supplemental classifier is applied when Pangram 4 detects evidence of AI-generated content. It identifies evasion techniques such as deliberate typo injection, casing changes, synonym substitution, homoglyph attacks, and transformations produced by services that advertise humanization or AI-detector evasion. Incidental artifacts, such as PDF-extraction errors, copy-and-paste corruption, OCR errors, and encoding or Unicode-normalization problem…
    Pangram 4 Technical Report
  • he provenance of the surface style of a text can be distinct from the provenance of its underlying ideas ( Russell et al. , 2026b). A human can have a very well-formed, concrete idea that is then worded and rephrased by an AI assistant: this is also an example of co-authorship. We use this to motivate our labeling schema, wherein we aim to differentiate fully AI-generated text from text where a human came up with the original idea, and then the AI was responsible for the final lexical choices that appear in the writing
    Pangram 4 Technical Report
  • We present Pangram 4 , the latest deep-learning-based AI-text classification model from Pangram Labs. We achieve an AUROC of 0.9916 with a false positive rate of 0.0041% and a false negative rate of 0.3396% . In addition to its increased overall accuracy compared with Pangram 3, Pangram 4 exhibits superior out-of-distribution generalization and robustness to adversarial attacks. Another novel contribution of Pangram 4 is its improved ability to distinguish fine-grained edits and mixed AI-human co-authored text.
    Pangram 4 Technical Report
  • A compute infrastructure asset is actually several assets with differing lifespans stacked on top of each other. The shell, land, substation, and cooling plants can last decades, though even this “durable” layer is repriced by the chip cycle, as substation sizings and cooling standards designed around one hardware generation lose value against the next. The bulk of the volatile value lies in GPUs, which possess a short, uncertain economic life. GPUs and their associated parts, like memory or storage, are repriced not only by wear and conventional depreciation schedules, as ordinary server flee…
    Wiring Capital to Compute
  • The American AI buildout rests unsustainably on the same few corporate treasuries, and it is neither standardized nor repeatable in a manner that lets American capital markets fund frontier compute. This is unlike the way assets ranging from mortgages to traditional power plants are funded. Instead, urgency and a lack of an existing playbook mean capital comes in through side doors.
    Wiring Capital to Compute
  • However, it is a mistake to interpret this by simply saying that “Stargate failed,” and the way in which that reading is wrong holds a valuable lesson for the future of the American AI buildout. The main campus still serves OpenAI compute. But the broader buildout that served to scale the multi-gigawatt arrangement between OpenAI, Oracle, and Crusoe collapsed. Abilene leaned heavily on two counterparties and their capacity to shoulder compute infrastructure risk. Stargate attempted to separate out risk according to whoever could best bear each specific burden, but when OpenAI’s internal cash-f…
    Wiring Capital to Compute
  • When I think about a four at low psychological health, I picture somebody who is incapacitated by a fear of risk, who is afraid of looking bad or stupid. They’d rather not try at all than risk failure. A more psychologically healthy four is going to be more adventurous, more willing to do things that look high agency, because they are less constrained by that fear of not being extraordinary.
    Can You Just Do Things?—Asterisk
  • Working in AI safety is a version of this too. There are certain scripts you can follow that seem radical from the perspective of somebody outside of the community, but within the community, they're just the way that things are done. It can be easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are doing something radical and creative as an expression of your own deep interests, when in fact you are doing what everybody around you is doing. This is not an indictment of AI safety, or anybody in particular.
    Can You Just Do Things?—Asterisk
  • From a predictive processing framework, it strikes me that a lot of what you're talking about is just finding some way to break your priors about what’s possible for yourself.
    Can You Just Do Things?—Asterisk
  • I really hate it. The one context in which I will not reject it outright is when somebody is using it to describe their own personal transformation. Otherwise, I have a very strong allergy to the term and find it morally repugnant. The idea that some people do not count because they are not thinking for themselves in the way that the speaker believes they should is, to me, really vile. I have a hard time even getting along with somebody who I know has used the term, I find it so offensive.
    Can You Just Do Things?—Asterisk
  • Models struggle to extract at- tributes from human conversations, disagree with human judgments on relevant attributes, and generate personalized responses that hu- mans judge no better than generic responses
    [2606.06614] Re-Centering Humans in LLM Personalization
  • Using S ELF -S TUDY to produce a KV- cache is much more costly than simply running standard ICL pre-fill. With our unoptimized implementation, training an ICL-quality C ARTRIDGE takes ∼ 30 minutes on a single 8 × H100 node (for L LAMA -8B ) So our work does not provide a drop-in replacement for ICL, but rather demonstrates one way to tradeoff increased compute for reduced memory when constructing a KV-cache. This tradeoff is extremely advantageous in many settings: users often issue many queries over the same corpus and S ELF -S TUDY can be trained offline on idle or underutilized compute
    [2506.06266] Cartridges: Lightweight and general-purpose long context representations via self-study
  • We generate synthetic training data by prompting the model to quiz itself about the corpus content, resulting in a synthetic conversation trace. Training on these lets us avoid training on the same exact text multiple times and improves generality (see Figure 3). To support corpora that exceed the effective context length of the model, we chunk the corpus when generating synthetic conversations
    [2506.06266] Cartridges: Lightweight and general-purpose long context representations via self-study
  • The natural baseline approach is to train a C ARTRIDGE with a next-token prediction objective on the raw corpus. Excitingly, this yields C ARTRIDGES that memorize the corpus perfectly using 107 × less memory than the KV-cache. However, the resulting C ARTRIDGES are not general - they degrade the LM’s ability to respond to diverse questions beyond regurgitating the corpus
    [2506.06266] Cartridges: Lightweight and general-purpose long context representations via self-study
  • Food choices shape both human and planetary health; yet, designing foods that are delicious, nutritious, and sustainable remains challenging. Here we show that generative artificial intelligence can learn the structure of the human palate directly from large-scale, human-generated recipe data to create novel foods within a structured design space. Using burgers as a model system, the generative AI rediscovers the classic Big Mac without explicit supervision and generates novel burgers optimized for deliciousness, sustainability, or nutrition. Compared to the Big Mac, its delicious burgers scor…
    Generative artificial intelligence creates delicious, sustainable, and nutritious burgers | npj Science of Food
  • I am capable of privately spoiling my wonderful marriage at any time, by noticing that it’s not the relationship I would’ve imagined being in. Meanwhile, a few months before meeting my wife, I wrote down a list of characteristics that the perfect partner would have, and I subsequently met that person. She was completely lovely—I find much to criticize in my own behavior from that period and nothing bad to say about her. And yet the relationship did not stick. How odd.
    Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy
  • Strangely, happiness isn’t produced by getting what you want. Unhappiness is the product of the number of times per minute that you believe circumstances should be otherwise. “Enough” and “not enough” are mental stances that, very often, are uncorrelated with exterior facts.
    Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy
  • Excellence requires non-attachment to principles. All mediocre performers are the same: instead of improving on feedback from what happens, they react to what they think is supposed to be happening, or try to reinforce a theory they’ve internalized—perhaps an inaccurate approximation of someone they admire. This attempt at coherence is futile, since the mind of an expert makes no sense. It is filled with exceptions, contradictory principles butting up against each other. Perhaps the knowledge of how your life works is the same.
    Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy
  • just skip all of that, and admit that you’re scared of what you know you will do. And then do it.
    Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy
  • When people talk about “being authentic,” they are often referring to executing some program, some persona, that they’ve devised privately. Of course, our impression of such people is that they’re unnatural and unoriginal.
    Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy
  • Your introspection is successful if it is finite, if it leads you towards direct contact with experience
    Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy
  • Often, our self-image is a defense against the traits we reject in ourselves. “I love to be spontaneous,” says the most calculating person you’ve ever met. Thus, if you’re trying to live in self-loathing and denial, one way is to sculpt your life around the self-image you’ve decided on.
    Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy
  • The planning part of your mind, the one that generates ambitions and hypothetical situations, is a small part of your overall intelligence. Anyone who is halfway good at sex, comedy, or any creative art will know this. Designing your life based on what that part of your mind wants is like designing your house to fit the needs of your right hand. Congratulations, your house is filled with fidget spinners and soap.
    Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy
  • After getting everything I wanted in my 20s, and discovering that I was still miserable, I decided that I should no longer be in charge of choosing what I want, and I slowly settled into a frame of, “I’ll do whatever God seems to want from me.”
    Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy
  • “Circling” is this extremely autistic practice in which adults sit in a circle on the floor relating their present experience without judgment in an attempt to improve their ability to communicate authentically with others. I know it sounds gay but I found it quite fun.
    WBE meets the Rationalists
  • I can confidently say that every woman, at least once in their life, will have the experience of feeling personally victimized by a self-righteous, self-titled “nice guy.” He’ll poke fun at performative men. He’ll wallow in self-pity, choking on his tears, whining about how girls view him as a friend but never anything more. He’ll feign good intentions like his life depends on it. There’s a wicked, silent violence in it all. His true intentions creep to the surface, like a phantom that lies dormant until it can sense your guard has finally been lowered enough to strike.
    ‘Obsession’ & the Male Loneliness Epidemic
  • Meet AI girlfriends, and, in this case, abusing a woman’s free will in exchange for companionship. I’d argue that the phenomenon came into fruition, especially more so recently, because oftentimes men will outwardly point fingers as to why they’re single or lonely because it’s always some other entity as opposed to some internal deficiency. It must be some “other.” They fault the indoctrination of feminism or claim more women are converting to misandry than usual, as if the new religion. Men have begun to cry “loneliness epidemic,” in the same way they once cried wolf. In reality, though, wome…
    ‘Obsession’ & the Male Loneliness Epidemic
  • But in the second half of the twentieth century, this dynamic changed. There was a huge increase in migration, either to major cities or to other countries, and airplanes made it possible for people to work abroad and return home on a regular basis; and refrigeration allowed bodies to be preserved for much longer. And so the old limitations on funeral expenses were blown open. Migrants were generally suspected of shirking their kinship obligations, and so were eager to demonstrate their continued loyalty to the kinship group: and the funeral, where this loyalty could be made tangible and publi…
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • Kinship networks certainly do provide a number of important welfare functions: people want to see their relatives fed and housed and cared for, and a kinship network is, among other things, a mechanism for accomplishing that. But it’s hard not to notice something darker. The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it: someone who no longer needs your help is also someone who might not help you.
    How funerals keep Africa poor - David Oks
  • she told me that she was disappointed—so very disappointed! The world she lived in now wasn’t any different from the world she used to live in, after all. It’s not the “future” she was looking forward to.
    Introduction to 2181 Overture
  • the people who preserved their old self and refused to cheat time, and the people who fought tooth and nail and yet were still abandoned by the wheel of history that turned at a blinding pace.
    Introduction to 2181 Overture
  • This technology is a curse. People become insatiable because of it; they’re putting their hopes anywhere but the present reality.
    Introduction to 2181 Overture
  • However, as the originator of “time stock,” Tang Zhu did not, in fact, choose to go into cryosleep in 2049, nor did she join the underground cities that came after. Instead, she founded Time Stock, an insurance company that managed the properties of cryosleepers. She emerged as one of the wealthiest businesswomen of her generation. In a conversation, she admitted to the author:
    Introduction to 2181 Overture
  • Beauty cannot be invoked by a passing mention of jasmine scents and love cannot be invoked by the bleary-eyed witnessing of wispy silhouettes moving in the distance. If such invocations were sufficient, then so would flowers be enough to awaken the bereaved from the darkness of grief, so would Hallmark cards be enough to fold a couple torn by separation back into matrimony, so would low-effort consolations like “Everything happens for a reason” be sufficient to soothe the lacerations left by bitter and violent demonstrations of Reason’s very abandonment.
    Yearnslop is the perversion of everything good about Love
  • I think Yearnposting is a dominant form of writing on Substack because writers start writing from a mindspace of wanting to make something diffuse and vague more clear and legible. The initial act of sitting down to write is in itself a mindstate of yearning for completion and yearning for beauty. Particularly if you have a poetic sensibility, and therefore a genuine potential for writing really well, you probably turn to the pen in states of uncertainty, confusion, anxiety and disaffection. So what is naturally produced at early levels of skill is an elaborated expression of these emotional s…
    Yearnslop is the perversion of everything good about Love
  • Consequently, the archetypal Yearnslop addict is the depressive romantic who falls in love quickly and exits it just as fast once confronted with the impenetrable and confusing Otherness of a human being with desires and values foreign to itself. They yearn deeply for the days of ignorance when their lover was merely a beautiful and perfect mere receptacle for them to jettison their feelings of inadequacy; the want the lover who plays guitar, says clever things about the economy at dinner, is comprehensively therapised, but never turns into the one who is insecure about turning into his dad or…
    Yearnslop is the perversion of everything good about Love
  • The style is easy to consume and does not confront the viewer, other than to offer as a clean mirror to reflect the viewers’ own, diffuse, unarticulated feeling of lack onto itself. It affirms a viewer’s pre-existing suspicion that they are real and deeply feeling entity, but it does not invite the viewer to question or learn anything else, the very sensation that would take the viewing Yearner (neutral) out of its state of lack and into the state of love it so desires:
    Yearnslop is the perversion of everything good about Love
  • Why is it that Yearnslop so often deals with what it feels like to be the Yearner (derogatory), the imagined persona, and never the actual human or thing that Yearner (derogatory) reaches for? For someone who apparently loves love so much, why is there no interest in another human being at all? Why all this gesturing at minor sensitivities to experience, without the actual clarity and generosity of sight of witnessing someone else into sacralised being?
    Yearnslop is the perversion of everything good about Love
  • The answer is unequivocally nothing. The piece exists as a container for a pre-existing, grasping feeling, it offers itself up as free food for the searching Yearner (neutral) to slide down their gullet and pass through its many pipes while releasing no nutrient contents. It leaves no impression, shape or indentation upon the viewer, other than a diffuse affect of wanting. But then why does it seem to be beautiful on first blush? Smell, jasmine, blue, night, brief. These words conjure ideas that seem like they must be deep. They gesture wistfully but incuriously at impermanence—that popular su…
    Yearnslop is the perversion of everything good about Love
  • Why does the persona want to smell like the blue hour of the night? When does the blue hour of the night occur? Is stepping outside to briefly smell the night-blooming jasmine a common experience that other people or myself are supposed to have? Is it only possible to smell the night-blooming jasmine at precisely this hour? From what department store could I procure this scent and what is it like? (I suppose the obvious answer is “like jasmine, specifically, night-blooming jasmine, whereby we can also surmise that the time of night-blooming occurs at the exact same timing as this ‘blue hour’, …
    Yearnslop is the perversion of everything good about Love
  • If there is an underclass, 996 won’t save you
    The Old World Is Dying: Advice for 2026 graduates