flâneur

C LI

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on the atlas — 145

highlights — 328

  • Lastly: a note on anthropomorphising language
    If you haven’t recently used Claude Code*, you might not understand where AI is at
  • Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day in their book Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart (Nardi & O'Day 1999) apply the ecology metaphor to local environments, such as libraries and schools, in preference to the more common metaphors for technology as tool, text, or system.
    Information_ecology
  • Nardi's My Life as a Night Elf Priest is one of the best known ethnographies of World of Warcraft.
    Bonnie Nardi
  • She is widely known among librarians – especially research, reference and digital librarians – for Chapter 7 of Information Ecologies, which focused on librarians as keystone species in information ecologies.
    Bonnie Nardi
  • These binary conditions and the written steps associated with them can create convenient training signals for LRMs. The model doesn’t have to learn or reliably apply a general reasoning process, Kambhampati said; it just has to absorb enough examples of what the steps look like to predictively mimic them on its way to “stitching together” a plausible result that can then be verified.
    Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons? | Quanta Magazine
  • His working hypothesis is that an LRM, like its LLM precursors, performs what he calls “approximate retrieval” across its vast training corpus: “somewhere in the middle” between pattern matching and reasoning, he said, but closer to the former. The role of “thinking tokens,” then, isn’t to narrate an actual chain of thought (because there isn’t one). Instead, it’s to load up the model’s context window in a way that makes it more likely to predict, or “approximately retrieve,” reasoning-shaped strings of text.
    Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons? | Quanta Magazine
  • Taking the meaning of AI reasoning traces seriously, he said, was a scientific “rabbit hole,” akin to believing in geocentrism (opens a new tab) or the ether (opens a new tab).
    Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons? | Quanta Magazine
  • 100% of the company’s voting stock transfers to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, created to protect the company’s values; and 100% of the nonvoting stock had been given to the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature.
    Reimagining Capitalism — Patagonia
  • Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing
    On Liberty
  • All computing is to some degree artificially intelligent.
    Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI
  • But we end up persistently moving the goalposts on “intelligence.”
    Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI
  • It wasn’t always there. The men of 18th century “Western” rationalist science built it - Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and their kin.
    Problematic Proteins
  • There is an imaginary wall in our minds that divides the world of Nature from the world of Culture. We seem to believe these are eternal, inherent categories of things in the world.
    Problematic Proteins
  • At the heart of the matter is scientific hubris. Bateson argues that Occidental epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven.
    Gregory Bateson
  • Within each system is found competition and dependency.
    Gregory Bateson
  • Double binds are often utilized as a form of control without open coercion—the use of confusion makes them difficult both to respond to and to resist.
    Double bind
  • As ecologist, he taught us that human beings act in ways that are destructive to fragile ecological systems because we do not see the interdependencies between natural systems and our own lives. As anthropologist, he taught us that behaviors and words have no meaning outside of cultural contexts. As cyberneticist, he taught us that change in one part of a system can be manifested in an entirely different part of the system in unexpected different ways. As family therapist, he taught us that pathologies reside not in individuals but in the patterns of relationships between individuals. As creat…
    An Ecology of Mind | Psychology Today
  • we look for the interconnections and relationships between people instead of seeing people as separate independent individuals
    An Ecology of Mind | Psychology Today
  • THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH FIRST PRINCIPLES
    What About US - Polymaths 3/3 by nonzerosum james
  • Piaget thought that egocentric speech follows from inner speech and "dissolved away" as children matured, but Vygotsky showed that egocentric speech became inner speech, which was then called "thoughts.
    Lev Vygotsky
  • nothing could, even in principle, falsify psychoanalytic theories
    Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • he was appalled by the failure of the democratic parties to stem the rising tide of fascism in Austria in the 1920s and 1930s, and the effective welcome extended to it by the Marxists, who regarded fascism as a necessary dialectical step towards the implosion of capitalism and the ultimate victory of communism.
    Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • "Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?" Essay by Alan Sokal, published in Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public, edited by Garrett G. Fagan (Routledge, 2006), pp. 286-361. Available in PDF and Postscript formats. Published in French translation, together with a very interesting preface by Jean Bricmont, by Éditions Odile Jacob (September 2005) under the title Pseudosciences et postmodernisme: Adversaires ou compagnons de route?.
    Alan Sokal's writings on science, philosophy and culture
  • Sokal is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University Press's Social Text.
    Alan Sokal
  • its key point is the computation of a suitable measure of the remoteness of two bodies of knowledge
    [cond-mat/0108530] Language Trees and Zipping
  • One honest downside: getting opencode dialled in as a CLI agent took real fine tuning compared to the out-of-the-box Claude Code experience. Which raises a different question, how much of Claude Code's quality is Opus 4.7 itself vs the context and tool orchestration around it? Possibly more than people credit.
    Qwen3.6:27b is the first local model that actually holds up against Claude Code for me : LocalLLM
  • How can I make it clear to him that, while it may seem easy and wonderful, it will drag him down to the depths, to a place where he’ll no longer find friends, support or beauty, so far down that he may never rise to the surface again?
    On That Day — diaries near you
  • To be honest, I can’t imagine how anyone could say “I’m weak” and then stay that way. If you know that about yourself, why not fight it, why not develop your character?
    On That Day — diaries near you
  • Even intellectual liberals — my own movement and social class, if only by process of elimination — increasingly subordinate other goals to their dream of lowering the social status of wealthy technologists.
    The American age was the human age - by Noah Smith
  • The industries of the future can only be built in America if they take up nearly no land, use nearly no energy, require very little bank financing, and are able to procure skilled labor as needed from abroad.
    The American age was the human age - by Noah Smith
  • group chats (indeed, the salons of the 21st century)
    Why Be Courageous? - by Hrishikesh Joshi
  • Your home department need not fully dictate your education.
    Why Be Courageous? - by Hrishikesh Joshi
  • As a graduate student, if you publicly dissent from the orthodoxy, you will absolutely be discriminated against when it comes to jobs at the majority of traditional departments. People with poorer CVs, worse teaching portfolios, and less well-developed research programs will get chosen over you. It will hurt. But you don’t need every department to hire you: you just need one. And if there are 10 departments or centers willing to hire people with your profile but only 5 plausible candidates, your chances are good.
    Why Be Courageous? - by Hrishikesh Joshi
  • But graduate students with heterodox views (heterodox w/r/t the academy, even if widespread among the public) see the writing on the wall and self-censor. Junior academics self-censor until they get tenure. Even after tenure, many would rather not rock the boat.
    Why Be Courageous? - by Hrishikesh Joshi
  • beliefs can also signal our group loyalties. Groups can then differentially award status and other benefits based on whether they perceive the person as being on “their side.”
    Why Be Courageous? - by Hrishikesh Joshi
  • in any productive conversation, we must meet our interlocutors where they are
    Why Be Courageous? - by Hrishikesh Joshi
  • the contrarian is letting the world decide her opinion for her, just in the other direction. She too is intellectually unfree in a sense
    Why Be Courageous? - by Hrishikesh Joshi
  • Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
    Why Be Courageous? - by Hrishikesh Joshi
  • It took me 20 years to fully embrace the switch — it requires developing a long-term vision, willpower to create structure without deadline pressure, a theory of value, project management skills, good taste, the willingness to turn projects down, brutal honesty about whether our work is any good (even if it gets published), and a lot more.
    Arvind Narayanan on X: "At the start of my research career I operated in a deadline-driven mode because that's what most researchers seemed to do. Gradually I discovered the value-driven way of working. I'm glad I had a supportive advisor who didn't make me chase deadlines. It took me 20 years to fully https://t.co/MV7SM27hPR" / Twitter
  • Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed biologists' understanding of the evolution of the Eukaryotes, organisms with nuclei in their cells. She proposed that they came into being by symbiotic mergers of bacteria.
    Lynn Margulis
  • Still a junior faculty member at Boston University at the time, her theory that cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria was largely ignored for another decade, becoming widely accepted only after it was powerfully substantiated through genetic evidence.
    Lynn Margulis
  • Margulis was a strong critic of neo-Darwinism.[
    Lynn Margulis
  • Deacon explicitly rejects claims that living or mental phenomena can be explained by dynamical systems approaches.[3] Instead, Deacon argues that life- or mind-like properties only emerge from a higher-order reciprocal relationship between self-organizing processes.
    Terrence Deacon
  • investigating the evolution of human cognition
    Terrence Deacon
  • He has long stated an interest in developing a scientific semiotics (particularly biosemiotics) that would contribute to both linguistic theory and cognitive neuroscience.
    Terrence Deacon
  • the study of evolution-like processes at multiple levels
    Terrence Deacon
  • Insights from biosemiotics have also been adopted in the humanities and social sciences, including human–animal studies, human–plant studies[5][6] and cybersemiotics.[7]
    Biosemiotics
  • Phenotypic plasticity is a key mechanism with which organisms can cope with a changing climate, as it allows individuals to respond to change within their lifetime.[74] This is thought to be particularly important for species with long generation times, as evolutionary responses via natural selection may not produce change fast enough to mitigate the effects of a warmer climate.
    Phenotypic plasticity
  • Functional ecology is a branch of ecology that focuses on the roles, or functions, that species play in the community or ecosystem in which they occur. In this approach, physiological, anatomical, and life history characteristics of the species are emphasized.
    Functional ecology
  • "If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop. You just do it and do it and do it, and you sort it out later."
    Training the Idea Muscle | Alexandria