Our moral alarm systems seem to react to violent acts that cause harm actively, through the application of personal (muscular) force.
These systems may not be suitably activated by guns and modern weaponry.
A new game I like to play is: who can debug a sticky and seemingly head-scratchy bug quicker - me or the GitHub Copilot LLM models?
Normally the LLMs win before I've even got the environment set-up. Using a more structured approach.
The letter age. Wasn't that great! Just bits of paper through your door or people needing to physically visit with their presence. And you could always shut your door. Now our doors are permanently open and everything's piling up on the doorstep.
Happiness Pump
(Grok wins)
Why in the U.K. do we have this perverse notion that tiny vehicles going 4mph with no protection that are difficult to stop/start are the perfect lane-mates of very large vehicles going 30mph+ that regularly stop/start?
It still feels a bit weird that I should have to step in to help a flailing agent and say "hold on, just let me run that locally, I can see you're having issues, I can fix it". They need to know when to ask for help, bless em.
Funny the things that stick in your mind.
Two weeks ago I watched a throwaway video piece on Russia - it said its economy was cooked if oil stayed ~$54/barrel. It said it needed ~$59+ to match economic plans.
Guess what the oil price has risen to today?
“If your students can easily complete your assessment with AI, it’s not a good assessment.” Discuss
I'm Mandy Fly Me open.spotify.com/track/4mmWv1... [Love 10cc - this song shows them on top form.]
Funny how I haven’t seen many people talk about money as the ultimate human reinforcement learning signal. We structure most of our societies around a continuous scalar that you can quantise hierarchically. The next frontier after thumbs up/down?
China has been very smart on robotics. Push huge domestic market for industrial robots to build the supply chain. Build on existing strengths in robotics. Subsidise to make affordable. Open source & get your customers to share your R&D. Wish Europe or US would do this.
I don’t have to plan my life with a high chance that I will have to bury one of my children. I’ve never been starving. I can afford to heat my house. I have all my teeth. In my pocket I have access to more books and films than the biggest physical libraries.
Ah remember those days in machine learning where "progress" over a decade would be a 1-2% bump in the eval metrics? Now we're getting 5-30% improvements every 1-2 months.
(Also thinking works but takes more resources. Who'd have thought it?)
What would a “university education” in compassion look like?
Practical compassion, it all its messiness and flaws.
An education with the aim of keeping the heart open of the rest of a life.
"Are ghosts dreadful because they bring toward us from the future some component—in the vectorial sense of our own deaths? Are they partially, defectively, our own dead selves, thrust back, in recoil from the mirrorface at the end, to haunt us?"
Bits of this set in early 1900s strike camps of Colorado (written by Pynchon in 2006), remind me of 2025/2026 militarised state enforcers in the US.
Things often don’t change; change is just merciful forgetting transfigured.
Cortez the Killer - 2016 Remaster open.spotify.com/track/3ZPLFD... [Tune]
Per day:
# of errors because the AI has generated code with errors: ~0
# of errors because I have edited some AI code and put something wrong: ~10
# of errors because the AI is relying on my old code which is shite: ~5
# of errors because I haven't explained what I wanted properly: ~3
One benefit to having a wide general knowledge is you can make analogies across seemingly unrelated domains - use the linguistic and structural tools of one domain in another. Experts that are siloed deep in a domain cannot do this.
Symbolic abstraction is both the greatest and the worst thing human beings have evolved. We can compute over those abstractions (“reason”). We can apply emotion to abstractions. We can live or die for those abstractions.
Like how Epstein emails show that certain business success is superior intelligence and skill at capital allocation rather than large-scale supply of confidential information and insider trading (with a little blackmail).
Monday morning raring to go…
The broadband is switched off locally for “repairs and maintenance”, laptop shuts down with charging issue, and phone has no signal.
Cup of tea it is…
Folks with autism are often skilled at working with animals and children, showing “empathy”. Maybe the skill deficit is an inability to abide with adult human BS.
Is alcohol just a way to cope with the Northern hemisphere?
Thinking outside the box, could you have Israel and Palestine as two separate “quantum” states, each occupying the same geographical area?
Hmm wonder why the UK has a housing problem...
taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/01/29/w...
And wonder why this crops up in many countries...
(As enabled by mostly UK Commonwealth off-shore states...)
Quick Film Review: Breathless & Nouvelle Vague Double Bill
I watched Breathless. Then Nouvelle Vague. These are my thoughts. New wave style.
Those Epstein emails are instructive for "elite" positioning aren't they?
The emperors & empresses were not wearing any clothes all this time. How Epstein was perceived as an "intellectual titan" is beyond me.
It's the banality & the stupidity isn't it? Always the banality & the stupidity.
"We need less knowledge and achievement and more wisdom and care."
