Kyle L (bruxist)

I would love to meet a dog

having intense cravings for (the executive functioning required to get a job required to get the income required to get) really elaborate Lego sets

Borges also obviously very topical and evocative in the LLM era

My tutoring student and I read 'The Aleph' and I think this is the sassiest Borges story I've read.

I love how you can first only hear Bernie's voice and see his hand gesticulating into the frame

Did a vampire who hates Italian food write this?

Can any LLM-fluent people explain to me what happened here? This seems like a big failure completely alien from how any human would fail, & seems like it should be an easy case. (Presumably, most "Here are the lyrics:"-adjacent text in training data is followed by some string rather than no string?)

This is such a striking failure of reasoning, and so unlike anything a human mind would do, that I literally can't understand what concept of "temporality" could undergird this...

I'm talking to Claude about the lacuna in anti-capitalist anti-addiction rhetoric, particularly around weed. I mention the song 'Last Blunt' by the Coup, but Claude can't access the URL.

I type "here are the lyrics", intending to paste in the copied-pasted lyrics to 'Last Blunt', but I accidentally don't paste them before hitting Send. Claude answers: "these are really something" and proceeds to give a whole analysis despite having no access to the lyrics. It's vague, though plausible analysis, includes gems like "The phenomenology is exact"

I call Claude out on having analyzed non-existent lyrics. Claude acknowledges the mistake and confubulation.

I only got LLM-pilled like two days ago (ambivalently pilled) and I was all giddily impressed with Claude's reasoning until the bizarre failure below, wherein I lead up to pasting lyrics for Claude to analyze, forget to paste the lyrics, and get a confabulated analysis instead. What happened here?

It's also harder (for me at least) to understand the distinction between the LLM and its environment, since it seems like it just *is* the crystallized social knowledge in its training data plus whatever I contribute by prompting it.

This is hard to articulate for LLMs because it's not at all clear how many Claudes there even are (see paper linked below) or where one starts and ends (user-individuated runtime instances? background weights? abstract mathematical shape?).

(assuming you're talking about AI vs human minds)
I think another thing, maybe related to temporality, is the notion of a finite bounded experiential history, a stable distinction between my life and the environment around me.

Sure, but I guess I'm also imagining genuinely stratified legal systems that track not just money (as in progressive taxation) but also official status and social function. Like, a literal upside down caste system where government officials and cops are subject to different, harsher laws.

I just finished 'Dawn of Everything' and was struck by the examples of societies stabilized not by universal rights or enforcement mechanism, but ones specifically designed to unequally target and deflate those most likely to abuse power...

Is there a name for a political philosophy where government behaves more coercively/restrictively towards people in proportion to their power? Something like progressive taxation, but also literacy tests for elites but not masses, death penalty for armed agents of the state but no one else...

Every day, I try to betoken myself without beclowning myself. It's hard.

I feel like I'm in that scene from The Lobster where the hotel staff pantomime the dangers of singlehood.

Claude told me to either get an intimate acquaintance to pull it out, or go to urgent care saying "I have a splinter in my ass", or to just let it stay there and hope it comes out on its own without leading to sepsis. Wish me luck with the sepsis!

sucks to have a splinter in your ass while single

Does that mean it's no longer contemporary slang? In theory, with contemporary slang, you should be asking the kid, not the other way around lol

philpapers.org/archive/JONC...

Still occasionally having unwanted intrusive flashbacks to particularly annoying/mediocre parts of 'Southland Tales', which I recently saw for the first time.

I'm just mad at everyone involved (Wally Shawn, The Rock, the Bush era, etc.)

This is genuinely adding a new flavor of altered states of consciousness to my general cocktail of such. Very slight body horror — my body doesn't work with this slippery askew landscape.

Coming brusquely to terms with how tilted my new room is. I should've paid attention to this when visiting. My room isn't at all on a plane parallel to the surface of the Earth or perpendicular to its gravity. My only chair is tiny & rolling. Tipped over in it yesterday. Sea legs all the time.

cognitive-cultural achievements accomplished in my recent time off Bluesky, OR the good news and the bad news:

— finally finished 'The Dawn of Everything'

— watched 'Southland Tales' for the first time

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why does there have to be a single underlying sample space, rather than two separate ones (i.e. listeners sample from U then infer states from utterances, & speakers sample from S then craft utterances for states)?

Can you spell out what you mean by "the underlying sample space"? I guess I sorta thought about it as the listener(s) samples from a distribution over utterances & thereby tryies to infer the state, while the speaker samples from a distribution of states & tries to craft an appropriate utterance.

yes, the wheels of justice are slow. agonizingly, excruciatingly slow. and oftentimes they miss or go off the tracks entirely. in fact most of the time. but occasionally, very infrequently, that big wheel of justice delivers theoretical remuneration for a handful of vested business interests

The majority of organizing happening in Minnesota isn’t just peaceful, it’s INVISIBLE. Moms showing up who won’t be interviewed on TV, people whose ICE patrols don’t turn into viral video. The grocery runs, the donations, the people filming bc they happen to be there. Please remember this.

The New York Times When a Coat Becomes a Symbol of Conflict How the choice of outerwear for Gregory Bovino, the president’s Border Patrol chief, turned into part of the deportation story.

Gregory Bovino Der ICE-Kommandant im Nazi-Look Martialisch und effektheischend, so tritt ICE-Kommandant Gregory Bovino gern auf. 22.01.2026, 17.09 Uhr

the nyt style section vs. der spiegel