maxcooper.bandcamp.com/track/patter...
11.03.2026 02:23
π 1
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Wow. Foraminifera!
ROV pilots paused and carefully zoomed in to collect footage of these single-celled microorganisms, or protists, at 843 m during the #OBVI #LivingBioreactors expedition w/ @schmidtsciences.bsky.social offshore of Argentina. Read the full caption: youtube.com/shorts/Yv_ud...
had to add the lumped capacitor
For Kai Dao, we decided the track would be compromised if we took it away from its original form. Itβs a little burst of positivity, written & performed entirely on synthesisers: gogopenguin.lnk.to/calltothevoid
#synths #synthesizer #modularsynth #electronica #electronicmusic
do you have thoughts on the examples i provided or are your contributions limited to uninformed sneering? one thing i didnt even mention is how big formal verification is probably about to get martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/a...
a fun thing to do for papers with good source code available is to git clone the paper repo, drop the paper pdf in, and then tell claude to, for example, write an interactive opengl visualization of Figure 4 (adding the plot from Figure 2 on top) with sliders for playing with the parameters
Magnetic Fields: Find a central metaphor that's so good that everything aligns to it. Design meetings are no longer necessary, it designs itself. The metaphor should be crisp and fun. Smalltalk is object-oriented, but it should have been message oriented. Snobbery: Turn up your nose at good ideas. You must work on great ideas, not good ones. Appreciate mundanity: after all, a pencil is high technology One goal: the computer disappears into the environment The computer shouldn't act like it knows everything. The whole notion of 'programming language' is wrong.
Combobulating...
vibecoded signal generator, now without the sine peaks cut off
it's not just programming any more. Claude Opus 4.6 is a pocket mathematician. an unreliable one, but experts can get real results from these things, it seems.
That's a lot of proofs:
> In two weeks, Gauss then autoformalized the 24-dimensional case using only the original paper as input, performing autonomous literature searches when needed. This brought the total sphere packing formalization from 70k to ~200k lines.
> In just 5 days, Gauss automatically proved all remaining results needed to verify the result in 8 dimensions. The Sphere Packing team estimated that the 8-dimensional case alone would have taken six more months of work with existing tools.
www.math.inc/sphere-packing
but then you have the problem of making some backend system that categorizes all the possible topics that people are posting about. this is at minimum LLM-complete, and doing this at bluesky scale seems to require a lot of infrastructure!
Your feed was then often things about the topics you followed, but somethings adjacent topics that the recommendation algorithm thinks you may also like. in this model, I suppose the idea would be to extract topics from a user's bluesky interactions and blog posts.
Screenshot from Maven's page for the "RLHF" tag, showing other users following that topic and what other topics they follow
yeah I think "how do you register interest in topics in this system" is not fully worked out in my mind. On maven (I discovered it's still up, app.heymaven.com) every post has topics extracted automatically, and then each user had to follow individual topics, and you could see what everyone followed
Kenneth Stanley talks about this in www.youtube.com/watch?v=73sv..., the phrase "what is transformative to you cannot be decided through consensus" has been rattling around in my brain ever since (esp. as I browse For You, unfortunately). I wish atproto was more mature when he'd tried making this
added a voltage vs time plot and Gaussian signals
a custom visualization, mostly vibecoded. still needs work, but source here: tangled.org/oscillatory...., and i deployed a version here: dev.oscillatory.net/tline-viz/
impedance discontinuities
still bouncing around
Because of the scaling work, I became completely absorbed with how the exponential increase in complexity of integrated circuits would change the way that we think about computing. The viewpoint of the computer industry at the time was an out- growth of the industrial revolution; it was based on what was then called βthe economy of scale.β The thinking went this way: A 1000-horsepower engine costs only four times as much as a 100- horsepower engine. Therefore, the cost per horsepower becomes less as the engine is made larger. It is more cost eο¬ective to make a few large power plants than to make many small ones. Eο¬- ciency considerations favor the concentration of technology in a few large installations. The same must be true of computing. One company, IBM, was particularly successful following this strat- egy. The βComputing Centerβ was the order of the dayβa central concentration of huge machines, with some bureaucrat βin chargeβ and plenty of people around to protect the machines from anyone who might want to use them. This model went well with the bu- reaucratic mindset of the timeβa mindset that has not totally died out even today. But as I looked at the physics of the emerging technology, it didnβt work that way at all. The time required to move data is set by the velocity of light and related electromagnetic considerations, so it is far more eο¬ective to put whatever computing is required where the data are located. **Eο¬ciency considerations thus favor the distribution of technology, rather than the concentration of tech- nology.** The economics of information technology are the reverse of those of mechanical technology.
the dream of the 90s
Some thoughts on AI and math, inspired by βFirst Proofβ: www.daniellitt.com/blog/2026/2/...
Phasor Agents: Oscillatory Graphs with Three-Factor Plasticity and Sleep-Staged Learning
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04362
"Be the Signal" I ~ v x C_L where: I = current out of our foot v = speed with which we move down the line, charging up regions C_L = capacitance per length of the line
Be the Signal
just set up a tangled.org knot for fun. you can't yet migrate an existing repo to a new knot (tangled.org/tangled.org/...), but it's easy enough for me to re-create my repos since they currently don't have state outside of git
impedance mismatch
so the kanye seeddance video didn't give me me too much motion sickness, but this one does. it's the rapid camera pull back that does it. it's been years, seems like the labs are never going to fix this problem. looking forward to a glorious future of AI-generated ads that literally make me nauseous
new end of winter metric just dropped: the day that Veronika starts removing her winter coat
β«βͺ the best part of waking up is rainbows in your cup βͺβ«
yeah, the flip side of my post above is "i am not a computer scientist, so I will not be learning git, and AI will handle all of my version control tasks". there's two LLM modes: running straight through complexity walls that I don't care about, and delving into the gaping maw of complexity i do
