Happy 250 years of USA! Proud to be an American.

Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.

Very overwhelmed atm by all the information the robots are throwing at me. I cannot keep up and yet I want to move quickly.

“The challenge is navigating user requests without providing false proofs.

It seems challenging.”

—GPT 5.5 Pro

In certain domains, with the right context, Opus 4.8 is blowing me away with its philosophical competence.

It comes up with complex original ideas, makes extremely subtle conceptual distinctions, and keeps everything straight in a complex conversation with many moving parts better than almost any human would.

Edit: right after I wrote this, it started falling apart a bit in the specific conversation I was having. Still blown away, tho

The food at LISA is pretty good!

It bothers me when speeches which are supposed to honor someone are 50% generic vacuous statements and 50% lies.

But this seems like the standard in my experience. Which is odd, because it really isn’t be that hard to say things which are both positive and true.

I think people are drawn towards the lies because it’s a more active form of self gaslighting.

It’s often said that one of the motivators / desiderata for natural abstraction is robustness to ontology shifts.

Phrased like that, it almost seems impossible - doesn’t an ontology shift by definition entail throwing away your old abstractions and replacing them with new (hopefully better) ones?

Well, Guaranteed Translatability (tho it does have some strong assumptions which we need to grapple with) wants to say something like this: if two different agents are both modeling a certain section of the world correctly, then you should be able to translate both ways between their concepts which explain that section.

This works with one agent which is learning, comparing between two different times: if an agent had a good model of a part of the world back in the day with its naive ontology, and now it has a bigger or different ontology which is still making the same predictions over this part of the world, its old concepts should be expressible in terms of the new concepts and vice versa!

In other words, you have guaranteed translatability between the ontologies of past and future versions of the same agent, insofar as both versions of the agent make the same predictions and are using natural abstractions; and you can restrict this to a subset of observables.

So two agents don’t have to agree on absolutely everything in the world, just on one bit of it; and they don’t get translatability everywhere, just with regards to this particular bit of the world which they agree on.

Socks have never fit me. This is because I never buy myself socks. Every sock I’ve ever worn has been a gift, usually a Christmas gift, and apparently they’ve all been size L when they should have been XL.

I have my first XL socks coming in the mail tomorrow… I can’t wait to no longer have to struggle when I take off my socks.

After seeing their announcement, I was skeptical that Gemini 3.5 Flash would be of any use to me.

But I gotta say after trying out Antigravity 2, I appreciate the speed. It is quite nice.