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@without.boats

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Screenshot of Claude Code creating a plan called “I’m not sure was zany pancake”
“Overall, it's important to think about whether the types of investments we are making into Al are actually matched with the benefits we want from Al. On a societal level, I think the answer to that question right now is "no." There is a lot of development and expansion of a particular subset of Al technologies, and these are not the technologies that will have the biggest benefits across energy and climate applications. I'm not saying these technologies are useless, but they are incredibly resource-intensive, while also not being responsible for the lion's share of the benefits that could be felt in the energy sector.”
A dirt road in the woods toward the Emilian Apennines
1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. 2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. 3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. 4. We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
an animation of Tarjan‘s algorithm
Woody Harrelson in True Detective saying “I just want you to stop saying odd shit”
They need to negotiate with each other. They have to probe each other. They have to dynamically figure out a common language so they can exchange information and fulfill the goals that the human programmer gave to them. So that’s why this goal-directed stuff is going to be so important when we have this internet—is because you can’t write a procedure because we won’t know the procedures for talking to these remote programs. These programs themselves have to figure out procedures for talking to each other and fulfill higher-level goals. So if we have this worldwide network, I think that this is the only model that’s going to scale. What won’t work, what would be a total disaster, is—I’m going to make up a term here, API [Application Programming Interface]—this notion that you have a human programmer that writes against a fixed interface that’s exposed by some remote program. First of all, this requires the programs to already know about each other, right? And when you’re writing this program in this one’s language, now they’re tied together so the first program can’t go out and hunt and find other programs that implement the same service. They’re tied together. If this one’s language changes, it breaks this one. It’s really brutal, it doesn’t scale. And, worst of all, you have—it’s basically the machine code problem. You have a human doing low-level details that should be taken care of by the machine. So I’m pretty confident this is never going to happen. We’re not going to have API’s in the future. What we are going to have are programs that know how to figure out how to talk to each other, and that’s going to require programming in goals.
Text from “What is Theology?” by Adam Kotsko, reading: “On the one hand, there is philosophy, which seeks after perennial truths that are knowable, in principle, by every human being with the time and inclination to think carefully. Despite their universal accessibility by the mind, however, these perennial truths can only ever be approximated in our material world. Hence the satisfactions of knowledge and contemplation come to take priority over the futile tedium of political reform. On the other hand, there is theology, which seeks to remain faithful to a concrete historical event that claims to encompass the meaning of all human history.”
screenshot of a bluesky thread in which i have already muted all the participants
Screenshot of a moron (handle intentionally obscured) asking if a survey was “democratically put together” or “designed by an entity”, with the implication that if it is the latter the survey results are invalid
The defendants at Nuremberg
Zohran campaign style image saying impl Copy for Arc<T>
a stack of books on my dining table which reveal my broad and interesting taste, signaling to my followers that they should like the post to demonstrate their own taste, giving me a little dopamine hit
“Caravaggio’s Berghain” generated by some free stable diffusion model in January 2023
an engraving of Sleeping Hermaphroditus framed in a gold frame
From Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C Pierce: “Unfortunately, the power of dependent types is a two-edged sword. Blurring the distinction between checking types and carrying out proofs of arbitrary theorems does not magically make theorem proving simple-on the contrary, it makes typechecking computationally intractable! Mathematicians working with mechanical proof assistants do not just type in a theorem, press a button, and sit back to wait for a Yes or No: they spend significant effort writing proof scripts and tactics to guide the tool in constructing and verifying a proof. If we carry the idea of correctness by construction to its limit, programmers should expect to expend similar amounts of effort annotating programs with hints and explanations to guide the typechecker. For certain critical programming tasks, this degree of effort may be justified, but for day-to-day programming it is almost certainly too costly.”
Passage from Joan Didion’s “On Self-Respect”: “Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work-say it is screenwriting-in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.”
“Freedom of Speech” by Norman Rockwell
“You wouldn’t tariff a movie” meme
“Freedom of Speech” by Norman Rockwell
A DC-7
A UniFi 7 Pro WiFi Access Point, a PoE injector, an Ethernet switch, an RJ45 to USB-C adapter, and several CAT6 cables
Philips head screws
“Finally, to correct the possible impression that the inability to face radical novelty is confined to the industrial world, let me offer you an explanation of the -at least American- popularity of Artificial Intelligence. One would expect people to feel threatened by the “giant brains” or “machines that think.” Tin fact, the frightening computer becomes less frightening if it is used only to simulate a familiar non-computer. I am sure that this explanation will remain controversial for quite some time, for Artificial Intelligence as mimicking the human mind prefers to view itself as at the front lined whereas my explanation relegates it to the rear guard. (The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly: I’d rather use them to mimic something better.)” -EWD
Don’t mess with Texas advertisement
A projected video on the wall of my living room, with indirect lighting from the ceiling above
Cover of The Blind Spot by Jean-Yves Girard