https://aneeshsathe.com/All writing by Aneesh SatheHugoen-ushttps://aneeshsathe.com/not-my-lever/https://aneeshsathe.com/not-my-lever/Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I. A burden no one could carry alone # Some time around the year 170, in a tent on the Danube frontier, the emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek to himself: Be like the headland against which the waves continually break, but stands firm and tames the fury of the water round it. The empire was at war with the Marcomanni. The Antonine Plague had reached the army. His children were dying one after another; of his thirteen, only one would outlive him to any consequence.https://aneeshsathe.com/the-lightening-of-intent/https://aneeshsathe.com/the-lightening-of-intent/Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I. Ceolfrith on the road # In late spring 716, an English abbot named Ceolfrith left the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria for the city of Rome. He was seventy-four. He carried with him a manuscript Bible, the Codex Amiatinus, which he intended to present as a gift to Pope Gregory II. The Codex contained the entire Latin Bible in two volumes, weighed about seventy-five pounds, and required something close to one thousand calfskins to produce. Ceolfrith had commissioned three of these “pandects” at his abbey; this was the survivor he meant to deliver in person. The other two pandects are lost. The Codex Amiatinus was misattributed to a sixth-century Italian scribe for more than a thousand years; only in 1888 did Giovanni Battista de Rossi establish that the dedication page had been altered and the manuscript was Northumbrian work. He died at Langres in eastern Burgundy on 25 September 716, six months into the journey, before reaching Rome. His companions carried the Codex on. It sits today in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence and is the oldest complete Latin Bible in the world.https://aneeshsathe.com/the-viscous-frontier/https://aneeshsathe.com/the-viscous-frontier/Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Escherichia coli Bacterium (2021, revised 2022). Illustration by David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank. doi:10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-028. I. # In May 1976 a Satawalese master navigator named Mau Piailug stood on the deck of a double-hulled Polynesian canoe in Honolua Bay, Maui, and prepared to sail to Tahiti. Sans compass, chronometer, and chart. The canoe was Hōkūleʻa, a replica of the voyaging craft that had carried Polynesians across the Pacific a thousand years earlier. Over the next thirty-four days Piailug would navigate her about two thousand three hundred nautical miles south-southeast to Papeete using the rising and setting positions of stars, the shape of ocean swells refracted off islands beyond the horizon, the colour of the water at dusk, and the behaviour of terns returning to land at evening.https://aneeshsathe.com/the-cosmos-and-the-model/https://aneeshsathe.com/the-cosmos-and-the-model/Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I. The Averaging Machine # In 2025, researchers at USC ran a study that produced a result nobody expected. Atari et al., “AI-Powered Homogenization of Scientific Reasoning,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2026). They gave people reasoning tasks, some with LLM assistance, some without. Individual performance improved. Every metric showed it: more accurate responses, faster completion, fewer errors. The LLM made each person better. Then they looked at the groups.https://aneeshsathe.com/the-octotypic-mind/https://aneeshsathe.com/the-octotypic-mind/Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The Scholars of Dejima # In the 1770s, a samurai, a physician, and a Confucian scholar gathered around a Dutch anatomy textbook none of them could properly read. They were attempting a translation of the Tabulae Anatomicae. Sugita Genpaku and his collaborators, the rangaku-sha, “Dutch studies scholars” of Tokugawa Japan. The shogunate had sealed the country for over a century. European knowledge trickled in through one pinhole: the Dutch trading post on Dejima, a fan-shaped artificial island in Nagasaki harbor.https://aneeshsathe.com/the-end-of-identity-ai-plasticity-and-the-divergence-machine/https://aneeshsathe.com/the-end-of-identity-ai-plasticity-and-the-divergence-machine/Sun, 08 Mar 2026 06:28:21 +0000Over the past year, the Contraptions club has been reading through history—from Giordano Bruno and Montaigne to Spinoza, Adam Smith, and Hume. We are now using using Venkatesh Rao’s Divergence Machine framework as a lens to make sense of the modern world. For context, Venkat posits that human history operates through massive “world machines”. The “modernity machine” was constructed around 1200 and operated at a steady plateau of capability from 1600 to 2000. It is now in a state of rapid, partially scheduled disassembly. In its place, the “divergence machine” was constructed around 1600 and has been operating in fully deployed mode for about 25 years. Looking at this transition through the philosophers we’ve studied, my feeling is that over the centuries, we’ve witnessed a gradual peeling back of the layers of imagination that were once heavily layered on top of nature. We can map this peeling back directly to Rao’s divergence concepts.https://aneeshsathe.com/how-the-fox-with-the-long-tail-learned-to-play-in-the-dark-forest/https://aneeshsathe.com/how-the-fox-with-the-long-tail-learned-to-play-in-the-dark-forest/Sat, 07 Feb 2026 05:18:56 +0000 I. Everything is a Balinese Cockfight # It was after a police chase and a conspiratorial lie that Clifford Geertz and his wife Hildred were accepted into the social fabric of 1958 Bali. Until then they had been ignored, a treatment reserved for intruders. The police chase was the aftermath of attending a cockfight recorded in Geertz’ essay, Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. The cockfight, a ritual with the stakes so irrationally high that they ceased to be about money (or the birds) at all. Status, dignity, and the honor of their kinship groups was all on the table. It was deep play—a game where the potential for loss so catastrophic, and the potential for glory so fleeting, that from a utilitarian perspective, it was madness to engage in it at all.https://aneeshsathe.com/the-kernel-and-the-ark/https://aneeshsathe.com/the-kernel-and-the-ark/Sun, 11 Jan 2026 08:28:42 +0000 I. The Wall and the Infinite # It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the brutalities of the Seven Years’ War, finally withdraws to the banks of the Propontis to utter his famous dictum—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—he is not proposing a program of agricultural management. He is issuing a plea for containment. To cultivate a garden, in the shadow of such overwhelming chaos, is an act of stoic resignation. It is an admission that the world is too vast, too violent, and too unintelligible to be governed by reason. One builds a wall against the infinite, and within that limited circumference, one tends to the soil. The garden is a refuge from nature.https://aneeshsathe.com/the-deep-dark-terroir-of-the-soul/https://aneeshsathe.com/the-deep-dark-terroir-of-the-soul/Fri, 26 Dec 2025 02:17:37 +0000This is the third and final part of the Thicket Series: Part 1: Logic of the Thicket and the Unsearchable Web Part 2: The Architecture of Resistance The history of the working subject might be best understood not as a ledger of wages or a sequence of industrial breakthroughs, but as a study in the migration of the Master. In the eighteenth century, the Master was a concrete presence, a figure residing in the castle or the cathedral, distinct from the worker by a physical and social chasm. One knew where the authority lived because one could see the smoke from its chimneys. By the nineteenth century, this figure had moved into the factory office, closer to the rhythm of the machine but still identifiable by the suit and the watch. The twentieth century saw a further dissolution; the Master became atmospheric, blending into the very walls of the institutions that housed us—the schools, the hospitals, the barracks.https://aneeshsathe.com/the-architecture-of-resistance/https://aneeshsathe.com/the-architecture-of-resistance/Tue, 23 Dec 2025 05:38:32 +0000The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.https://aneeshsathe.com/logic-of-the-thicket-and-the-unsearchable-web/https://aneeshsathe.com/logic-of-the-thicket-and-the-unsearchable-web/Sat, 20 Dec 2025 06:47:37 +0000There is a particular kind of stillness found in the villa overlooking the Giardino all’italiana, a silence that is less about the absence of noise and more about the absolute presence of a plan. Standing upon a belvedere in the sixteenth century, one did not merely look at nature; one looked through a specific geometry that had already decided what nature was allowed to be. Leon Battista Alberti and Niccolò Tribolo did not view the wild landscape as an entity to be met, but as a rough draft to be corrected. The axial symmetry, the squares, and the circles of the Renaissance garden were not merely aesthetic choices; they were the visual grammar of a new kind of mastery. The medieval walls of the hortus conclusus fell away, not to invite the wilderness in, but to expand the reach of the human eye, establishing a panoramic viewpoint where the owner sat as the rational conductor of the visible world.https://aneeshsathe.com/the-shelter-as-epistemic-engine/https://aneeshsathe.com/the-shelter-as-epistemic-engine/Wed, 17 Dec 2025 06:35:42 +0000This is a continuation of my ongoing exploration of places and spaces. Previously: We need homes in the delta quadrant, Thinking with places, Problems are places questions are spaces. Introduction: The Terror of the Open Field # We tend to think of “Space” as a vacuum—an emptiness waiting to be filled. But geographically and philosophically, Space is actually a condition of high-entropy potential. As Yi-Fu Tuan famously articulated, space is “freedom,” but it is also “possibility without orientation.” It is the open field where everything is possible, which means nothing is yet distinct.https://aneeshsathe.com/the-tortured-artist-is-so-yesterday/https://aneeshsathe.com/the-tortured-artist-is-so-yesterday/Mon, 08 Dec 2025 05:08:29 +000041 years ago, Samuel Lipman wrote that an artist’s life is a “constant—and constantly losing—battle” against one’s own limits. That image has lasted because print culture taught us to imagine the artist as a solitary figure whose worth is measured by the perfection of a single, final work. Print fixed texts in place, elevated the individual author, and made loneliness part of the creative job description. That world is slipping away. And with it, the tortured artist.https://aneeshsathe.com/four-early-modern-tempers-for-a-world-that-can-summon-itself/https://aneeshsathe.com/four-early-modern-tempers-for-a-world-that-can-summon-itself/Sat, 06 Dec 2025 10:12:37 +0000 This is a partial synthesis of the books read through 2025 in the Contraptions Book Club. We live in a moment when the whole of human culture has become strangely available, no longer just an archive but something that behaves like a responding presence. A sentence typed into a search bar or messaging window returns citations and, more strikingly, continuations: pastiche, commentary, new variations of ideas that never existed until the instant we requested them. The canon now behaves more like a voice than a library. It is easy to treat this as convenience, yet summoning culture alters our relation to meaning in ways we are only beginning to see. The question is no longer whether we can find the relevant text, but what it means to think in a world that can generate its own echoes.https://aneeshsathe.com/much-love-to-everybody/https://aneeshsathe.com/much-love-to-everybody/Tue, 25 Nov 2025 03:59:58 +0000xkcd published this wonderful piece: https://xkcd.com/3172/ want to feel old?https://aneeshsathe.com/favorite-movies/https://aneeshsathe.com/favorite-movies/Sun, 26 Oct 2025 04:16:21 +0000 Friend asked if Constantine was my favourite movie… I mean Neo and the librarian in one movie?? Yes please! but… Not my favorite though… that would be between Notting Hill, The Mummy, and The Matrix. None of them are good movies — in the way that Perfect Days and sooo many others are — but they are my movies.https://aneeshsathe.com/rhyme-collected/https://aneeshsathe.com/rhyme-collected/Fri, 17 Oct 2025 07:29:10 +0000 Rhyme Managed memory leaks. Everything Neatly tucked away. The poets freed By print. Hackers Tamed themselves. Linting, Hinting, diff-printing Bolt cutters: vibe- image: Rain, Steam and Speedhttps://aneeshsathe.com/books-are-dwellings/https://aneeshsathe.com/books-are-dwellings/Sun, 05 Oct 2025 05:43:18 +0000Earlier this year I joined the contraptions book club. It is my first ever book club, so I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I have. I have tried and failed over the past 10 years to properly start reading again but could never get beyond maybe 3-4 books at a stretch. Since March I think I’ve read about 3-4 books per month. Every generation worries that ‘kids these days’ don’t read. Online, the debate cycles endlessly — are we reading less, or just reading differently? I used to be in the reading differently camp. After all, social media, blogs, emails, chats etc were all text and I was not just reading but also producing a hell of a lot of it. I have changed my mind. I used to think I was reading plenty — scrolling through blogs, threads, and chats. But that wasn’t reading; it was more like letting highway billboards flash through my mind. As a formerly heavy reader it feels super weird to say this to myself, but books are different. Books are dwellings. Books are places.https://aneeshsathe.com/better-company-than-caesar/https://aneeshsathe.com/better-company-than-caesar/Mon, 11 Aug 2025 06:06:22 +0000What is this urge that makes us want to be seen as something we aren’t. Take this blog, for example. I am in no way a writer. Barely even a proper blogger. My professional life has very little of this kind of writing. Scientific and investor communication, sure; but not this. Why do I have — and always have had — this urge to be, and be seen, as creative? Is this some kind of performative, effortless polymathism?https://aneeshsathe.com/2575/https://aneeshsathe.com/2575/Thu, 07 Aug 2025 06:52:15 +0000Godzilla minus one had no business being that good!https://aneeshsathe.com/digital-garden-tech-tidbit/https://aneeshsathe.com/digital-garden-tech-tidbit/Thu, 07 Aug 2025 04:32:31 +0000I’ve long used quarto and github pages to post in my studio. It works great. For many years I have also tried to publish my wiki/digital garden but it always kind of sucked. I had tried free programs like logseq and foam, and they were ok, but overloaded for my tastes. I like simple markdown files. Obsidian! Roam! I hear you, but no, I’m not going to be paying either to let me have control over data I generate.https://aneeshsathe.com/links-20250803/https://aneeshsathe.com/links-20250803/Mon, 04 Aug 2025 04:40:10 +0000Writing (almost) every day for the past month has been exhausting. It slowed down me reading significantly to say the least. But it proved a point to myself, that I can. I’ll be trying to write slightly longer posts maybe once or twice a week. I still don’t feel that I’m in the proper writing mode yet that I can stick to it if I take a month to write a long high-quality essay. I’m aiming for mediocre, but done.https://aneeshsathe.com/the-small-god-of-the-internet/https://aneeshsathe.com/the-small-god-of-the-internet/Sat, 02 Aug 2025 05:26:46 +0000It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.https://aneeshsathe.com/looking-forward-to-montaigne/https://aneeshsathe.com/looking-forward-to-montaigne/Thu, 31 Jul 2025 05:06:37 +0000As part of the Contraptions book club we will be reading the Essays of Montaigne. I actually started to read the Donald Frame translations, but felt I needed more context. In the book club, Paul Millerd had recommended Sarah Blackwell’s book on the life of Montaigne. I just finished it and I was left feeling rather warm. In contrast I was left rather cold and unsure by a recent podcast on a recent book by Byung-Chul Han. The book is titled The Crisis of Narration and covers the idea that we have lost the ability to tell good stories. Stories, Han says, create a shared reality instead stories have been turned into a commodity to create consumers. Storytelling has become storyselling. As far as I know, Han doesn’t offer any solutions. Social media has turned a dark corner but it would have been nice to know what we can do, if anything. Montaigne seems to offer some relief.https://aneeshsathe.com/why-every-biotech-research-group-needs-a-data-lakehouse/https://aneeshsathe.com/why-every-biotech-research-group-needs-a-data-lakehouse/Tue, 29 Jul 2025 06:04:54 +0000start tiny and scale fast without vendor lock-in All biotech labs have data, tons of it. The problem is the same across scales. Accessing data across experiments is hard. Often data simply gets lost on somebody’s laptop with a pretty plot on a poster as the only clue it ever existed. The problem is almost insurmountable if you try to track multiple data types. Trying to run any kind of data management activity used to have large overhead. New technology like DuckDB and their new data lakehouse infrastructure, DuckLake, try to make it very easy to adopt and scale with your data. All while avoiding vendor lock-in.https://aneeshsathe.com/work-or-play-ludic-feedback-loops/https://aneeshsathe.com/work-or-play-ludic-feedback-loops/Mon, 28 Jul 2025 05:57:58 +0000In his substack post today, Venkatesh Rao wrote about reading and writing in the age of LLMs as playing and making toys respectively. In one part he writes about how the dopamine feedback loop from writing drove his switch from engineering to writing. For him, writing has ludic, play-like, qualities. I have made almost all my “career” decisions as a function of play. I originally started off with a deep love of plants, how to grow them and their impact on the world. I was convinced I was going to have a lot of fun. I did have some. My wonderful undergrad professor literally hand held me through my first experiments growing tobacco plants from seeds. But that was about it. My next experiment was with woody plants and growing the seeds alone took 6 months, and by the end I had 4 measly leaves to experiment with. I quickly switched to cell biology.https://aneeshsathe.com/on-protocols-wagons-and-associated-acrobatics/https://aneeshsathe.com/on-protocols-wagons-and-associated-acrobatics/Sun, 27 Jul 2025 07:03:32 +0000Years ago, maybe a decade even, I fell in love with this software called Scrivener. I could never justify buying it because I didn’t actually write. But having that software would represent a little bit of the identity I would like to have, a writer. The Fourth of July long weekend gave me a running start. The plan was to write every day for a month. If I did, I would buy Scrivener. This was going quite well, then I couldn’t write for two days.https://aneeshsathe.com/briefing-the-state-of-explainable-ai-xai-and-its-impact-on-human-ai-decision-making/https://aneeshsathe.com/briefing-the-state-of-explainable-ai-xai-and-its-impact-on-human-ai-decision-making/Thu, 24 Jul 2025 06:10:10 +0000 This post is a sloptraption, my silk thread in the CloisterWeb. The post was made with the help of NotebookLM. You can chat with the essay and the sources here: XAI NotebookLM Chat I. Executive Summary # The field of Explainable AI (XAI) aims to make AI systems more transparent and understandable, fostering trust and enabling informed human-AI collaboration, particularly in high-stakes decision-making. Despite significant research efforts, XAI faces fundamental challenges, including a lack of standardized definitions and evaluation frameworks, and a tendency to prioritize technical “faithfulness” over practical utility for end-users. A new paradigm emphasizes designing explanations as a “means to an end,” grounded in statistical decision theory, to improve concrete decision tasks. This shift necessitates a human-centered approach, integrating human factors engineering to address user cognitive abilities, potential pitfalls, and the complexities of human-AI interaction. Practical challenges persist in implementation, including compatibility, integration, performance, and, crucially, inconsistencies (disagreements) among XAI methods, which significantly undermine user trust and adoption.https://aneeshsathe.com/ai-explainable-enough/https://aneeshsathe.com/ai-explainable-enough/Wed, 23 Jul 2025 05:50:31 +0000They look really juicy, she said. I was sitting in a small room with a faint chemical smell, doing one my first customer interviews. There is a sweet spot between going too deep and asserting a position. Good AI has to be just explainable enough to satisfy the user without overwhelming them with information. Luckily, I wasn’t new to the problem. Coming from a microscopy and bio background with a strong inclination towards image analysis I had picked up deep learning as a way to be lazy in lab. Why bother figuring out features of interest when you can have a computer do it for you, was my angle. The issue was that in 2015 no biologist would accept any kind of deep learning analysis and definitely not if you couldn’t explain the details.https://aneeshsathe.com/my-road-to-bayesian-stats/https://aneeshsathe.com/my-road-to-bayesian-stats/Tue, 22 Jul 2025 06:32:55 +0000By 2015, I had heard of Bayesian Stats but didn’t bother to go deeper into it. After all, significance stars, and p-values worked fine. I started to explore Bayesian Statistics when considering small sample sizes in biological experiments. How much can you say when you are comparing means of 6 or even 60 observations? This is the nature work at the edge of knowledge. Not knowing what to expect is normal. Multiple possible routes to a seen a result is normal. Not knowing how to pick the route to the observed result is also normal. Yet, our statistics fails to capture this reality and the associated uncertainties. There must be a way I thought.