Posts on Aneesh Sathe

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:06:50 +0000

Hard Disagree #

I’m tired of the people On the internet Who “hard disagree” yet give nothing to the world of thoughts or participate in the fun of exploration

Like trekking fast up a mountain To abandon the curmudgeons of your group Only to be caught By the sentient crumbs From the packs ahead

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:52:43 +0000

Excerpt from Aristotle by Billy Collins #

“This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.”

Nicheverse

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:20:27 +0000

Bookmarked: Nicheverse

Bio research gets more interestinger every day, cool work here mapping niches and cell states

Carl’s Required Reading

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:49:13 +0000

Bookmarked: Carl’s Required Reading

Good set

Farewell to a famous parrot : Nature News

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 04:16:24 +0000

Bookmarked: Farewell to a famous parrot : Nature News

Unexpected feels 🦜

“You be good,” said Alex last Thursday night. “I love you. See you tomorrow.”

via Sven Dahlstrand

I’m in the park reading Claire L. Evans’ book Broad Band.. - Sven Dahlstrand

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 04:10:44 +0000

Bookmarked: I’m in the park reading Claire L. Evans’ book Broad Band.. - Sven Dahlstrand

Code and poetry ❤️

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 03:24:36 +0000

I think it’s time to fully disengage from Be slightly evil and adopt Be mostly harmless

vgr: I have perfected my sev puri

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 01:20:11 +0000

Bookmarked: vgr: I have perfected my sev puri

When the chai is declared perfected I’m arriving unannounced

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 01:12:54 +0000

Geographies of Time #

Geology :: Climate :: Weather :: Seasons Iceland :: Singapore :: San Diego :: Japan Transformation :: Structure :: Contingency :: Rhythm Industrial Revolution :: Cold War :: 1848 :: Indian Independence

Places do not experience time in quite the same way.

In Singapore, climate dominates. There is weather, certainly, but it happens inside a remarkably persistent envelope. In San Diego, by contrast, the climate recedes into the background and one notices variations: marine layer today, heat tomorrow, Santa Anas next week. Japan makes another kind of time conspicuous altogether. The year arrives in recognizable phases: blossoms, rain, cicadas, autumn leaves, snow.

How to avoid the “clean data, clean model” trap when teaching statistics and data science

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:47:40 +0000

Bookmarked: How to avoid the “clean data, clean model” trap when teaching statistics and data science

Excellent thinking about teaching stats but also for data science leadership thinking about team training. It softens my usual throw in the deep end approach but I like it.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:31:21 +0000

People are still learning to use AI and the internet. Even though the narrative feels like lots of things are happening, it’s all micro-stories at best. Eventful history of our time is still ahead of us.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 06:06:26 +0000

As a complete non-smoker these rare but regular desires to own a churchwarden pipes are just weird…

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 05:59:00 +0000

Got a new fountain pen, extra fine nib. It is.. extra fine ❤️

I Built a Blog and Forgot to Write - Ben's Web Space

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 07:52:06 +0000

Bookmarked: I Built a Blog and Forgot to Write - Ben’s Web Space

Glad I was lazy to begin with and made it easy to post to my blog…

Physicist say that they have found the origin of causality

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:34:42 +0000

Bookmarked: Physicist say that they have found the origin of causality)

This one is apparently not Quantum woo.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:21:25 +0000

All you need is a handful of scientific RSS feeds to remind yourself that you can only ever really work in a narrow area. Even with AI.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:45:52 +0000

Replying to this comment:

https://substack.com/@florianlohse/note/c-307765760?r=1lmu7t

Not liking any friction to posting is the whole reason I built the custom setup. I now automatically post to bluesky and mastodon… I even have a copy to clipboard button but the effort it takes to open this site and post is too much, so I’ve just not been posting here. If they had an API I would.

On the exhilarated feeling: I think that’s from impending likes and engagement as opposed to the posting. I’ve noticed that without that feedback loop my posts have become much more varied. For example I used to very rarely share links here but on my own site I bookmark with abandon.

Pandoc - twenty-years-of-pandoc

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:26:27 +0000

Bookmarked: Pandoc - twenty-years-of-pandoc

Round of applause for the software keepers. Pandoc simplified so much and continues to be a robust and reliable tool for document wrangling.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:16:29 +0000

This essay was super fun to write. Thinking about how to keep your thoughts interesting in the age of AI. Nakatomi Drift

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:51:12 +0000

Somehow I’ve never written “Man vs. Nature” in the margins. B. Collins urges me to do so now, but I don’t see it. Man is also nature, and hmm… that’s the right way to bookend that vs.

Nakatomi Drift

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been muddling through ways to stay interesting – to myself and friends – in the age of AI. Part of the answer, I have come to understand, is the construction of Thickets. Dreaming up such a thing without a way to traverse it kept the idea incomplete. One nagging thought was that it was important to get properly lost – as opposed to trivially lost. That feeling where you had a good sense of where you were, but a question you asked or a connection you made has left you in unfamiliar territory. Excitingly so.

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:06:44 +0000

Came across my first pokemon crowd in a long time. Last one I saw must have been around 2021/22 in Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. That was a proper horde rushing from one end to the other in pursuit of stuff only they could see. This one was, in a San Diego suburb, was more of less horde and more of a flock

Agent Harness Engineering vs. Loop Engineering vs. Graph Engineering

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:06:00 +0000

Bookmarked: Agent Harness Engineering vs. Loop Engineering vs. Graph Engineering

Coding Agents Don’t Need Bigger Context Windows — They Need a Context Compiler | Towards Data Science

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:00:25 +0000

Bookmarked: Coding Agents Don’t Need Bigger Context Windows — They Need a Context Compiler | Towards Data Science

Interesting way to not just reduce but actually control context. Should try it out. Wondering if this can be applied to text files also…

I ♥ RSS – Andrew Shell's Weblog

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:13:04 +0000

Bookmarked: I ♥ RSS – Andrew Shell’s Weblog

Everyday something fun around RSS.

Blaugust 2026 is Coming!

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:04:49 +0000

Bookmarked: Blaugust 2026 is Coming!

TIL Blaugust is a thing. Looks fun. also so many people writing and wanting to write

sudo boo

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:53:50 +0000

Bookmarked: sudo boo

Hehe always here for sudo jokes

Blaugust Begins

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I decided it was time to firmly exit the platforms. At first I was going to do some kind of cross-posting but most don’t have an exposed API or any kind of application password type setup. So right now, my blog only cross-posts to Bluesky and Mastodon. But what I’m finding more and more is that maybe I don’t really even need those.

I’m coming to a rather happy realization that bloggers who still blog are a particularly shaped kind of people. What I’ve gathered so far is that they value freedom along multiple axes, some easy ones to spot:

On Turning Ten by Billy Collins

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 05:31:03 +0000

Bookmarked: On Turning Ten by Billy Collins

Such a beautiful poem this is, On Turning Ten by Billy Collins

I didn’t expect to see my younger self in it and yet there I was — thinking “This is the beginning of sadness”

Ontologies Are So Back: Why AI Agents Are Reviving the Semantic Web

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:07:06 +0000

Bookmarked: Ontologies Are So Back: Why AI Agents Are Reviving the Semantic Web

Bringing this to AI in bio-sciences will be critical for AI to be even more useful than it is now.

“In computer science, an ontology is “a description of data structure – of classes, properties, and relationships in a domain of knowledge” (as nicely defined by Oxford Semantic Technologies). Coyle himself defined an ontology as simply “data as graphs.” He added that ontologies as a concept go right back to Aristotle, and have been used throughout the history of Artificial Intelligence.“ And “ you can have a reasoner built on ontology, to check [and] keep the LLM on track — have guardrails to keep it honest”

The Last Museum

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:12:48 +0000

Bookmarked: The Last Museum

Search engine for museum art

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:41:28 +0000

Platforms are flat glass. Wild topography is a drug

About RSS.chat

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:02:08 +0000

Bookmarked: About RSS.chat

RSS.chat seems to be a wild entry back into the open web. Especially since Wordpress built a deep integration: When the walls came down

Is this…. Google Reader? 🦋

I don’t know… but exciting times.

Masks in Redshift

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:21:23 +0000

This is my first month participating in the “IndieWeb Carnival” where the prompt for this month is “Masks, Identities & Cosplay”.

With age we learn to hold memories and thoughts at a distance. As if on a shelf across the room or in some other part of home. Age gives you the luxury of making furniture of history where you can safely stow away parts of your world. On such a shelf I keep my masks.

Substack writers, you need a website!

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 04:28:56 +0000

Bookmarked: Substack writers, you need a website!

Every few years there are imploring shouts that people should have their websites. Unfortunately they lead to nothing, but I’m glad it happens, I’m sure it converts at least a few. Obviously, I agree. What is even more true now is that with some set up help from Al it is trivial and even free if you want to host your own website.

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 03:32:50 +0000

Pulled back 25y after getting a guestbook signature. ❤️ https://burgeonlab.com/

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 05:08:07 +0000

Would we be really happy if it were an AI that we sent out into the universe and it made first contact with other intelligences? Would we count that as first contact?

Certainly it’s difficult to think of the Mars rovers as making first contact, but AI, even in its current rudimentary form might be acceptable.

Which makes me wonder, what is contact? Is it simply telling other entities that we exist? Is it a demonstration physical and intellectual of who we are and what we can do and to bring back information about them?

Em dashes are fucking amazing

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 01:17:06 +0000

Bookmarked: Em dashes are fucking amazing

Working with AI helped me actually learn punctuation because clarity makes better prompts. Reading em-dashes in text helped me understand em-dashes. Now I use them — alll the time.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:08:11 +0000

In the age of AI, evolutionary theory will become a critical cultural and business theory. This is because evolution is concerned with observed life. Life is essentially information that folds upon itself and stories play out on that manifold.

AI makes it important not so much to be first in culture or technology, but to be right. AI makes everything very oozy and new ideas arrive and flow quickly. That is AI now allows minds to notice an occupy cultural and tech niches faster than we could in the past. The game now becomes one of fitness and niche domination.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 21:12:17 +0000

Contraptions Book Club #

August book is Darwin’s Dangerous Idea — Evolution, and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Starting the August book, past 2 months have been software development and my non-fiction reading cratered. At least I read Ortega before the encyclopedia so I can count that as the July reading. I remain delinquent on the encyclopedia book, I hope to fix that.

With the oracle and book ingestion mostly in place I feel comfortable backburnering those.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:36:49 +0000

Had Chitale pedas after what feels like years. Is there a more perfect Indian sweet? I say not.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 07:15:01 +0000

It is a strange happiness to really grasp the differences between the words prediction and anticipation. That there is a difference at all.

When I sought to understand the difference I anticipated this joy but could not predict it.

Prediction assumes that everything knowable is known and failure is a matter of chance between known possible outcomes. However to have a false prediction is to lose in some way because you positioned yourself as if the prediction were true.

You don’t have to blog like me

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:41:08 +0000

Bookmarked: You don’t have to blog like me

Nice post. When exiting the platforms the habit of posting for internet points is strong. This is a reminder that you can do your thing.

India's first privately developed rocket reaches orbit on dramatic debut launch

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 06:05:50 +0000

Bookmarked: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/indias-first-privately-developed-rocket-reaches-orbit-on-dramatic-debut-launch/

Very cool for any team to get this right on the first try. Amazing work by the scientists and engineers.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 03:40:46 +0000

When exploring a new Space, especially with friends, your job is not just to keep exploring at high level. Sometimes you need to become a Place.

When you find some little nugget that attracts your particular mindset you must sit down and go deeper into that sub-Space.

Why? Because your mindset — your way of looking at things — represents Places which no one else had access to. By becoming a Place you show people some of the things that are accessible in that sub-Space. Then, if something grabs their interest, they can combine their mindset with yours and hold the Portal into that sub-Space a little wider.

Hadley Wickham on AI and its role in data science

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:17:33 +0000

Bookmarked: https://open.substack.com/pub/tidydesign/p/y-code-when-ai

The wonderful Hadley Wickham gives his overview on how and why to use AI in Data Science work. The conclusion is actually applicable to anyone using AI in their work: “AI is an amplifier. And I really urge you, to the best of your abilities, to use it to amplify the best parts of you, the most human parts of you — not the laziest part.”

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:48:36 +0000

The new Opus model was released. It is supposed to be less susceptible to prompt injection.

On Thickets, Enclosure, and Leaving

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few months I have discovered and written about the idea of thickets and have been wondering what the practice of thicketing looks like. At its core the idea behind thicketing is to create and dwell in systems that resist capture and defy legibility. Weirdly this is not some anti-establishment move but a simple desire to just be and return to a state where you had your own corner, your friends, and your thoughts. Over the past few hundred years, with the ascent of modernity, legibility and legibilizing have been treated as the norm and a default good thing. However the pattern which has emerged (not just on the internet) is that systems position themselves as commons, invite people to enjoy themselves and slowly initiate capture mechanisms under the guise of some or the other security. Not all of this is bad, much of the modern world would not function without security and minimal enclosures.

The Birth of Thickets

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The legibility regime runs one operation. It converts Space into Place, and everything else it does follows from that.

Space is the undifferentiated field. It holds every possibility and offers no orientation, which is why standing in it feels less like freedom than like vertigo. Draw a boundary around part of it, name what is inside, and you have made a Place. A farm is a Place; beyond the fence is forest. Drawing that boundary is the first act of thought, because you cannot know anything you have not first cut out from everything else. The trouble begins when the operation runs everywhere, on everything, at once, until it stops being thought and becomes weather.

The Ocean

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 23:46:08 +0000

Wound up at the beach today. A proper San Diego beach. Unlike Carlsbad beaches, San Diego beaches tend to be a bit cropped but they are always livelier. This one was no exception. It was a pleasant, cloudy day, warm but not blazing, my favorite kind of day. The beach was full of families, teeny kids, some old folks, and, of course, the throngs of young women and men, beautiful and silly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The End of Identity: AI, Plasticity, and the Divergence Machine

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 06:28:21 +0000

Over 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.

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.

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.

The Deep Dark Terroir of the Soul

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 02:17:37 +0000

This 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.

The Architecture of Resistance

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 05:38:32 +0000

The 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.

Logic of the Thicket and the Unsearchable Web

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 06:47:37 +0000

There 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.

The Shelter as Epistemic Engine

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 06:35:42 +0000

This 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.

The Tortured Artist Is So Yesterday

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 05:08:29 +0000

41 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.

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.

much love to everybody

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 03:59:58 +0000

xkcd published this wonderful piece:

https://xkcd.com/3172/

want to feel old?

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.

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 Speed

Books are dwellings

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 05:43:18 +0000

Earlier 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.

Better Company Than Caesar

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 06:06:22 +0000

What 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?

Untitled

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 06:52:15 +0000

Godzilla minus one had no business being that good!

Digital Garden - Tech Tidbit

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 04:32:31 +0000

I’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.

Links 20250803

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 04:40:10 +0000

Writing (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.

The Small God of the Internet

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 05:26:46 +0000

It 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.

Looking Forward to Montaigne

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 05:06:37 +0000

As 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.

Why Every Biotech Research Group Needs a Data Lakehouse

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 06:04:54 +0000

start 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.

Work or Play? Ludic Feedback Loops

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 05:57:58 +0000

In 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.

On Protocols, Wagons, and Associated Acrobatics

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 07:03:32 +0000

Years 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.

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.

AI: Explainable Enough

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 05:50:31 +0000

They 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.

My Road to Bayesian Stats

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 06:32:55 +0000

By 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.

The Keel

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 06:23:02 +0000

Tonight we cast our nets 
In foreign waters 
Now we are new 
Tomorrow we’ll belong 
Then the sea'll tug and pull 
Time to be gone 
 
So, let’s 
Kiss the nymphs 
Meet the crabs 
In their bucket games 
Feel their stabs 
 
Our plans are small 
But they are spread 
A thousand ports 
Before we are dead

Image: Sailing off Gloucester (ca.1880) by Winslow Homer.

The secret flag of content

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 06:36:28 +0000

I don’t have any fun when I use LLMs to write. It may have perceived utility: popping out a LinkedIn article or two everyday. But I bet no one is actually reading. It’s a strip mall for a thumb stroll.

LLMs suck at writing. The summaries that LLMs give with the “Deep Research” are so poor in quality that I start to skim it. Yes, I skim the thing that is already a summary.

What do platforms really do?

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 05:51:44 +0000

In 1986, David S. Landes wrote the essay, ‘What Do Bosses Really Do?’. He argues that the historical role of the ‘boss’ was an essential function for organizing production and connecting producers to markets. Digital platforms have become the new bosses. Platforms have the same functions of market creation, labor specialization, and management, but they have replaced the physical factory floor with algorithmic management. While their methods are novel, platforms are the direct descendants of the merchant-entrepreneurs and factory owners Landes described, solving the same historical problems of production in remarkably similar ways.

Hack, Hacky, Hacker

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 06:21:48 +0000

A few days ago I wrote about the beauty of great documentation; this is the evil twin post.

The spectrum of meaning across the words hack, hacky, and hacker form a horseshoe when thinking about postures toward life. On either ends are the most difficult options. Being either a hack or a hacker requires dedication and both approaches narrow your world. Being hacky, taking imperfect shortcuts, in the world is immensely satisfying. It is play disguised as problem solving.

A Good Dictionary

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 06:35:42 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about good documentation opening doors to options you didn’t realize you had. In the book On Writing Well Zinsser mentions how one of his key tools is the dictionary. That got me curious about the limitations about the dictionaries available to us. This is not just about the dictionary on the bookshelf but the ones that we have in-context access to. The ones on our computer and phones.

Divine Documentation

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 05:20:46 +0000

Dad was about my age when he said that reading the manual was better than hypothesis driven button pressing. For teenage me, that took too long. Sure, I may have crashed a computer or two but following my gut got me there. Of course my gut isn’t that smart. In the decades preceding, devices had converged on a common pattern language of buttons. Once learned, the standard grammar of action would reliably deliver me to my destination.

The Plato Plateau

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 06:58:53 +0000

This post started off as a joke. I was attempting to snow clone the Peter Principle for philosophy. It led to a longer thread of thoughts. But first, the snow clone:

The Plato Plateau: People philosophize to the level of their anxiety.

Anxiety is the realization that you have absolute choice over life – Kierkegaard. Anxiety, in this context is not nervousness. It is a positive thing when harnesses. We harness it everyday.
Anxiety is a generative. Anxiety creates identity by locating stable places to launch exploration.
Action, exploration, and anxiety are a motor. Anxiety → exploration → action → refreshed identity. Inaction leads to identity death
Realizing you are radically free to choose can also lead to a forest of perceived signals. These can be an overwhelming inbox or simply overloaded ambition.
When anxiety overwhelms it becomes difficult to tell signal from noise.
Tools like GTD crash anxiety. When overwhelmed, GTD works well. When there is too little anxiety identity becomes ephemeral.
GTD isn’t a means to nirvana: GTD integrates 10k, 30k foot views to reintroduce future anxiety.
When your identity is smeared across too many anxieties you declare anxiety bankruptcy and crash your identity in some safe spot. Journals, sabbaticals, quitting.
Like the parable of the rock soup, vaporized anxiety needs a place to condense onto. Ideally something disposable but sufficient to let your identity create an “ordered world of meaning”
Life examination occurs with identity crashes. Philosophy provides just enough of a toehold in the abstract to spur action in the actual.
Philosophy is a way to spur action absent anxiety/identity. We pick the philosophy depending on the degree of identity loss.
Philosophy can be broadly sorted as:
1. Survival - laws and tactics oriented
2. Social Cohesion- harmony, virtue ethics, etiquette
3. Systems level order - algorithms and protocols oriented
4. Self Knowledge and Meaning - reflecting on existing and consciousness
5. Meta-systems - theorizes about theories
Most scientists and builders work best at level 3 systems level order. Going lower, i-ii, for environmental crises and higher, iv-v, for internal crises.
Complexity of selected philosophy is not superiority. A rung’s usefulness matches your identity state and environment, not some civilizational high score.
Philosophy as Periodic Maintenance: Crashing and philosophy sampling are maintenance actions on the place called identity.

Problems are Places, Questions are Spaces

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 06:23:05 +0000

Last year, while regrouping myself and rebuilding my old curious ways, I had a thought. The common words “spaces” and “places” pass through our minds, fingers, and lips but they deserve a second thought. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t the first one to consider this and the wealth of reading material helped me write We Need Homes in the Delta Quadrant. Spaces and places have been an enjoyable lens to look through.

The Best Game Ever Made

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 06:58:58 +0000

What does audacity look like?

I did not imagine the problems I was having was due to a lack of temples and worshipping the right gods. Being from India, this should have been obvious. I had figured out long ago that a steady supply of beer, dedication to craft, good means, and romance were the were critical to happiness. Spirituality had not been considered. Hewing a temple out of granite improved focus.

Royalty, Administration, and Antimemetics

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 06:09:13 +0000

I was all of 15 when defenestration was forever implanted in my mind. It means to throw someone out the window. It happened in Prague, 1618. Some important people were defenestrated, fell 70 feet, landed in dung. This led to the thirty years war and the coining of the word ‘defenestration’. Defenestrating happened to important, visible, people held responsible for mismanagement leading to widespread discontent. While the defenestrated may represent the idea, surely we can’t imagine that it was that specific person who was going around causing the suffering. No, they had minions. Here we explore a bit of their story.

Beyond the Dataset

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 05:41:24 +0000

On the recent season of the show Clarkson’s farm, J.C. goes through great lengths to buy the right pub. As with any sensible buyer, the team does a thorough tear down followed by a big build up before the place is open for business. They survey how the place is built, located, and accessed. In their refresh they ensure that each part of the pub is built with purpose. Even the tractor on the ceiling. The art is in answering the question: How was this place put together?

Nothing Ventured

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 04:51:52 +0000

The wave towered over me. Then the sound filled my ears. Not the calm breath of the waves; but it was surf music. I was maybe 3. Song names and artist names were beyond me. There was only the blue-green wave and the twang of the guitar.

I have chased music all my life. Just had to figure out the tools. The record player and the giant speakers taught my first lesson: pressing buttons was joy. In my pursuit I learned in about records, tapes, CDs, mp3, flac, streaming, Napster, torrents, Winamp, VLC, blanks, CD-R/RWs, compression, bit rates, conversion, transfer, backups, VPN, networking, impedance matching, DACs, amplifiers, calibration, ARC, fibre, buying, licensing, and streaming in approximate order.

Rejected In Paris

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 05:18:57 +0000

I got told off by The Paris Review today. Maybe it wasn’t necessarily directed at me, but as they say in the, now old, new lingo, I felt attacked. You see, recently, drawing on the well of inspiration that is history I succeeded in writing a poem, but not just any poem. I wrote a ghazal.

Those who know me for any amount of time are made aware of my taste for writing poetry. It’s usually pretty bad but I persist, cause why not. The OG is long gone anyway. The ghazal is an especially ambitious type of poetry to be taken up my someone with my modest talents. To make matters worse, as I learned today, the ghazal is really well suited for the Urdu. For all practical matters, I know only English.

Social Internet – Lost and Hungry

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 06:51:33 +0000

When printing was invented, Europe suddenly had access to all the books that had existed until that point in history. This included everything from mystical texts to astronomical observations. Having no guides to judge quality, some people went off on the deep end. Giordano Bruno is sometimes referred to as the forefather of modern cosmology. He was not. An extreme case, he took mystical click-bait, mixed it with the then-contemporary Copernican theories, and, without any data, invented the infinite universe. Eventually, culture adapted and people started to compare and organize all the data. This act of orienting and place-making led to the scientific revolution.Printing created too much information and we had to learn how to handle it. Today we are in a similar position.

The Mind as Semi-Solid Smoke

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 06:23:52 +0000

This post continues the series on Socratic Thinking, turning the space-and-place lens inward to examine the mind itself. Human minds can be thought of as an imperfect place with the ability to create their own insta-places to navigate ambiguity.

Exploration in any real or conceptual space needs navigational markers with sufficient meaning. Humans are biologically predisposed to seek out and use navigational markers. This tendency is rooted in our neural architecture, emerges early in life, and is shared with other animals, reflecting its deep evolutionary origins 1,2 . Even the simplest of life performing chemotaxis uses the signal-field of food to navigate.

Thinking with places

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 06:22:05 +0000

“A farmer has to cut down trees to create space for his farmstead and fields. Yet once the farm is established it becomes an ordered world of meaning—a place—and beyond it is the forest and space.” — Yi-Fu Tuan

Thinking itself is place-making: the act of converting undifferentiated possibility into navigable meaning.

A place comes into being the moment we interrupt undifferentiated space. Place-making is fundamentally an act of interruption. Space is thought of as possibility but is unavailable without the signposts of place. When a place is created we impose a way of looking, being, and acting on the space of choice. The place you pick to navigate your space defines the identity you will inhabit during your quest. Every tool is a micro-place: it frames what can be thought and forecloses alternative moves. They enforce the kind of thoughts that can be had, the type of exploration that can be done, and configures space in an opinionated way.

Chatbots, Bats & Broken Oracles

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 05:54:05 +0000

I had the strangest conversation with my son today. There used to be a time when computers never made a mistake. It was always the user that was in error. The computer did exactly what you asked it to do. If something went wrong it was you, the user, that didn’t know what you wanted. After decades of that being etched in today I found myself telling him that computers make mistakes, you have to check if the computer has done the right thing and that is actually ok. A computer that hallucinates also provides a surface for exploration and seeking answers to questions.

Reflection on the VGR bookclub

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 21:38:00 +0000

This bookclub is the most fun thing I’ve done in a decade… this includes starting, expanding, and leaving a startup ;)

The last fun thing was post-PhD rapid exploration of applying AI for bio, which laid the foundation for where I am now.

The book club feels like a philosophical anchoring to understand complexities of the world and, as I turn 40, my place in it.

Read more about it: The Modernity Machine

Life-Compass / Why We Write Poetry

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 04:14:49 +0000

write 
to distill 
life’s brine 
into Morse code. 
 
we dot 
the night – 
constellations 
to navigate by

Financial Instruments and the Ottoman Empire’s Decline (16th–19th Centuries): A Comparative Analysis

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 05:36:09 +0000

This essay was explored with ChatGPT o3 as a curiosity while reading Islamic Gunpowder Empires by Douglas E. Streusand as part of the Contraptions Book Club

Introduction #

The decline of the Ottoman Empire from the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566) through the 1800s was closely intertwined with its financial system. A combination of internal fiscal instruments – such as the timar land-tenure system, tax farming (iltizam), coinage debasements, and halting reform efforts – and external financial dependencies – including capitulatory trade agreements, foreign loans, and reliance on European capital – weakened the empire’s economic foundations. This report examines how these financial tools contributed to Ottoman decline, and compares the Ottoman fiscal system with contemporaneous innovations in Venice, the Dutch Republic, England, and the Habsburg Empire. By analyzing public debt management, state banking institutions, military finance, and credit markets, we highlight how European states developed resilient “fiscal-military” systems that gave them economic and military leverage over the ailing Ottoman state. The analysis is supported by historical and academic sources, and a comparative table summarizes key differences.

Dissolving the Sun

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 23:02:25 +0000

Desert guitars breathe dusk’s low tone, dissolving the sun; 
Footsteps of light retreat alone, dissolving the sun. 
 
Victories fade like prayers on wind-worn stone, dissolving the sun; 
Sorrows sleep deep in caverns unknown, dissolving the sun. 
 
Love gilds the cactus—an amber throne, dissolving the sun; 
Hatred grinds silence to marrow and bone, dissolving the sun. 
 
Hope drifts north with oud smoke blown, dissolving the sun; 
Despair sits south, unmoved and prone, dissolving the sun. 
 
Time loosens strings on an old dial-tone, dissolving the sun; 
Night tunes the dust to a heart on loan, dissolving the sun. 
 
G, your whisper returns full-grown—melded as one, dissolving the sun; 
All journeys end where they’d begun, forever dissolving the sun.

The above is (approximately) in the ghazal form. I’ve been reading history of the al-Andalus, listening to Darrymple’s podcast, and reflecting it all back to India’s recent history while reading Shadows at Noon.

Carry you home

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 07:42:05 +0000

Sometimes the algorithms find just the right thing. Carry you home is a beautiful song. Especially for those days and nights when parenting is a little bit of an uphill climb.

Read more about it and the Jazz artist, Curtis Nowosad, here.

20250605 links

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 03:42:44 +0000

Causality Podcast #

Just discovered this it promises to be promising:

https://causalbanditspodcast.com/

AI deals show no signs of slowing #

https://www.nature.com/articles/d43747-025-00027-z

Collectively, four notable trends are emerging;

an increase in upfront commitments

specialization in new therapeutic modalities (such as biologics rather than small molecules)

the rise of niche dataset providers

increasing participation from mid-to large-cap biotechs that are following the early adopters.

Brain cells compute cluster #

https://spectrum.ieee.org/biological-computer-for-sale

Musings while reading Monkey King Journey to the West

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 17:22:19 +0000

Monkey King is named Sun Wukong - Child awoken to emptiness. Sun can also mean monkey instead of child if, what is called as, the animal radical is included. Wu means awoken
Tweeting from the Bureau of Rice Reincarnation. iykyk
“Give him a government job.” seems to be a much older solution than I had imagined.
Monkey’s job in heaven being imperial groom is telling. Given the age when this was written, horses, their variety, numbers, and complexity of upkeep must have been a well known thing. Also interesting that it’s a very lowly post, imperial context wouldn’t want to give importance to horses no matter how much they depended on them.

Shadows at Noon by Joya Chatterji

Wed, 21 May 2025 04:09:54 +0000

Finished chapter 1 of Shadows at Noon. A very dense 83 pages. I can see why Joya Chatterji won the Wolfson History Prize.

Reading with a pencil, not a single page is unannotated!

The Cloister Web: Reshaping the Political Maidan

Sun, 18 May 2025 16:38:18 +0000

The advent of the “Cloister Web,” a conceptual space where individuals leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to cultivate novel ideas and commit them to a persistent public memory, heralds a profound shift in our intellectual and political landscapes. Politically, the mere genesis of an idea is insufficient; its effective distribution is paramount. LLMs, in this context, are not just tools for thought but potent engines for bespoke delivery, tailoring messages to resonate deeply with individual recipients.

We Need Homes in the Delta Quadrant

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 07:44:02 +0000

Place is security, space is freedom. — Yi-Fu Tuan

Starfleet Log, Delta Quadrant—Classified Briefing

At the edge of the known, maps fail and instincts take over. We don’t just explore new worlds—we build places to survive them. Because in deep space, meaning isn’t found. It’s made.

I. Interruption of Infinity #

The Delta Quadrant is a distant region of the galaxy in the Star Trek universe—vast, largely uncharted, and filled with anomalies, dangers, and promise. It is where the map ends and the unknown begins. No stations, no alliances, no history—just possibility.

On the rheology of cats

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 03:50:33 +0000

Probably the cutest paper you’ll read today.

The wetting and general tribology of cats has not progressed enough to give a definitive answer to the capillary
dependence of the feline relaxation time. Fig. 2b gives
an example of a lotus effect of Felis catus, suggesting
that the substrate is superfelidaphobic. […]
cats are proving to be a rich model system for rheological research, both in the linear and nonlinear regimes.

Untitled

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 06:32:28 +0000

It seems monstrosity requiresan organic element. When there isn’t one, monsteris more often an adjective than a noun qualifying an incomplete potentialfor monstrosity.

[…]

Monumentality embodies distant, impersonal forces at work, that pose a terrifying threat because they don’tcare about us. Monsters on the other hand, care enough to be deliberately threatening to us.

Includes a recipe for making the perfect monster! — Reading on contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/monsters-and-mediocrity

Dwarf Fortress, Emacs, & AI: The allure of generative complexity

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 06:21:46 +0000

There is a shared soul shard between Dwarf Fortress, Emacs, and AI that lured me to them and has kept me engaged for over a decade. For a long time, I struggled to articulate the connection, managing only to describe Dwarf Fortress as the Emacs of games. But this analogy, while compelling, doesn’t fully capture the deeper resonance these systems share. They are not merely complicated; they are complex—tools for creativity that reward immersion and exploration.

Untitled

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 05:03:27 +0000

Every few years decentralization and RSS feeds come back into the ligh. Usually this happens when one otherwise functional social media site dies in a real or practical way. Google Reader being my, and my generation’s, touchstone.
During these times of turmoil, a beautiful soul puts together a guide for how to use RSS. This is a good guide for this iteration:

Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

Untitled

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 04:50:19 +0000

I’m taking part in the Contraptions Book Club where we are reading City of Fortune which is about Venice. I was struck by the character of Doge Dandolo. Dude was 80+ when we saw a trade opportunity in the 4th Crusades. In the book, the author, Roger Crowley describes a brief moment when Dandolo makes a heroic rush on the banks of Constantinople’s Golden Horn during the Sack of Constantinople.

I found both the Doge and the imagery interesting so went looking for art depicting the art, there’s supposed to be lots. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any and nothing in the public domain. So I asked AI to generate something.

Untitled

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 08:06:00 +0000

Came across a heartwarming fan-made comic of a collaborative story told on tumblr. A farmer makes a temple to see who shows up and it’s a self-doubting god of transient beauty. This immediately brought back the Small Gods from Discworld, but also the poem Worm by Gail Mcconnell.

The comic and the story are beautiful. Perhaps there is some sense to shrines…

The God of Arepo- PDF available

via metafilter

Untitled

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 07:09:14 +0000

Trying something different for a few days. Instead of spamming all the social media accounts with daily links, I will post links only on the blog everyday. Maybe even multiple times a day.

Still thinking about doing a weekly digest or something. Let’s see.

Jan 17, 2025

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 08:06:00 +0000

Table Turpentine #

Came across the gt package for better tables in R. Might sound silly but it’s one of those cheap turpentine things.

Who made the train? #

via ChiPa

Yunus Emre-The Watermill #

via harvard blogs

Translation

Why do you groan, O Watermill; For I’ve troubles, I groan
I fell in love with the Lord; For It do I groan
They found me on a mountain; My arms and wings they plucked
Saw me fit for a watermill; For I’ve troubles, I groan
From the mountain they cut my wood; My disparate order they ruined
But an unwearied poet I am; For I’ve troubles, I groan
I am The Troubled Watermill; My water flows, roaring and rumbling
Thus has God commanded; For I’ve troubles, I groan
I am but a mountain’s tree; Neither am I bitter, nor sweet
I am but a pleader to the Lord; For I’ve troubles, I groan
Yunus, whoever comes here will find no joy, will not reach his desire
Nobody stays in this fleeting abode; For I’ve troubles, I groan

Jan 16, 2025

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 08:06:00 +0000

Hardbreak: Hardware Hacking Wiki #

This was a cool little find. I’ve always played with software in one form or another, but besides building PCs actual hardware hacking felt out of reach. Maybe I can start with some simple things like radio hacking.

The beauty of understanding #

My love for science seems to always involve some sort of rube goldberg machine: you set things up just so and discoveries magically flow out. Sure, designing pretty experiments is difficult and there is a lot of literal and metaphorical heartbreak along the way but to finally discover the way is all frisson.

Domain Ontologies: Indispensable for Knowledge Graph Construction

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 08:06:00 +0000

AI slop is all around and increasingly extraction of useful information will face difficulties as we start to feed more noise into the already noisy world of knowledge. We are in an era of unprecedented data abundance, yet this deluge of information often lacks the structure necessary to derive meaningful insights. Knowledge graphs (KGs), with their ability to represent entities and their relationships as interconnected nodes and edges, have emerged as a powerful tool for managing and leveraging complex data. However, the efficacy of a KG is critically dependent on the underlying structure provided by domain ontologies. These ontologies, which are formal, machine-readable conceptualizations of a specific field of knowledge, are not merely useful, but essential for the creation of robust and insightful KGs. Let’s explore the role that domain ontologies play in scaffolding KG construction, drawing on various fields such as AI, healthcare, and cultural heritage, to illuminate their importance.

Jan 14, 2025

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 08:06:00 +0000

Font fight! #

The fonts have assembled, their ligatures sharp their curves are shiny. They all line up with perfect kerning… or do they? Your eyes and mind are their battlefield.

https://www.codingfont.com/

I got JetBrains mono btw.

Decentralization is just partial centralization #

Renée DiResta writes about the social media flux in Noema.

Decentralization places a heavy burden on individual instance administrators, mostly volunteers, who may lack the tools, time or capacity to address complex problems effectively.

Jan 13, 2025 Life, platforms, vectors

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 08:22:47 +0000

Crystal-Bison #

I don’t want to give away much of the poem but it captures the nature, ferocity, and purpose of life.

Ghost Exits #

Aligning with the idea that blogs will be the last of the [good internet](http://Jan. 3, 2025) there is a broader question about platforms and their methods. Long before meta and X abandoned all pretense the internet was already under attack while we were believed this was fine.

The Universal Library in the River of Noise

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 08:06:00 +0000

Few ideas capture the collective human imagination more powerfully than the notion of a “universal library”—a singular repository of all recorded knowledge. From the grandeur of the Library of Alexandria to modern digital initiatives, this concept has persisted as both a philosophical ideal and a practical challenge. Miroslav Kruk’s 1999 paper, “The Internet and the Revival of the Myth of the Universal Library,” revitalizes this conversation by highlighting the historical roots of the universal library myth and cautioning against uncritical technological utopianism. Today, as Wikipedia and Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT emerge as potential heirs to this legacy, Kruk’s insights—and broader reflections on language, noise, and the very nature of truth—resonate more than ever.

Jan 11, 2025 - Leading with Kindness

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 08:06:00 +0000

Leading with Kindness #

PDF kindly made available by the author, Steve Swensen - via Helen Bevan on Bluesky.

Steve Swensen held leadership positions at Mayo Clinic ensuring not just improving care but also preventing burnout. This paper from May 2024 provides leaders with a framework to help colleagues do better and “Kindness is helping people do better.”

That colleague or work environment that creates stress and anxiety have a very real impact on your health and long-term well-being. An organization can improve team health by creating space for “nurturing human conditions” to emerge:

Jan 10, 2025 - AI Agents, Machiavelli's Study

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 08:06:00 +0000

Agents Are Not Enough #

Last year I was heavily experimenting with Knowledge Graphs because it’s been clear that LLMs by themselves fall short because of the lack of knowledge. This paper by Chirag Shah and Ryen White (you can click the heading above) from Dec 2024 expands on those shortcomings by exploring not just knowledge but also value generation, personalization, and trust.

They open the paper by casting a very wide definition of an “agent” everything from thermostats to LLM tools. While this seems facetious at first, their next point is interesting. Agents by definition “remove agency from a user in order to do things on the user’s behalf and save them time and effort.”. I think this is an interesting way to injext an LLM flavored principal agent problem into the Agentic AI conversation.

Jan 9, 2025 - The Age of Fire and Gravel

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 08:05:00 +0000

Today I discovered the Public Domain Image Archive attached to the Public Domain Review which has some great essays and commentary on image collections, like the one below.

Utagawa Hiroshige: Last Great Master of Ukiyo-e #

Just before Hiroshige died, possibly of cholera, he wrote the following poem:

I leave my brush in the East
And set forth on my journey.
I shall see the famous places in the Western Land.

This was a fortelling of sorts because Hiroshige

Jan. 8, 2025: Count your DIGITS! Drunk Bayesian

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 08:06:00 +0000

NVIDIA Project DIGITS #

Around 2015 I was putting together funds in academia. Convincing IT, senior professors, and finance that yes, it was worth giving me a LOT of cash to build a workstation with multiple GPUs.

…
“No, it isn’t for gaming.”
…
“Yes, it will change the world.”
…
“No, there are no university rules that hardware bought multiple invoices across multiple departments can’t be used in the same box.”
…
“Yes, I’m aware that all my individual quotes are just below the bureaucracy summoning purchase limits.”
…
“Yes I tried random forest with the other stats and ML methods, this really is better. How do I know? Well…”

Jan. 7, 2025: Building Dwelling Thinking

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Today’s product builders and data scientists shape the way people see the world. The analysis, plots, and UI we create are places where others dwell. Not merely occupy but live and harness the mental space we give them access to. Martin Heiddeger wrote Building Dwelling Thinking(archive.org) in his 1971 book, Poetry Language Thought.

Man’s relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken

Jan. 6, 2025

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 14:00:00 +0000

VMC: A Grammar for Visualizing Statistical Model Checks #

Data Scientists check how well a statistical model fits observed data with numerical and graphical checks. Graphical checks have a huge range outside of the well knowns like Q-Q plots. Scientists are of course limited by their training and experience, and it’s not trivial to arrive at effective model checks. Both programmatic and visual plotting tools require significant effort to generate new plots increasing the friction to do proper checks.
Work out of Jessican Hullman’s lab has created the VMC package (github) is a tool to easily access these methods and determine the quality of your model quickly. VMC is

Jan. 5, 2025

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Improving Research Through Safer Learning from Data #

Another one of Frank Harrell’s posts. Given my day job, and the R&D background this one is quite close to home. As a team leader on the industry side one hopes to build a culture with the team that aligns scientific rigor with company goals. Any method, statistical or cultural (in this case both), that solves for this tension will get you the most bang for your buck.

Jan 4, 2025

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:30:49 +0000

Bayesian Thinking Talk (youtube) #

Talk details from Frank Harrell’s blog - includes slides

This beautiful talk about Bayesian Thinking by Frank Harrell should be essential material for scientists who are trained in frequentist methods. The talk covers the shortcomings of frequentist approaches, but more importantly the paths out of those quagmires are also shown.

Frank discusses his journey to Bayesian stats in this blog post from 2017 which is also in the next section.

Jan. 3, 2025

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 17:07:56 +0000

In 2025, blogs will be the last bastion of the Good Internet #

Erik Hoel writes

a work of maximalism succeeds when it triggers this property in the experiencer. You know that the whole is there, but you can’t see it all at once. You can only take it in sequentially. It is the awareness of an emergent form you, as a limited being with only a periscope for perception, cannot actually understand in full.

2025-01-02 Links

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 11:43:50 +0000

Are we slowly entering the post data annotation world? #

The act of annotating data for ML has always been a shortcut to access concepts not present in the training data. This new work, incorporates literature with data to achieve a fuller picture with complementary information.

Specifically the tech,

utilizes GPT-4 to induce reliable disease-specific human expert concepts from medical literature and incorporate them with a group of purely learnable concepts to extract complementary knowledge from training data.

2025-01-01 Links

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 06:24:06 +0000

Beauty as resistance - Good visualization design is an act of liberation by Alberto Cairo

Good visualization tells the reader what the collected data is saying it creates a little place in an otherwise confusing space.

Truth and liberty are entwined in a self-reinforcing loop. When we design a good visualization we aren’t just conveying our best understanding of a truth; by sharing our contemplation of that truth, we’re also making ourselves and our readers freer.

Variations on a grocery run

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 16:30:23 +0000

I. 
Unruly, unmoored 
A tempest of questions 
In the car seat swrils 
 
 
II. 
The car seat is full 
Of a tidal wave 
Of question marks 
 
 
III. 
A flood of questions 
Pool in the car seat 
Doubting the universe 
 
 
IV. 
Between the tides of questions 
The car seat is both 
Raft and the sea 
 
 
V. 
Asleep 
The cauldron of the car seat 
Brews 
Questions

Thank you, Olivia Dean — Dive

The Arrival of Composable Knowledge

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 09:13:34 +0000

Traversing through human history, even in the last two decades, we see a rapid increase in the accessibility of knowledge. The purpose of language, and of course all communication is to transfer a concept from one system to another. For humans this ability to transfer concepts has been driven by advancements in technology, communication, and social structures and norms.

This evolution has made knowledge increasingly composable, where individual pieces of information can be combined and recombined to create new understanding and innovation. Ten years ago I would have said being able to read a research paper and having the knowledge to repeat that experiment in my lab was strong evidence of this composability (reproducibility issues not withstanding).

Dancing on the Shoulders of Giants

Fri, 10 May 2024 18:31:09 +0000

In Newton’s era it was rare to say things like “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” and actually mean it. Now it’s trivial. With education, training, and experience, professionals always stand “on shoulders of giants” (OSOG). Experts readily solve complex problems but the truly difficult ones aren’t solved through training. Instead, a combination of muddling through and the dancer style of curiosity is deployed, more on this later. We have industries like semiconductors, solar, and gene sequencing with such high learning rates that the whole field seems to ascend OSOG levels daily.

Reimagining AI in Healthcare: Beyond Basic RAG with FHIR, Knowledge Graphs, and AI Agents

Fri, 03 May 2024 21:15:05 +0000

Introduction #

While exploring the application of AI agents in healthcare we see that standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning methods often fall short in the interconnected realms of healthcare and research. These traditional methods struggle to leverage the structured knowledge available, such as knowledge graphs. Data approaches like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) used alongside advanced knowledge graphs can significantly enhance AI agents, providing more effective and context-aware solutions.

On Being Good vs. Knowing Good: Perspectives on AI

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 19:41:07 +0000

In this video, Stephen Fry narrates Nick Cave’s letter, which argues that using ChatGPT as a shortcut to creativity is detrimental. Surprisingly, I found myself in agreement. Having been involved in the AI industry for over a decade, I’ve always viewed AI positively. As an entrepreneur who pitches AI to investors and customers, I liken AI to technologies like spreadsheets: they eliminate tedious tasks, but you still need to understand what you’re doing.

Links 20240119

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 08:26:36 +0000

Shorthand to make your handwriting worse than it is:

https://orthic.shorthand.fun/

This one feels like a direct attack given my recent mini tongue-in-cheek rant:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/llm-2

First self-amplifying mRNA vaccine was approved in Japan. Apparently a much lower (1/6th) has the same effect as a normal dose. I wonder if the side effects are better:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-02101-2

Norah Jones will have a new album out on March 8. The woman is a machine! With the very active podcast I had thought she might be taking a break, but nope here she is with Visions:

https://www.norahjones.com/news-1/visions

There is sadness in the Long Earth

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 07:07:02 +0000

I’m on the last book of the Long Earth Series, The Long Cosmos and reading it makes me sad and wistful.

Perhaps it’s knowing that Terry Pratchett didn’t live to see it published, perhaps it’s the little hints and hooks of Discworld.

Whatever it is, there are parts of the book where I laugh out loud, like when Sancho calls himself “The Librarian” and then I’m plunged into soft sadness.

My grandfather had lore, my father had Google, I have ChatGPT, my son will have lore

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 23:17:56 +0000

“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel,” Hong Kong of the Desert

So goes the old Middle East proverb about the rise and fall of Dubai’s prosperity. The world is going through a similar cycle of prosperity in the context of accessing accurate information. However, with worsening search results Research: Is Google Getting Worse? | Media article:Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse , and alternatives like ChatGPT that are designed to make stuff up ChatGPT and other AI chatbots will never stop making stuff up, experts warn , we might enter a phase where a majority of the people don’t have access to quality information. We might end up falling back on the OG source of truth, lore. The problem with the current, popular, flavor of AI is that there is no step where any kind of error checking is done. Worse yet, tools like ChatGPT don’t even have anything like a confidence score when answering queries. They just state the answer in an extremely confident manner which our brains instinctively accept as truth. Long ago, xkcd made fun of both politicians and Wikipedians with the term “citation needed”. In the context of LLMs the lack of citations is not a joke. You can’t really look under the hood and say this information comes from this source, and the source is good, and the information is accurately reproduced. This whole thing would have been a non-issue had vanilla search engines stayed up to par, but they aren’t. That is deeply uncomfortable. Web search is a critical application, people make decisions, sometimes life changing ones based on what they find. Explainable AI is the only kind that’s worth building, especially when it comes to critical applications. Being frustrated with search is one thing, but generative AI becoming a buzz word in critical applications like medicine and defense is a serious problem. If AI is explainable, the users are able to apply their own logic and experience to disregard AI input when things seem off. I understand that tools like Perplexity are trying to bring back the citation, and I hope they do a good job. However, as long as LLM and similar generative technologies are at the core, trust will remain an issue. In the end lore, and its formal relative, education, might be the only option left. Stuffing humans with complex information and relying only on them for expertise will be a step back for the world. Then again, if it worked for granddad… #

Pair with: Blackberry Winter by Keith Jarrett

Cool tool for poetry writing

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 06:38:46 +0000

Completely randomly on mastodon I came across this wonderful tool via Ada.

It’s not fancy, it’s a funky looking, but I was instantly in love. Here it is:

Giant Heart Poetry

It has a syllable counting function and I used it immediately to write (bad) haikus… here are a few:

Sanity is found in boxes

Life spills. Unraveled.
Collect it all, tick boxes
GTD keeps me

A Flying Kite Caught

A flying kite caught
Winter’s saddest ocean breeze
Little boy giggled

Strategy sits on a pyramid of hearts

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 23:00:47 +0000

There is a fetishism around management artifacts, handbooks, spreadsheets, memos and more. People who like the idea of being a leader but lack experience look at these artifacts and think that whatever goes into the artifacts is how the world will function. This micromanagement flavour of command and control forgets that there are people involved. Leaders must remember that the people who you are leading are just like you and, crucially, that they are closer to the problem. Strategies crumble when they leave out the team’s intelligence, insight, and input. Therefore, building a culture of mutual trust and an intuitive mode of operation is crucial for success. Winning hearts is not trivial.

The boy who collected stones and the boy who collects sticks

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 07:52:45 +0000

The year was 1989, Solapur, then a small town in India. I’m about 4 years old attending one of the kindergarten years at St. Joseph’s Highschool. The days feel endless and everything has a sheen of significance. During recess me and a friend haunt the area just off from the main playground. This was an area that we’re not exactly allowed to go to, but not exactly forbidden either. What makes this place worth the apparent risk is that it’s full of pebbles. This is a place where treasure is to be sought. You see, a few days ago I had found a particularly interesting shiny stone and given it to my mom, who said she loved it. I won’t know if she meant it or it was just a thing to be said to little boys who bring home random things while the newborn sister is fussing. It was now my mission to give her more of the same.

Leadership is solitude, leadership teams are introspection

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 05:46:59 +0000

#

Summary #

Leaders are by the nature of their job, alone. Good leaders are thinkers, they explore and map their territory and lay out a course. That is they lead with vision. To develop a clear and confident vision leaders need to be able to concentrate on what’s important to take decisions with courage and conviction. Leaders don’t have the expertise to tackle every problem. Leadership teams have a wider expertise and should be structured such that there is openness and space to explore from a place of vulnerability. Good leadership teams are also good friends who are able to fearlessly point out mistakes and pitfalls. Leaders should go out of their way to create and maintain that culture of intellectual honesty in their leadership teams enabling the same kind of introspection as one would with close friends.

Norah Jones + Anoushka Shankar 😍

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 04:17:15 +0000

Most people know my love for Norah Jones (I bought the cassette for Come Away with Me before all the awards), most people don’t know that I’m a long time fan of Anoushka Shankar also. To hear the sisters talk and play together is something else! If for some crazy reason you don’t want to listen to the podcast, here are some of their songs from albums:

Here’s one of Anoushka with Sting:

And the best tribute I saw to Chris Cornell:

Now go listen to the podcast 😉

Ye olde web… noveou web

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 03:18:56 +0000

As I start to build up my web presence during, what seems to be the fall of twitter, coming across article like these is heartening. Glen says:

The hardest thing we can do, but the most vital, is to start building amateur websites again! […] Building amateur web pages increases the quality of content on the web as well. A status update or a tweet on a huge social network is a lot like fast food; it’s immediately satisfying, but it’s not good for you, and ultimately leaves you feeling empty. But writing content for your own site - something that you feel so passionate about that you needed to build your own site to get it out into the world - is like cooking your own meal from scratch. It’s immediately filling, and satisfying in the long run the way fast food could never be. But it’s not enough to build our own site. We need to connect to others. Geocities was one of the pioneers of early web hosting, and even though it’s gone, there are still lessons we can learn from it. When you built a site on Geocities your site was sorted into a neighborhood, along with other sites that shared a common theme. This is a concept that we can borrow and build upon. We need to get to know our virtual neighbors and build a community around common interests, linking each other’s websites to form our own microweb of related content. So seek out new and interesting sites, and link to them on your site. Reach out to them, and see if they’ll link to you. Start a dialog. The way to build a better web is to build a better web of people.

Sheep goes? Baa! Cow goes….

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 15:38:57 +0000

Little feet waddle over the bookshelf. Little hands grab books made for little hands. It’s his favourite, a cardboard box of four books: numbers, animal sounds, alphabet, and objects. Illustrated by Eric Carle, each page has one a lovely illustration accompanied by one or two words. We pick a book, as we do several times a day and what feels like several hundred times on the weekends. Usually the routine goes we open a book, I point at the picture and say the word often with some sound effects. Usually Aarin makes encouraging noises, stays till page four then goes and does the next thing but not today. Today is different.

Orcas in the Afternoon

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 17:09:54 +0000

We've been around since dawn 
And our day is yet long 
We were lucky 
To have Orcas 
In the afternoon

Before our huts
Of fire, steel, and stone
This Earth strode alone
Palaces
Of light, blood, and bone

Ever changing, yet ever same
Characters with shared masks
But a different name

At the tips of pyramids,
The giants dance.
Even as we steal the bricks,
For a second
Of prosperity's glance

Our murderers are microscopic,
They train their harpoon.
We were lucky
To have Orcas
In the afternoon

Of the World's Sounds

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 03:30:58 +0000

I carry,
The world’s sounds with me.
A cat’s satisfied purr,
On a hot day the fan’s whirr

Leech

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 03:30:55 +0000

Ours to Light up, Ours to Burn

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 03:30:48 +0000

She is the hot-headed matchstick

And I the rough red side

Of a matchbox.

Forever we tease each other

About how with the

Littlest effort a flame

We could make.

But content with this knowledge,

We sit as friends side by side

Laughing

And Jeering at the world

For it is ours to light up

And ours to burn.

Ambitions

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 15:34:00 +0000

Blades of grass

With redwood dreams

Compost feasts

And sunlight creams

Dedicated stem

And a piece of the sky

An apical bud to reach ever high

No more dainty flowers

No more depressed clones

Only the best of xylem

For her darling cones

The Toothpick

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 02:45:00 +0000

The toothpick of propriety

From this sandwich shall fall

After the teeth of age

Have gnawed at bits

And Life digested

The bread away

Then layers

Unravel

Squishy bits

Return to clay

Child-like drawing-me

*Purple (The Purple Pointer)

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:32:00 +0000

The rain has fallen.

Giving way to the shoots of memories,

Strewn along the tar roads, years deep

The sky takes on a peculiar character,

With the clouds quite unwilling to retire,

But ushered out nonetheless

Between the arms

Of the sensuous purple sky,

And the slow breeze

Which takes care to weave itself,

Between every, strand of her hair.

The past has manifested as a mood

Not only on our small window to the universe

Tonight's Nightmare

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:43:00 +0000

Pick pick Dear Mind,

Pick pick.

Tonight’s Nightmare

Pick pick

Shall it be the day’s proceedings,

And the world’s rejections?

Or will the dark locked trunks,

Come avisiting,

Carrying within

Burned moral objections?

Pick pick Dear Mind,

Pick pick.

Tonight’s nightmare

Pick pick.

Shall your heart be embraced

By mismatched arms?

Or should the skeletons rise

From friendship farms?

Pick pick

Dear Mind

pick pick

Eyes closed

The inside is out

Inner Cultures

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Purple Monsters,

With UV spears stand guard,

Pleasures in a plastic card

Sparkling glasses

Strange cut sights

On the right meet the lights,

Smoke without fire,

Mr. Tyndall hanging on to the light spire

Throbbing bodies

Smoky eyes,

Questionable motives,

Screaming lies.

A little numbing of the nerves,

Low frequency beats,

To the inner cultures,

Front row seats

Immortality Naïve

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 17:50:00 +0000

These walls shall be filled with words

With emotions these rooms overflow

For a thousand years I shall live

And in their minds forever grow

Drops Vacillate

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 18:01:00 +0000

Drops from the drizzle
Hit me like unsure thoughts.
A glimpse into the future.
The coming storm,
And the drenching rain,
Of the path soon to be blind
And the smile,
These lips shall have to feign.
Of the laughter drowned by the thunder,
The unwelcome guest,
Once a stranger named Pain.
As the liquid becomes a second skin,
Do I a new footprint make?
Or the last one take away?
With shoulders wide,
Do battle?
Or cower,
At the image these drops portray?

Medic

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:31:00 +0000

Bandages in my pocket
On my hands the smell of blood
Eyes close
Ears try to drown
The wails for their saviour
In white, for those with hope
In black, for those without.

Outside,
Children’s eyes
Where the innocence nourishing tears
Have long dried.
The deserts
Now to the spores of hate
Give shelter.

The thought and the wish
To understand why,
Have both grown weary
But that field tires not,
Sending to me steadily
Skin and bones
That once made people.

Trespasser

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:51:00 +0000

Staked a claim and flew away.

Barren patch of land,

Wished to be a garden,

But the gardener is away.

There is a board that holds place.

Declaring loudly,

The prosecution of trespassers.

But the paint is peeling,

And the iron rusts.

The land feels forgotten,

And for caring hands lusts.

Go ahead, bend the wires and step through.

Barren now,

But could be a garden to you.

Img: http://lawisjustice.deviantart.com/art/No-Tresspassing-91782954

CStruck

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:17:00 +0000

Cries of despair and joy ring out

Bullets are shot and he goes ploughing through

DooMLoRD has arrived

Doing what he was meant tot do

At his side RAB and .avi like hound dogs rounding up sheep

Give push a nighthawk and bullets will shove you down

cobra slithers with his deadly bite

yobo towards you runs

Of life you are quickly light

M!THRAND!R with his shotgun

Oh, how he spoils the close range fun.
KillRoy is there but never arrives.

Three Centimeters Short

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 15:45:00 +0000

At the congregation of poets
Words moved the world
Words moved the heart
With their pens they wrote
Each line a beautiful thought
As the evening meeting continued
Each line they read
Took them further
Down beauty’s road
Every step was a dream
And they were free to roam
Even as the night turned to dawn
They went on and on
With their dreams and thoughts
They explored for miles and miles.
When the words stopped
They went home
For their dreams could no longer cater
Too bad, for you began
Three centimeters later

Posts on Aneesh Sathe

Hard Disagree #

Excerpt from Aristotle by Billy Collins #

Nicheverse

Carl’s Required Reading

Farewell to a famous parrot : Nature News

I’m in the park reading Claire L. Evans’ book Broad Band.. - Sven Dahlstrand

vgr: I have perfected my sev puri

Geographies of Time #

How to avoid the “clean data, clean model” trap when teaching statistics and data science

I Built a Blog and Forgot to Write - Ben's Web Space

Physicist say that they have found the origin of causality

Pandoc - twenty-years-of-pandoc

Nakatomi Drift

Agent Harness Engineering vs. Loop Engineering vs. Graph Engineering

Coding Agents Don’t Need Bigger Context Windows — They Need a Context Compiler | Towards Data Science

I ♥ RSS – Andrew Shell's Weblog

Blaugust 2026 is Coming!

sudo boo

Blaugust Begins

On Turning Ten by Billy Collins

Ontologies Are So Back: Why AI Agents Are Reviving the Semantic Web

The Last Museum

About RSS.chat

Masks in Redshift

Blogroll of blogrolls

Directories of personal sites #

Non-commercial search #

Random discovery & webrings #

The lightweight web #

Feeds & newsletters #

Substack writers, you need a website!

Em dashes are fucking amazing

Contraptions Book Club #

You don’t have to blog like me

India's first privately developed rocket reaches orbit on dramatic debut launch

Hadley Wickham on AI and its role in data science

On Thickets, Enclosure, and Leaving

The Birth of Thickets

The Ocean

Not My Lever

I. A burden no one could carry alone #

The Lightening of Intent

I. Ceolfrith on the road #

The Viscous Frontier

I. #

The Cosmos and the Model

I. The Averaging Machine #

The Octotypic Mind

The Scholars of Dejima #

The End of Identity: AI, Plasticity, and the Divergence Machine

How the Fox with the Long Tail Learned to Play in the Dark Forest

I. Everything is a Balinese Cockfight #

The Kernel and the Ark

I. The Wall and the Infinite #

The Deep Dark Terroir of the Soul

The Architecture of Resistance

Logic of the Thicket and the Unsearchable Web

The Shelter as Epistemic Engine

Introduction: The Terror of the Open Field #

The Tortured Artist Is So Yesterday

Four Early-Modern Tempers for a World That Can Summon Itself

much love to everybody

favorite movies

Rhyme, collected

Books are dwellings

Better Company Than Caesar

Untitled

Digital Garden - Tech Tidbit

Links 20250803

The Small God of the Internet

Looking Forward to Montaigne

Why Every Biotech Research Group Needs a Data Lakehouse

Work or Play? Ludic Feedback Loops

On Protocols, Wagons, and Associated Acrobatics

Briefing: The State of Explainable AI (XAI) and its Impact on Human-AI Decision-Making

I. Executive Summary #

AI: Explainable Enough

My Road to Bayesian Stats

The Keel