On Slop
TL;DR: What is slop, and why? Is it fundamental? Is it in the room with us right now? And how do we exorcise it?
On Brains, Minds, And Their Possible Uses
Welcome to my little corner of mindspace
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Latest posts
The suspense budget
TL;DR. Why Max Harms' Red Heart fell a bit flat for me but might not for you, with a detour through Conservation of Expected Evidence and a martingale identity I learned from, of all places, econ.
Why the tails (sometimes) don’t come apart
I keep coming back to thinking about Arnold Schwarzenegger.
On the digit game
A toy model where you estimate a number one decimal digit at a time. Obvious result: leading digits matter most. Less obvious: sometimes the seventh digit tells you about the first.
A permitted value of resting
This came to me as a flash of insight in the shower and I knew it had to exist, so I made Claude write it.
Elementary Condensation
Previously in this series: Elementary Infra-Bayesianism
On the unequal distribution of consumer surplus
TL;DR: Uniform pricing gives richer buyers better deals. Nash bargaining (split surplus 50/50) fixes this and under realistic conditions, sellers profit more too.
Making of IAN v2
IAN v1 died expensive TPU death, IAN v2 rises from markdown ashes. Personal AI assistants, knowledge graphs, and the alignment problem when the AI is you.
Thoughts on AI Ontology
Nostalgebraist’s new essay on… many things?
This week in fashion
TL;DR: A holiday obsession turns into a deep meditation on all things pretty. Albatrosses and reward *models* included. Also, check out www.fashionator.xyz (no malware, I promise).