I once went to a 2 Chainz concert with my friends back in undergrad. It’s weird to see how unhype something can be. Like watching a drunk guy sing alone in front of an uncaring audience.

The PIE root *skel- means to cut. From it you get shell, scale, skull, skill. Skill is just cutting well.

one of the strangest things about people is how much can be destroyed without everything being destroyed

Shabbos is one of the strangest ideas human beings ever took seriously.

I don’t care if this is AI slop, it’s based on my notes.

People love comeback stories because most people suspect they’ve been reduced.

A lot of disagreement happens before the disagreement.

I’ve been thinking about what greatness actually is. Not the word — the structure.

Richard Sutton wrote The Bitter Lesson: the history of AI research shows that general methods leveraging search and learning beat specialized methods every time. Every time a researcher hand-codes knowledge into a system, it works for a while. Then someone throws more compute at a dumber method and wins. Forty years of this. Chess, Go, vision, language. The lesson is always the same.

What does it mean for a number to be big?

One of my random hyper fixations is proto-Indo-European etymology. My friend Lydia said that etymology is astrology for men. So I made a lecture on it with that title because I realized, yeah, she’s right.

what is the point of it all?

My strangest experience on Tinder was in Sichuan. Dunno why but I got >100 matches in 12 minutes, a truly bizarre experience, felt like my guts were getting swizzled with hot gravel. But something worse approaches.

In R Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse series, there’re these monks called the Dûnyain and these goblins called the Sranc.