• On Sid Meyers’s Alpha Centuri
  • Estrogen: A Trip Report
    • I love phenomenological reports like this. It’s always a good reminder that there’s a lot of nuance to human experience that can be qualified by just being more attentive. I need to be more mindful of this; it’s a nice hobby that can be practiced anywhere, any time.

    • I can almost envision everything on our street coming apart piece by piece like an exploded technical diagram. The asphalt, the curb, the patches of grass, all of them could just lift into the air and drift apart, nothing but thin surfaces, almost like abstractions or mere representations. If I were to take a shovel and start digging a hole in the road, it would just be an indentation in that surface, pushing it to extend a bit in one direction or another – but underneath it, nothing. The houses along the street are just outgrowths of the surface, a sort of puckering in it, like a ball on a rubber sheet to demonstrate how gravity is the curvature of spacetime.

  • Curve-shortening flow
  • Life as slime
  • How much do language models memorize?
    • I did a big writeup on this. The theory is really cool; it’s very impressive to see a simple mathematical model of rote memorization vs generalization applied to actual ML algorithms.