“Human beings, equipped with language, abstraction, technology, institutions, and ideology, can be stupid on a truly civilizational scale. This is not a joke; it is close to a law of nature. A law that might very well be our undoing.” nautil.us/what-makes-h...

What Makes Humans Stupid

What Makes Humans Stupid: It takes intelligence to get things spectacularly wrong. An essay on our undoing.

nautil.us

Listening to early Teenage Fanclub makes me sad. The goof kind of sad, but still.

some light readin’

Cynar Spritz with a couple of dashes of Végétal de la Grande-Chartreuse:

cold summer borscht + a dirty gin martini

daily.bandcamp.com/features/pow...

Why Power Pop is the Sound of Now

A new wave of bands are reaching for the ringing of six strings, the thwack of real drums, and a melody sung straight from the heart.

daily.bandcamp.com

Stanislaw Lem, _His Master's Voice_:

I’ve been watching the Last Meal series on the Mythical Kitchen YouTube channel, and so I got to thinking: what would I want for my last meal on Earth? Here goes: * extra dry gin martini with three olives and the trio of snacks from Bemelmans * traditional Greek salad

One can always count on @jwherrman.bsky.social to make good sense of what’s happening in and around AI:

In AI, Nothing Ever Happens. Wait, It’s Happening!

What explains the increasingly volatile mood swings of America’s most important industry?

nymag.com

Today marks my three years of substacking: realizable.substack.com

The Art of the Realizable | Maxim Raginsky | Substack

Intermittent musings on the philosophy, theory, and practice of engineering, primarily in the context of machine learning, automatic control, and cybernetics. Click to read The Art of the Realizable, ...

realizable.substack.com

So apparently my soon-to-be-12yo daughter can do the prefect bene gesserit voice. Achievement unlocked, I guess?

I was in the Bay Area over the weekend, and Alyosha Efros twisted my arm to give a talk in his weekly research group meeting and to "keep it entertaining." I took this as an opportunity to think of five philosophy papers everyone working on AI/ML should read. realizable.substack.com/p/five-philo...

Five Philosophy Papers Everyone* Should Read

*in AI/ML

realizable.substack.com

This made me chuckle, but Stanislaw Lem had done this sort of thing much better and with more humor.

No, Humans Are Not Conscious - The Philosophers' Magazine

July 1, 2026 It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the burgeoning literature on human sentience. Some may see it as a passing fad, but I’m worried. The contention that humans have inner live...

philosophersmag.com

Reading Word and Object and nodding vigorously the whole time so the people on the bus know, from my overt behavior under publicly recognized circumstances, that I agree with it

Yifeng Chu and I just posted our paper on chaining-type bounds for expected soft maxima of Gaussian processes. The analysis makes use of a nice blend of ideas from probability, statistical physics of disordered systems, and information theory. arxiv.org/abs/2606.22611

Why does Dwarkesh sound like he’s always speaking at 1.5x speed? I was listening to Ada Palmer on his podcast, and the contrast is so noticeable.

my version of Hugo Spritz St. Germain lemon juice magnolia pear shrub prosecco seltzer lemon, mint

"We are bound to adapt any alien pattern to our own in the very process of understanding or translating the alien sentences." (W.V.O. Quine, "Speaking of objects")

Can I write a critique of the splendors and miseries of emergence using hipster music references and the phenomenological concept of Fundierung? Only one way to find out!

Emergence and I

Fundierung relations versus reductionist dismemberment plans.

realizable.substack.com

Can I write a critique of the splendors and miseries of emergence using hipster music references and the phenomenological concept of Fundierung? Only one way to find out!

Emergence and I

Fundierung relations versus reductionist dismemberment plans.

realizable.substack.com

carnitas time

Peter Winch, writing in 1958, prefigures a lot of the current obsessions at the intersection of AI and language:

4 dashes angostura bitters 2 dashes chocolate bitters 1/2 oz falernum 1 oz Batavia arrack 1 oz Appleton Estate 12 Jamaican rum

Excellent essay by Leif, Tyler, and Ben. Interestingly, reification of “internal states” is one of the pitfalls of the intentional stance of Dennett, something we are seeing a lot of AI interoperability research succumbing to.

Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social · 2mo ago

In _The Ideas Letter_, Leif Weatherby, Tyler Shoemaker, and I wrote about the creation of reality through pseudoscience, religion, and psychosis. Of course, the piece is mostly about AI.

waiting out the rain

I came back

Maxim Raginsky@mraginsky.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Stopped by a new bookstore (opened this Friday): Spineless Books. They have a small, well-curated selection, books are alphabetical by author but not arranged by genre. I browsed for a bit and spotted Italo Calvino, Brian Eno, Stanislaw Lem, Georges Perec, John Wyndham, etc. www.spinelessbooks.com

This was an excellent episode, very dense in ideas and concepts. Highly recommended.

Matt Dinan@mattdinan.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I'm on the latest episode of Know Your Enemy trying my best to help navigate Strauss' Natural Right and History: know-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/leo...

White Negroni, Mood Indigo edition 1oz Empress 1908 indigo gin 1oz Luxardo bitter bianco 1oz C. Comoz vermouth blanc