13: collywobbles

• Where I am now: Oxford

• What I’m doing now: warming up, cooling down

• Last Song: “Megan”

• Currently watching: Nothing at all.

• Currently reading: “After the Fall”

• Current Obsession: artificial mathematics

Up and atom. Spent a week on the farm with friends, smashing old sheds and moving giant piles of iron, sometimes by rotating. We found asbestos, mercury, and strychnine. (We were wearing respirators before uncovering them.) I have never slept so well.

We buried my aunt, who turns out to have a much larger h-index than I do.

Arb has 15 active projects. Most of our work is currently private but e.g. me, Peli, and Niccolo have been getting quite deep into the present (transient) Golden Age of mathematics. This got into ICML, and we raced this into NeurIPS. And this came out after 18 months of suffering through pharmaceutical data.

I would really like some help with this project: I need many mathematicians and a small sum of money.

At the start of this month I listed 19 urgent problems, the incipient singularity only one of them. Insane, lifetime-peak amounts of paperwork (inheritance, accountancy, planning permission, corporation tax, funny employment agreements), but which Opus 4.8 has been completely obliterating. The world changed. Claude Code is even better than before: see things like /btw and /fast and /output-style learning and /goal and /powerup.

I have a new job alongside Arb, leading a new nonprofit. Well everyone needs a hobby.

Went for a driving test, having done zero formal lessons. Failed, predictably, but got quite close.

I spent the heatwave in the gym, the only airconditioned building in Bristol. 10 hours, ice baths, exercising every day. Wonderful. But as always I cannot decide whether I am cutting or bulking.

Got my first really serious soundsystem (e.g. I keep it on volume 12 of 100). So far it changed my life less than I’d hoped. I was expecting Bach to land like a bomb but turns out that, as so often, the limiter is not my ears but my brain.

I once again give thanks for the flaws (laziness, contrarianism, lack of rigour, lack of standard ambitions, paranoia) which continue to prevent me from doing great harm in this great harmable age. One benefit of going through a neet phase as a young man and later encountering people much smarter than me is that I don't feel worried about AI "robbing my life of meaning" even if it eventually exceeds me at e.g. all knowledge production work I could do.

Posts

• Just a bunch of funnee squibs. I’m quite pleased with this though.

• Backstage of the blog, I looked at all of Common Crawl for backlinks to me; backed-up every site I link to; and had Claude sum up what my blog is about.

Films

• Ahead of the final instalment I watched all of the “7 Up!” series. Marvellous. One of the strongest things ever made (despite Apted’s manipulations, a high degree of reflexivity, and the inarticulacy of the subjects, after the age of 7). They don’t need to talk for us to understand. Just amazing.

• Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). Very funny, still dark. Must have been shocking at the time.

• Hamlet 2 (2008). Mostly interesting as a period piece - lots of casual race jokes in a way no longer doable. The songs are good but you have to endure 70 minutes to get them.

Playlists

• LA. Staggering.

• Major revamp of Brazil (incidentally the first country playlist I ever made; the first country that forced me to study it).

• The best compilations ever

  • A classic Fat Wreck compilation

• I miss my favourite band

• Claude didn’t want to help me make this.

• Not going to put too much effort into this: songs of this year

New words

• workslop (AI n.): AI output which looks good (and fools managers) but doesn’t actually advance any latent goals.

• availability-first training (AI n.): by analogy to massive databases, prioritising fast weight updates over global consistency of the update. Now necessary for the multi-datacenter nonsense people are doing for 10T models.

• boy kibble (Insta n.): mince and rice. Bro food.

• middlebox weaponization (infosec n.): reflected amplification of UDP and now TCP packets. The abuse of spyware like the Great Firewall to DDoS someone inside it. Your Censor is My Censor.

• porism (maths n.): something inbetween a theorem and a conjecture. Holds for infinite values if some assumption is granted. The opposite of aporia.

• congi (Indian slur n.): A fan of the Indian National CONGress; by extension, someone opposed to the dominant Hindutva supremacism.

• homologation: accreditation; approval process. Now mostly in sports.

• homologation special (racesport n.): a racecar sold with a highly limited stock, just to get around a race’s requirement of commercial vehicles only.

• stri-kelist (British n.): a person who only bikes when there’s a tube strike.

• Glonzo (internet n.): A popular falsehood or conspiracy exploited by populist politicians.

• grinding tomography (geology n.): a destructive imaging technique: look inside something by sanding it down.

• agentsplaining (AI n.): an agent justifying deviating from spec, sense, or ethics by appealing to necessity. See also

• “did the journal factory explode” (internet interjection): used to slap a notionally oversharing or over-sincere person.

• fast tech (consumer n.): throwaway Shenzhen slop, Amazon top results, etc.

• tifo (sports n.): synchronised dancing or flag-waving at football matches.

• epsilontics (maths n.): the Standard episilon-delta approach to analysis.

• goodput (networking n.): the rate of transmitting useful application data. Throughput minus headers and wasted data.

• content partner (Onlyfans n.): a male volunteer providing filmed services to a content creator. By extension, also all of the loved ones drafted in for less obviously unwholesome Instagram content.

• slampig (East Coast intrasexual conflict n.): a promiscuous woman

• Montessortof (internet adj.): of an imitation Montessori school

• treatlerite (internet n.): one who complains about the cost or convenience of luxury services like DoorDash. See also first world problems.