7: faceplant

Author

Gavin Leech
May 31, 2025

  • Quit my job. The crew is strong and loveable, but I just don’t buy 3 year timelines and after 5 months of grinding with the heat of the future at my back it feels like time for me to go stretch and think on my own.

    • It is about time for me to know what kind of worker, what kind of thinker I am. But things are going fine without knowing.

  • First funemployment I’ve had in 6 years. Long list of cool shit to do.

    • First up, producing The Fabric Book all beautiful-like

    • Next up, training something on my 10 megatoken personal corpus.

    • Might review all 5000 NeurIPS abstracts with Juan and livestream it.

    • Going to go fairly deep into anthropology for a new ESPR class. Might take a textbook and a dumbphone interrailing.

    • Let me know if you want to do daily Mathacademy or Raschka

    • If you want to meet up, write to me; this is probably the likeliest moment.

    • “If month-AGI lands in 3 years, will I feel proud?” Yes, I think so.

  • I shall be an instructor at EXP but I can’t tell you anything about it.

  • Been living in west London. A little too posh for me, and also remarkably loud, but the Arabs calling you “brother” at the drop of a hat and the French performing straight Paris glam is compensation.

  • Vishal pranked me in front of 220,000 people (my largest tweet ever rip).

  • My birthday present form went well, with 40 entries, some of them very beautiful. You made me a bit larger. I also organised myself an odd reflective party.

  • My cyberpunk thread is not just entertainment but also an attempt to spot the world changing from under me. How can it be that there is still a shortage of curation and correlation?

  • I have a small Manifund regranting budget; if you’re reading this please think if you should tell someone in particular that I do.

  • Playlists:

Books

Finally back on my game.

  • Alvaro’s Cavafy was beautiful and I hope to do something this satisfying in my time off.

  • Mathematics in Western Culture. Not exactly what I was looking for but fairly nourishing.

  • Herschel Schoen. A crushing christmas story. Robnost is one of very few sci-fi authors with both literary taste and technical chops. Bear with it til Frederick arrives, that’s when the real holy sauce starts.

  • OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE NUTS TO CRACK. Not very good.

  • The Watchers. Complete history of the Elizabethan secret police. It’s about 10 guys, and they are actually very scared all the time that the country will topple.

  • Jonathan Strange. Magical realism for the Napoleonic era; intensely researched (many of the minor characters are real); dense and generous with characterisation. I first read this as an extremely stupid 13 year old. I dimly sensed that it was doing something completely different from the identikit fantasy trilogies I read in their dozens but I didn’t know what it was. (It was actual historical understanding, actual interest, actual writing.) Hard to imagine it winning a Hugo now.

  • Started Middlemarch. It’s great, dense. One tiny 6 page chapter a night is enough.

Words

  • expugn (v.): to vanquish; to fight-out

  • chirpsing (London n.): flirting, especially of the ingratiating sort, especially played as a long game. See also glazing.

  • digital fossil (digital humanities n.): a unique n-gram produced by naive OCR of documents, e.g. those set in columns read as if they were a continuous line. An indicator species for dumb data pipelines and/or LLM fraud. (What fraction of LLM bugs are due to fossils?) See also Gould’s related indictment of 80% of biology textbooks.

  • tortured phrase (metascience n.): an unidiomatic term produced e.g. by dumb iterative use of a thesaurus to hide that the text is plagiarised or reused.

  • vegetative electron microscopy (stink n.): A digital fossil and currently a marker of fraudulent LLM manuscripts.

  • bhimta (racist n.): Hindutva term for buddhist Indians / liberal Indians / dalit sympathisers. Think “DEI hire” or whatever. See also cheemta.