Avani

Also TIL my voice sounds like a 10 year old on the radio 🙊

I had a great time talking to the folks at @planetmoney.bsky.social a few weeks ago about the infrastructure needs of a shared future between humans and bots on the Internet, and the interview is up now! www.npr.org/2026/10/26/n...

Highly recommend anyone hosting who doesn't have a mitigation in place to get behind Cloudflare's firewall. It's just a few commands to set up and has a generous free tier.

biblically accurate PHP server, October 21, 2026

Go to your camera roll and search “boat” and post one that you like. This was somewhere on Roatan, after a dive

Holy shit Grace Hopper just got cancelled less than 3 weeks before it was supposed to happen. (It's a long running conference for women in computing. It's changed, but in 2009 it was one of the first places I met recognised brilliant, technical women. It was inspiring and formative)

Update: I have successfully uninstalled Stocks.app

And yes I know the answer is to buy a Framework and run Linux but in a week I'll have this configured correctly and it will just blessedly work until the logic board goes out and I have to do this all over again.

I can’t emphasize this enough — “AI” wasn’t born corrupt and toxic. For ~75 years, it was mathematicians and scientists doing interesting, thoughtful work and trying to solve problems, making only the usual human mistakes. What “AI” did to machine learning is as tragic as what it did to artists.

I have conflicted feelings about this birthday gift.

We have made a new mistake over here. My son named him "Charon" because "he is strong and gentle and likes travelling," and I couldn't argue with that.

This is my new favourite take on the question of "when does an AI get a soul?"

Cool cool their OS is 9 years out of date and API KEYS ARE HARDCODED. Brilliant work from Micah.

rip annie dillard

Approximating the Lorenz attractor with a chaotic leaky water wheel. The orange dot is the centre of mass of the water. It traces (a projection of) the familiar attractor as the wheel spins seemingly randomly left and right.

Steen has also done proof and copy editing for academic papers my lab has put out. He's great at picking up context without getting lost in it!

I saw what's left of Dawes glacier today, and promptly ruined several strangers' vacations by showing them a photo I took from a bit further back in 2007.

I spent my first 5 months out of college getting paid to play Barbie Horse Adventures, working for a former member of N.W.A.

A good rule of thumb: If the press release (or stenographic news reporting masquerading as journalism) says that an "AI" did something, that's deliberate obfuscation. Software doesn't do anything of its own accord, but folks sure like to talk about it as if it does: >>

Why hello Seattle. I wish I was doing more than passing through.

For those who were at my worldcon talk: here is a far better explanation of why there was no "model going rogue".

RIP Gloria Steinem. The world has lost a true pioneer and force for women rights,,, my deepest condolences to her family, friends, and team. Public Enemy will be forever grateful for her blessing and support of our track SHE GOT GAME. open.spotify.com/album/0BG4L6...

I got to meet her at the Women's March in 2017, and even in her 80s she was still made of ferocity. What a legend.

Coincidentally, the summer after this is when I got involved with lockpicking.

📣 My lab at NYU currently has two open post-doc positions. We are interested in understanding perception, thinking, and hallucinations. We employ a range of cutting-edge techniques in human neuroscience (e.g., 7T fMRI, MEG, iEEG/DES) and computational approaches (e.g., DNN modeling).

Not at all the obituary I wanted to read today

Street art in her honor from SE Seattle

This is more succinct than the explanations I've been giving can I steal it?

Semi - counter: writing is hard. Academics are not trained to write well, and frequently the time doesn't exist to write well in today's world. (Papers from the 60s, otoh, are often delightful and very clear). Formulaic, dense writing is easier.

I'm forever grateful to Sheila for all of her work in the science fiction community as a mentor, memory keeper, editor, and general fount of knowledge. Her kids need help paying for her recovery.

PSA: If you haven't moved to another search engine yet, tenbluelinks.org will help you get rid of the generated clutter on Google.

I wondered why my hometown was on the list, then realised the first non -(white, Middle Eastern, or Asian) person I spoke to was when I went to visit colleges.

at long last we have created the Uzumaki from the famous Junji Ito manga "don't create the Uzumaki"

I did a podcast interview the other day where the man I was talking to was genuinely shocked that AI bias can exist in the presence of guardrails. This is a fantastic example!

Take a scrolling break and read this

Mistakes have been made. This is where to go to watch me self-combust at Worldcon this year.

It's official! SING THE DOWNED BIRDS has been announced!

FINAL WEEK! Submit by Friday the 31st!

Constructing counter-examples is "easier" than developing new theoretical frameworks, but I'll admit this prompt still took the air out of my lungs.

OpenAI is doing this because Mythos got airtime thanks to the media that does press-release-as-aservice. So now, as one security engineer put it, “something which would have been an embarrassment ten years ago is now repackaged as a capability demo, a heroic AI-vs-AI story and a marketing pitch"

Legend. Added to personal vocabulary.