Jake Spinella

Someone in my department is leaving full plastic cups of coffee on the counter— for days at a time—even though we have a sink. They have done this *after* the sign went up. Utterly deranged!

“I think it’s important for a dog to experience the world in a sober state of mind” is going to enter my lexicon

John Perry, “The Problem of the Essential Indexical”, 1979:

How it feels to be a professor in the year of 2026

Finally, a perfect philosophy talk

A play in three acts

How every conversation with an effective altruist goes:

A colleague of mine found some great marginalia in a used copy of Hacker’s Insight and Illusion

Great poem alert

Will Stencil 0/10 obvious ragebait

I think this is wrong—instead of sending their proof to the annals of mathematics, they should send it to me, so I can send it to the annals of mathematics

What if the real AI alignment was the friends we made along the way

Pronouncing ‘Claude’ like ‘Sade’ as a form of resistance

PSYCHOLOGIST: we think that this explanation is conceptually flawed, so we ran 400 undergrads through a two year study PSYCHOLOGIST: turns out, it’s conceptually flawed

Asking Claude to find De Zerbi’s email and to tell him how Tottenham can score more goals.

Abstract for a fun little study I've been running in my spare time. It compares LLM reasoning across tasks that hold content fixed but vary format (iconic vs. discursive), and asks what that shows, if anything, about the format of LLM representations. Full preprint coming soon!

This is the far more likely pathway for how AI will end us all, btw. Not via some superintelligent swarm of paperclip maximizers, but by a cascading sequence of dumb fuckups driven by human beings who have arranged things to be fast-moving and catastrophically fragile while also being really lazy.

They Live but donning the glasses allows you to see the true logical form of natural language sentences

Anthropic is just like me

Someone just walked into this coffee shop with a “New York or Nowhere” tote bag. We are in Chicago Illinois

AI is the future now everyone has their very own idiot junior analyst

Who among us is ready to crawl towards culture??

Amazing things happening on threads right now

I really wish Wittgenstein were alive today. I think he would’ve loved BlueSky and Grindr.

Vengaboys Vengaboys Vengaboys Vengaboys Vengaboys Vengaboys Vengaboys Aqua Yo-Yo Ma

Puzzle of the self-torturer but instead of turning the knob up one unit you’re forced to watch one more second of Tottenham football

It needs a bit of sprucing up, but it sure is nice to have your own office!

As a philosopher, the best thing about the AI boom is being able to ask “So what are you going to do with that?” to computer science majors.

Proud to finally have a {DOCUMENT_TYPE} with my {FIRST_NAME} {LAST_NAME} on it