Ryan Moulton

If you thought my last post didn't have enough birds, or enough math, or enough math about birds, I have the post for you. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/08/14/f...

Dead internet theory is false, but dead ragebait theory is true. If it's ragebait it's presumptively fake. Demand outstrips the natural supply.

Dead internet theory is false, but dead ragebait theory is true. www.pangram.com/history/04c2...

Every cradle of civilization based its existence on modified grass. Corn, wheat, rice, emmer, barley, oats, all grass. Grass didn't exist until the late Cretaceous and didn't spread until the Oligocene, 30 mya. The Great Filter is grass.

I want to tell all the Chinese barbers in the bay area that you don't have to keep the same price for 30 years. You don't have to charge $15 for a haircut. I feel so bad for them.

If we're an ancestor simulation we're probably a random joke somebody made at a party. "What if Donald Trump had been president at the singularity? lol." "*burp* I'm gonna type it in." "Haha, no wait. That's too mean to that world. You can't put them through that." "Too late."

CALL FOR AI DETECTION BENCHMARKS I believe it is vital that third parties are able to audit AI detectors like Pangram. Our largest sample size benchmark, from UChicago, was run on Pangram 3 and is a year old now.

If you have a tweet that goes viral and contains even an 8th grade vocabulary word, you'll get a bunch of quote tweets saying "look at this guy who learned this word yesterday and is trying to show off."

It's a real problem in the design of consciousness that you need to be unconscious every day to live, but can't diagnose any problems with your unconscious period because you aren't conscious.

Thank goodness.

They have this exhibit at the exploratorium. It's a giant parabolic mirror. You can reach out and poke upside down you in the eye.

Every time somebody dms me that they really appreciate my blog, I send it to my wife, and this convinces her that it's worth the time I spend on it, so anything you send me directly contributes to the time I have to work on new articles.

It's cool that purple and orange have become the canonical Halloween colors like red and green are for Christmas. Halloween did not have canonical colors when I was a kid.

I've uncovered a new spam technique on youtube music. You make a playlist for a holiday, like halloween songs, fill it with common favorites, but intersperse them with your own copies of public domain music that are each a half hour long.

My rate of coffee consumption is primarily limited by the fact that quality coffee takes time to prepare.

Now that we're divorced from twitter we should start calling it our spectral cluster rather than referring to twitter's proprietary and extinct algorithm. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectra...

Whenever people post this meme I'm unclear whether they want the datacenters to require more approvals, or the high speed rail to require fewer.

If you have a front door, and aren't decorating for Halloween, I assume you are either elderly and infirm, overwhelmed with young kids, are undergoing some immense personal tragedy that forces you to neglect day-to-day things, or you don't understand the purpose of life.

Are we not hearing about catastrophic hardware vulnerabilities because our hardware is actually that good or because people are holding them back since they're unpatchable?

The naive proportion would divide by height^3, and height^2 is just picked empirically, so yeah, there's no way 2 is the optimal exponent.