Andrew 🧮

not a cheerful topic by any means, but might be the most interesting book I finished this year ndrewwm.com/reading/alex...

turns out spiders can take a lil nap

Subtweeting yesterday’s AI discourse, I wrote about Breiman’s Two Cultures paper and what we want from our forecasting models.

resolution: more novels in the reading queue for the coming year

YCSE’s "second half [is shocking] because the intervention of the prison has made it impossible to see anything, turning the film into one about absence and how we make sense of the violent loss of control that lurks at the boundaries of American life." www.bkmag.com/2026/10/21/y...

a norwegian on Threads posted this and i just don’t know how much more clearly we can emphasize how much Americans are being ripped off by our system which is built to concentrate wealth at the top

"There is a growing sense that the political mainstream has tired of trying to hinder the rise of the far right and would prefer to write off this loss in order to focus on crushing the possibility of a left-wing alternative." dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

Overdue library books poster c. 1975 Tom Eckersley (British, 1914–1997) Image: Tom Eckersley Collection, Digital Collections, University of the Arts London; digitalcollections.arts.ac.uk/object/?code...

if you were presented with a cup of the primordial soup, would you sip it or take it like a shot?

BTW this means no funding for GSS, ANES, or PSID. GSS 2026 is in the field now, but then it looks like that's it. Devastating for social science.

wikipedia has been ANNIHILATED with AI bot traffic for a while now (because LLMs can't get enough of it) which puts a huge burden on its tech and server costs. and now it looks like bots are making unauthorized edits to pages and trying to hack community tools diff.wikimedia.org/2026/10/05/o...

Par Avion. www.presentandcorrect.com/blogs/blog/p...

Reading the timeline

Computer Rage Marinette, WI

The rapid growth of LLM writing in Econ. From this post with lots of details on how Pangram works for this kind of assessment. paulgp.substack.com/p/how-do-we-...

The contagion of fear bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/13/t...

JOHN SEARLE: In my thought experiment, I intended the "The Chinese Room" to be a cautionary tale TECH COMPANIES: At long last we have built the Chinese Room, which is sentient

there's a small piano in the corner of my neighborhood coffeeshop; most of the time it's used by kiddos, but today we're blessed with an elderly gentleman who's been playing it beautifully for about an hour

The brutal Silo season finale is a series high point.

TIL about Hack's Law: "Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that’s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6. (In symbolic form: L ~ A0.6.)" www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-rive...

gapgirls.bandcamp.com/track/people...

"A company may think a new technology is overhyped, too expensive, or even likely to produce excess capacity and lower profits for the industry as a whole. But if its rivals are spending billions on it, sitting out may be even more risky." www.unpopularfront.news/p/marx-keyne...

This is a good way of putting something that's irritated me: "I liken the AI-native attitude to someone who goes into the MoMA, looks at a Jackson Pollock, declares that they, too, can generate this thing that looks like a finger painting." eytanadar.medium.com/ai-native-ph...

after 2 months of working solely on my laptop, I'm finally back to having desktop monitors 😭

El-Sayed: "My commitment to Jewish safety is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters. Because if there is one question of political philosophy that ought to animate us all, it's what would we do if we treated all our kids like they were all of our kids?"

I think this is fundamentally wrong but in an interesting way I will need to write about sometime. The key is a) consumers do not choose what is produced, or how, they choose between what is produced. This is a crucial difference

airbnb I’m staying at unintentionally created the toughest punk album cover of 2027

day 3 of ?? where my city's AQI is above 180, generally housebound and feeling like I have a low grade cold

I have seen The Odyssey, and here is my take on the IMAX discourse: it's too dang loud in there

- man, where'd this weekend go - played hide n' seek w/ the niece & nephew - kitchen (mostly) unpacked

deeply annoying that creative breakthroughs don’t come on schedule from direct work but from things like “open-ended conversations with interesting people” and “doing nothing”

I have such an expertly curated algorithm that I'm seeing posts from Mexican street food restaurants in the US and this is how they're advertising the game tomorrow night. "Good vibes"

market capitalization = egg value + goose value

oh my god

POV