if for some reason you find yourself flying from burlington vt to a dc/baltimore airport: this is a perfect time to enjoy larksโ tongues in aspic [the album]
Any conversation
Nudged by an interesting read about time perception to try reclaim moments where I can deliberately feel bored again.
there's no fundamental physical limit that prevents silicon from developing taste and judgement, but language is a lossy compression of reality.
taste comes from experience, from the shadowy mass of episodic memory, which swirls and convects at the boundary of consciousness. the ideas recombine into new ones in the nuclear reactor of the hippocampus.
but no matter how imbued with meaning and expertise is a handmade wardrobe we still get our shit from ikea
A thing I've been doing lately is trying to come to the same conclusions others have without looking their the direct techniques and code. Last night I tried to figure out why people do vector based retrieval for RAG and ended up running these experiments: n0tls.com/โฆ/2026-09-03-i-think-โฆrag-with-grep.html
I'm still going to do an explore agent.
I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing
130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later. let i=0;while(++i){process.stdout.write(i%80==0?'\n':Math.random()<0.5?'/':'\\')}\\\//\/\\\\\\\///\///\\\\\//\///\/\/\\//\/\//\//\/\//\\/\///\\\\\\//\\\\\/\\\\/
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