The Rundown - November 12, 2025

• Charlie Meyer, LLMs Are the Ultimate Demoware:

“LLMs, on the other hand, can provide seemingly excellent results in a demo environment with minimal work. LLMs have a surface level understanding of essentially every domain, and with a bit of prompting, can create an excellent demo for many use cases...However, LLMs are shallow. Outside of the demo, there are very real downsides to consider.”

• Ars Technica: New image-generating AIs are being used for fake expense reports

• The school for inclement weather:

“The school for inclement weather is a 365-acre refuge and radical observatory set on the banks of an atmospheric river, just above the thermal belt in Kashia Pomo territory in Northern California.

We practice disaster companionship – systems of knowledge and care that emerge from weathering the earth (and each other) amidst planetary demise. Our work asks: as the earth mutates, how must we mutate in return? ”

• Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI:

“There are myriad ways to leverage and reshape AI to improve peoples’ lives, distribute rather than concentrate power, and even strengthen democratic processes. Many examples have arisen from the scientific community and deserve to be celebrated.

Some examples: AI is eliminating communication barriers across languages, including under-resourced contexts like marginalized sign languages and indigenous African languages. It is helping policymakers incorporate the viewpoints of many constituents through AI-assisted deliberations and legislative engagement. Large language models can scale individual dialogs to address climate–change skepticism, spreading accurate information at a critical moment. National labs are building AI foundation models to accelerate scientific research. And throughout the fields of medicine and biology, machine learning is solving scientific problems like the prediction of protein structure in aid of drug discovery, which was recognized with a Nobel Prize in 2024.”

The Rundown - November 3, 2025

• Charlie Stross on the upcoming energy transition (The pivot):

“Notwithstanding the world being on fire, an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Nazis popping out of the woodwork everywhere, actual no-shit fractional trillionaires trying to colonize space in order to secede from the rest of the human species, an ongoing European war that keeps threatening to drag NATO into conflict with the rotting zombie core of the former USSR, and an impending bubble collapse that’s going to make 2000 and 2008 look like storms in a teacup ...

I’m calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.

It’s pretty clear now that a lot of the unrest we’re seeing—and the insecurity-induced radicalization—is due to an unprecedented civilizational energy transition that looks to be more or less irreversible at this point. ”

• Anthony Moser: I Am An AI Hater:

“I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response. Miyazaki said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” Scam Altman said we can surround the solar system with a Dyson Sphere to hold data centers. Miyazaki is right, and Altman is wrong. Miyazaki tells stories that blend the ordinary and the fantastic in ways people find deeply meaningful. Altman tells lies for money.”

• Tools to sabotage AI.

• Catastrophic Forgetting in LLMs: A Comparative Analysis Across Language Tasks.

“As we progress toward an agentic world where LLM-based agents autonomously handle specialized tasks, it becomes crucial for these models to adapt to new tasks without forgetting previously learned information - a challenge known as catastrophic forgetting. ”

STATUS: October 31, 2025

• DISSERTATION: 3750 notes, 122 pages. Will need to be in editing and drafting mode this November.

• INBOX: 133 messages.

• LAST WATCHED: A House of Dynamite

• READING: Poor Economics, by Banerjee and Duflo

Catching up from the last update: Finished my required coursework with a chapter presentation last July. Went back to the Philippines. Attended a conference in Spain. Now on my way back to Japan.

The Rundown - October 25, 2025

• If only Arxiv required researchers to sign at the top rather than the bottom of the page, none of this would’ve happened:

“[I]t’s hard to design a convincing fake study. Fake things look fake. Reality is overdetermined.”

• Chris Kelley - “Vibes won’t cut it”:

• From Carl Brown (The Internet of Bugs):

“ The building block task of programming, going back 40+ years, is writing a block of code that takes some input, does some processing as described by some requirements, and returns some output. Code generation AIs do this pretty well, even for some extremely hard programming riddles that coders (and AI companies) like to brag about solving. However, most of the advancements in programming languages, technique, and craft in the last 40 years have been designing safer and better ways of tying these blocks together to create larger and larger programs with more complexity and functionality. Humans use these advancements to arrange these blocks in logical abstraction layers, so we can fit an understanding of the layers’ interconnections in our heads as we work, diving into blocks temporarily as needed. This is where the AIs fall down. The amount of context required to hold the interconnections between these blocks quickly grows beyond the AIs’ effective short term memory (in practice, much smaller than its advertised context window size), and the AIs lack the ability to reason about the abstractions as we do. This leads to real-word code that’s illogically layered, hard to understand, debug, and maintain.”

• My next tech/hobby project: MacintoshPi - Mac OS 7/8/9 for Raspberry Pi

• The AI that we’ll have after AI:

“So the bubble is bad. Really bad. But even so, there will be things we can salvage from it: open source models, skilled programmers, cheap GPUs bought out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar. It would be better if we created that stuff without burning the world’s economy to the ground and emitting a heptillion tons of CO2, but ignoring the productive residue of the AI crash won’t bring the economy back, or suck the carbon out of the atmosphere.”

The Rundown - October 20, 2025

• Specific suggestions for sabotage - “E.g. #02678 - Change expense codes without notifying people in advance“

• Just fucking code:

“Put the LLM down. Programming isn’t that goddamn hard.

These days even wordpress-plugin-installers call themselves engineers. HTML “programmers” produce static markup and still have the arrogance to demand the “developer” title. But hey, at least they’re still using their fucking hands.

The bar for programming is in the dirt, but with the help of your Cursor subscription, you’ve managed to wriggle underneath it.”

• Negative space programming:

“Negative space programming involves placing constraints and assertions throughout your code to explicitly define invalid states and conditions. By doing this, you ensure that the code fails fast and early, preventing unintended behaviors from propagating through the system. ”

• The Last Days of Social Media:

“Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks. ”

STATUS: April 13, 2025

INBOX: 243 emails, 12 tasks. I have been trying to keep the information feeds at bay while doing most of my tasks offline.

DISSERTATION: 2,295 notes, 103 pages. Haven’t touched the manuscript for a while. I am back to doing background research.

SHIPPING FORECAST: Will spend most of the what remains of the weekend dealing with the inbox and other administrivia.

READING: Midnight in Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbotham

WATCHING: Season 2 of Severance

STATUS: April 4, 2025

INBOX: 124 messages. I will try to go through all of them, prioritizing those most likely to bleed to death.

OPERATIONS: I have been out a lot, enjoying the cherry blossoms. Classes for the spring term has started, and I will have to re-establish a regular research and writing workflow.

DISSERTATION: 102 pages, 2,236 notes. The manuscript is at a standstill, but I’m trying to keep a consistent pace when it comes to writing notes from readings.

READING: The Clockwork Universe, by Edward Dolnick.

WATCHING: The Americans

A Very Late Start for 2025

Once again, I am asking myself to start posting regularly. Here is what has happened since the last time I was here:

Survived another winter in Japan. Which included a time where a snowstorm pretty much covered the whole country with record-breaking snowfall.

Went back to Manila for a month. I was hoping for a chill vacation filled with long drives and casual writing/editing. Instead, I had full days of reunions, meetings, and administrative errands for the detritus of our lives: the condo, the car, the job, the practice. All involved periodic renewals that could only be handled on site.

The dissertation is now at 102 pages. The Zettelkasten has 2,173 notes. Still a lot of notes to be folded into the outline and encoded, and a lot of adviser comments to be integrated. A lot of writing and programming ahead.

STATUS: November 11, 2024

INBOX: 201 unread messages. Please hold while I clam up and panic inside.

DAILY STEPS: 6,184 on average. I have four months to bring it up to 9000 (my commitment to my doctor and the Ministry of Health). At this rate I should be out there every day, walking to the library, walking to the cafes where I’m supposed to be writing my thesis.

DISSERTATION: 71 pages, 1,693 notes. A lot of programming background notes that I’m sure will not make it to the draft.

STATUS: November 1, 2024

INBOX: 110 unread messages. Back to keeping emails at bay. I am way behind some projects.

DISSERTATION: 70 pages, 1,634 notes. I feel like I’ve stalled when it comes to research and programming for the new chapters. All I’m doing is bulk up the existing chapters.

SHIPPING FORECAST: Likely going to stay put over the weekend, because of the rain and the cold.

WATCHING: Homeland, Season 1