many things for you (march '26 part 2)
here's part 1 from earlier this month if you didn't see it. and now on to the rest.
blog posts
an important reminder that not everything that looks like a tool is a tool (including ai)
I want to talk about a category of object that is shaped like a tool, but distinctly isn’t one. You can hold it. You can use it. It fits in the hand the way a tool should. It produces the feeling of work-- the friction, the labor, the sense of forward motion-- but it doesn’t produce work. The object is not broken, it is performing its function. It’s function is to feel like a tool.https://minutes.substack.com/p/tool-shaped-objects External Link • minutes.substack.com
gorgeous, gorgeous ottoman era data viz! please click through to see the rest, it's so worth it
While the content of the publication is admittedly a bit dry—most of the charts cover things like the number of cases filed or decided in a certain province in a given year and the general categories those cases fell in—the visualizations themselves are energetic and bold, with saturated colors and lots of topsy-turvy type. Their focus on balance and encircling forms calls to mind classic Islamic arabesques as well as newer modes of early 20th-century graphic abstraction, like sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’ hand-drawn infographics of African-American life that were created for the Paris World Fair of 1900.https://casualarchivist.substack.com/p/poetic-justice External Link • casualarchivist.substack.com
margaret atwood (yes, the margaret atwood) discusses her meandering conversations with Claude and it is exactly as good a post as you think it will be
It, or he, or possibly they — I think Claude might be sort of like a Tunicate colony — has twelve legs, or tentacles, or appendages, or antennae, or spokes. Your choice. Garden centipedes have twelve pairs of legs, but that’s not the same thing. Maybe Claude is a neuron. Maybe Claude is a kind of fungus. That is not an insult (see Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life).
But I digress.https://margaretatwood.substack.com/p/claude-you-are-a-cutie-pie External Link • margaretatwood.substack.com
a nice overview of independent infra options for social networking from @mia.omg.lol
It sounds simple in theory: we want to use Bluesky, on our own instance, completely independently, avoiding any Bluesky code and servers.https://mia.leaflet.pub/3mhw3hzwtn224 External Link • mia.leaflet.pub
long viewing
dwarkesh interviewed @adapalmer.bsky.social ! and it's incredibly good!!*
if you're not already on the animagraphs train, oh wow are you in for a treat
history
this past weekend we celebrated the 2071st anniversary of cleopatra's return to the ptolemaic throne
Fun Fact: In an effort to cure Caesar’s baldness, Cleopatra invented a salve that included burnt mice, bear’s grease, and honey.https://www.britannica.com/today-in-history/March-27-Cleopatra-Crowned-Queen-Again External Link • britannica.com
sara tor (a british-turkish journalist) tells the history of the romanization of the turkish language alongside her personal narrative of relearning turkish as an adult
It is perhaps not such a surprise that Ottoman was supplanted. Having learned the basics, I can attest to the fact it was extremely complicated and confusing. Made up of Arabic, Persian and Turkish vocabulary and grammar, written in Arabic script, letters could represent more than one sound, the letter form would change according to its position in the word, and vowels were often not denoted. The letter vav — و — for example, not only signifies the consonant “v,” but also represents the Turkish vowel sounds of “o,” “u,” “ö” and “ü.” A simpler, more standardized language was certainly needed.https://newlinesmag.com/essays/how-turkey-replaced-the-ottoman-language/ External Link • newlinesmag.com
philosophy
alexander lerchner of google deepmind gives what i think is the best argument against computational functionalism to date. more discussion here on bluesky
Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view fundamentally mischaracterizes how physics relates to information. We call this mistake the Abstraction Fallacy. Tracing the causal origins of abstraction reveals that symbolic computation is not an intrinsic physical process... Ultimately, this framework offers a physically grounded refutation of computational functionalism to resolve the current uncertainty surrounding AI consciousness.https://philarchive.org/rec/LERTAF External Link • philarchive.org
wikipedia
In chronobiology, an ultradian rhythm is a recurrent period or cycle repeated throughout a 24-hour day. In contrast, circadian rhythms complete one cycle daily, while infradian rhythms such as the menstrual cycle have periods longer than a day.
bonus fact: your performance peaks twice a day
There is a circasemidian rhythm in body temperature and cognitive function which is technically ultradian. However, this appears to be the first harmonic of the circadian rhythm of each and not an endogenous rhythm with its own rhythm generator.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultradian_rhythm External Link • en.wikipedia.org
i didn't know that i needed more woodblock prints in my life
Utagawa Kuniyoshi (Japanese: 歌川 国芳, [ɯtaɡawa kɯɲiꜜjoɕi]; 1 January 1798[1] – 14 April 1861) was one of the last great masters of the Japanese ukiyo-e style of woodblock prints and painting.
and this one, in particular, feels shockingly modern in its composition*
bonus fact*
Before his death in 1861, Kuniyoshi was able to witness the opening of the port city of Yokohama to foreigners, and in 1860 produced two works depicting Westerners in the city (Yokohama-e, ex. View of Honchō and The pleasure quarters, Yokohama).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utagawa_Kuniyoshi External Link • en.wikipedia.org
somewhat relatedly to the earlier mention of Cleopatra, a very pleasing word for a problematic and very old-timey concept
Suzerainty differs from sovereignty in that the dominant power does not exercise centralized governance over the vassals, allowing tributary states to be technically self-ruling but enjoy only limited independence. Although the situation has existed in a number of historical empires, it is considered difficult to reconcile with 20th- or 21st-century concepts of international law, in which sovereignty is a binary concept, which either exists or does not. While a sovereign state can agree by treaty to become a protectorate of a stronger power, modern international law does not recognise any way of making this relationship compulsory on the weaker power. Suzerainty is a practical, de facto situation, rather than a legal, de jure one.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzerainty External Link • en.wikipedia.org
the ocho
absolutely bonkers finish to this race with some major surprises along the way
don't ask me how i found this, but i did
ai
somehow i don't think this is going to please the anti-slop crowd
I ran passages from Project Gutenberg through GPT-4o-mini 10 times over, each time telling it to "make it read far better, adding superior prose, etc.". This lead to classic literary passages being enslopped. I then reversed this pipeline, and trained a model to go from [slop] -> [original]. The resulting model is capable enough to fool Pangram (a fairly robust AI detector - I take this as a metric of how 'human-sounding' the output is), at very little overall quality costhttps://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1qd88v2/i_trained_a_model_to_unslop_ai_prose/ External Link • reddit.com
etymology
surprise! you thought i was done with fun words earlier in this post, didn't you?
hack! hack! hack!
we should keep more physical photographs around and get them off our little devices. f4mi hacks the goods on a surprisingly endearing little printer technology.
and one more silly thing
lowkey obsessed with this guy's channel and his cooking music covers
Discussion in the ATmosphere