Viewing profile — olooney

Scholars and academics have been bemoaning the pointlessness of what the article calls "knowledge work" for centuries. A few of my favorites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amer…

I've taken a lot of notes and done a lot of "scratchpad thinking" over the last 20 years, something I started in college but really got into in grad school. I've tried Evernote, On…

A brief chronology of the extended mind thesis: * Characteristica universalis, Leibniz (c. 1679) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis * As We May Think, Vann…

I've been thinking of getting refern.app[1] to organize and catalog images... Have you used that? Do you have an opinion of how it stacks up against digiKam for the organization us…

On a similar note: on Steam, the original Dark Souls game[1] is listed with the "souls-like" tag. That's not wrong , I guess, but just kind of a tautology. Grice's maxims[2] genera…

Good discussion, but this conclusion: > I don’t know. Maybe a little. is not the right way to interpret the null result (insufficient evidence to reject null hypothesis that it has…

I wrote several polyomino solvers for this project: https://www.oranlooney.com/demos/soma-forest/ One of them used constraint solving with Z3, which was indeed reasonably fast. How…

> so hopefully you can refresh a few times and get a fresh one every time If you randomly sample from only 60 quotes, then after 10 refreshes there will be a greater than 50% chanc…

I've been collecting quotes for a long time (about twenty years now) and have recently been thinking of doing something interesting with them. For example, I recently added a flash…

If you enjoy this kind of thing, you might also like Martin Kleppe's work, such as the Quine Clock: https://aem1k.com/qlock/ I reverse engineered it to a unobfuscated version a few…

Stigler's Law of Eponymy strikes again! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

I like the 4-5-6 theorem: pi^4 + pi^5 = e^6 Well, to five decimal places, anyway. Some other good ones: e^pi - pi = 20 sqrt(2) ln pi = phi There are also famous "almost integers" s…

This is quite interesting. Because of science fiction like the short story Lena [1] and the video game Soma [2], I've come to the realization that whole brain emulation[3] is unbel…

Greg Egan's description of how mathematics evolves into "truth mining" in his novel Diaspora is seeming more and more prescient. It essentially describes what mathematics would loo…

Haruki Murakami's entire body of work is basically self-therapy[1] and personally I feel it's been very therapeutic. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an excellent place to start. [1]:…

It could return a vector or a deferred expression? In polars, for example, operations on `pl.col` return `Expr` objects that are used to build queries, not immediately evaluated: d…

> undeterministic abstraction I've seen people argue that LLMs will just add another layer to the top of the compiler stack: instead of writing code, we'll use English, and run it …

Incredibly detailed! The vision transformer stuff in particular is very useful to know. It's interesting that the token budgets are so much higher (up to 1120) than GPT, which uses…

This isn't surprising; the majority of programmers are using LLMs, and Claude is pretty good for coding. Penetration testing is also a pretty good fit for an agentic loop - you run…