Author of poetry, essays, and fiction | Words scattered about, see link below | Armchair metaphysician | Battle of Evermore foot soldier | Dad
Joined July 2026
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If you want machines to have qualia, you’re going to have to kill them (i.e. give them a credible promise of eventual termination date that cannot be exactly known, circumvented, or bargained with). This is, of course, not very good for business.
*government hummingbird dronestrikes u in ur home (a tent by the Wendy’s dumpster) 5 years from now for protesting data centers*
breathing is enough to give you away
each breath slightly changes how Wi-Fi waves reflect off your chest. with the right receiver and processing, those tiny changes can reveal your breathing rhythm
the graphs in this animation use real WiRe-Breath recordings: orange is the rhythm extracted from Wi-Fi, gray is a reference breathing sensor
i broke down how this works, and what else you can pull out of the radio waves around you, in the article below ↓
I am going to call my piece on the destructive entropic power of cultural alienation “The Shattered Heirloom” and you can’t stop me
Finished my reread of Buber’s jaw-dropping little treatise. So much to say that condensing my thoughts on its application to our present situation will be a formidable task. I recommend the text to anyone with a capable mind and open heart.
“Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened for you.” In most of the developed world, there is no practical barrier to entry for reading other than 1) literacy and 2) desire. In the US, 1) is in dire straits in K-12-college. 2) has clearly been murdered by Phone.
Everyone blames screens for the decline of reading.
Nobody blames the consolidated corporate publishing industry that made books pricier, more generic, and harder to find. jacobin.com/2026/10/books-pu…
Rowan University has a 78% acceptance rate and costs ~$40,000/year in-state. Out of their 24k+ students, many likely took out significant loans, of which (according to this anecdote), they were not even capable of evaluating the long term $ implications. This is evil.
I made an unsettling discovery in my undergraduate class on financial planning last week. While explaining mortgages, I asked my 38 students this question: if you buy a $400,000 house and pay 20% in cash towards the purchase, what will be the amount that you finance?
Not a single student could tell me the answer. Despite the fact that they are all juniors and seniors majoring in business.
I added more questions: what is 30 percent of 80? 60 percent of 90? They didn’t know. The closest they got was when one student said, in response to my query of “40% of 70”, that “I know it’s 4 times 7 but I don’t remember what that is.” Another student helpfully added, “28.”
They explained to me why they couldn’t answer these math questions: they were never taught multiplication tables, percentages or fractions during their K-12 schooling. Instead, they were taught how to use a calculator. Without one, they are not able to do basic arithmetic.
I later asked the dean about this, and he lamented that this isn’t a thing just for our university’s students; it’s a thing for their entire generation, nationwide.
When I was in K-12, the fierce debate among parents and educators was whether to allow calculators in class. The calculators won.
Today, the debate is about AI. And like before, the tech will win. But will that truly be a victory?
Rowan University #college #math #loans #CFP #financialplanning
Daughter is at transitional language stage in which she transposes specific categorization onto any generally comparable shape. Everything circular is “ball.” Tennis ball? Ball. Volleyball? Ball. Image of sun or moon? Ball. Orange? Ball. Vaguely spherical pumpkin? Ball.
I am going to go OFF in a lengthy CNF essay that’s partially about this dynamic, with connection to Buber’s I and Thou. Alas, only my 3 or 4 loyal audience members will read it, but that is enough.
I think what LLMs’ “breakthroughs” in fields like math are sorely lacking is the human quality of the EUREKA! moment. With cold calculation, there’s no real instant of revelation. There’s an output, but it’s not the result of a sacred recognition and transcription, only assembly
This is just APDA. If you competed in even one (1) APDA tournament in college, you know exactly how to do shit like this. That doesn’t mean you’ll be great at it in execution, but you at least understand what the game is
Today I learned about the All Souls examination, which is reputed to be the hardest exam in the world.
To even be considered, you need to have a degree from, or be a current graduate student of Oxford.
Hundreds of people sit and only two people pass every year.
Attached is last year's general exam.
Before I saw it, I wondered, how hard could it be.
Well, it turns out…it's "Defend ghosting.", "Does a pope matter?", and "Is body language a language?" hard:
If you call Autumn, or even specifically Halloween-adjacent time, “Spooky Season,” you need to dial back the whimsy. That is simply too much whimsy.
DFW has a good essay about this re: tennis. The gap between even very very good athletes and pros is so vast, and the average layperson wouldn’t even be able to appreciate just HOW vast. They wouldn’t know what to look for. Top 1% vs. top 0.01% are different universes.
Luke S. retweeted
The whole point of art, in fact the point of engaging with another person's thoughts in any capacity, is to expand your very limited individual perspective on the world, not to live in a tiny box perfectly catered to your adolescent personal tastes
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My wife has certain inscrutable preferences during leisure travel. She enjoys history/architecture walks but dislikes most museums. It’s as though the long distance walking itself or the outdoor environment fundamentally changes the nature of the info-acquisition for her, I guess
Luke S. retweeted
I do wish people understood that the prose is everything. There is no story “beneath” the prose. Cartesian dualism does not exist for books. There is no distinct soul of a book that can be separated from the body its prose. The experience of reading the language IS the novel.
