The most famous choice in science fiction is epistemically impossible to make rationally. Morpheus offers Neo ’the truth’ but gives him no way to evaluate the offer. Cypher’s decision to go back is more philosophically coherent than the films acknowledge.
Euclid’s algorithm for computing greatest common divisors, applied to the problem of distributing k drum beats as evenly as possible among n time slots, generates rhythmic patterns that match traditional timelines from West Africa, Cuba, Brazil, Turkey, and the Balkans. An algorithm devised in Alexandria around 300 BCE encodes the rhythmic structure of musical cultures that had no contact with ancient Greek mathematics.
Everyone has a Downloads folder full of “scan0023.pdf” and “document(3)-final-FINAL.pdf”. Renaming them by content sounds trivial — read the file, understand what it is, give it a name. The implementation reveals something useful about how LLMs actually handle text: what a token is, why context windows matter in practice, why you want structured output instead of prose, and why heuristics should go first. The repository is at github.com/sebastianspicker/AI-PDF-Renamer.
The Oracle is the most interesting character in The Matrix for anyone who thinks about AI alignment. She systematically lies to Neo for his own good. The films present this as wisdom. I think it is a cautionary tale the Wachowskis didn’t know they were writing.
In 1935, Schrödinger introduced the cat as a reductio ad absurdum of quantum superposition. Ninety years later, “cat states” — superpositions of coherent states with opposite phases — are a practical tool in quantum computing. Bosonic cat qubits have bit-flip times exceeding minutes, scaling exponentially with photon number, and are among the leading architectures for fault-tolerant quantum computation. The cat is no longer a paradox. It is a qubit.
In December 2024, Google published a Nature paper announcing that their Willow chip demonstrated quantum error correction below the threshold — the point at which larger codes become more reliable, not less. The headline about “10^25 years of classical computation” was technically true and mostly a distraction. The real result is more important and less flashy: for the first time, a quantum processor demonstrated that logical error rates decrease exponentially as the code grows. This is what scalable quantum computing looks like at its first credible step.
On 2 December 2024 I gave three workshops at HfMT Köln’s Thementag on AI and music education. The handouts covered data protection, AI tools for students, and AI in teaching. This post is the argument behind them — focused on the curriculum question that none of the tools answer on their own: what should change, and what should not?
I am on the spectrum. Code is easy; emotions are not. This post is about the phrase ‘making mental illness visible’, what science actually tells us about that goal, why a non-affected person fundamentally cannot understand — and why trying still matters.
A third post in the networked music performance series. Technical latency is solved. Institutional infrastructure has a name. What students actually learn — and what conservatoire curricula consistently get wrong about teaching it — turns out to be a different problem entirely.
In October 2024, the largest known prime was discovered — 41 million digits, found by a GPU cluster. But the deepest prime story is not about record-breaking numbers. It is about a 1972 teatime conversation at the Institute for Advanced Study, a pair correlation formula, and the suspicion — numerically confirmed to extraordinary precision — that the zeros of the Riemann zeta function are the energy levels of an undiscovered quantum system.