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2025
9 articles on this page- Star Polygons and Drum Machines The {7/2} heptagram is not only a symbol. It is a traversal algorithm over seven beat positions. Because 7 is prime, that traversal never gets trapped in a sub-orbit.
- The Cat’s Eye: Slit Pupils, Thin-Film Mirrors, and 135-Fold Dynamic Range Domestic-cat pupils change area by about 135-fold, and a reflective tapetum sends transmitted light back through the retina. The pupil/ecology link is a comparative correlation; simple multilayer equations illustrate tapetal optics but do not supply cat-specific reflectance or sensitivity values.
- Your Transcript Is Already an Interpretation: AI Transcription and Grounded Theory aTrain and noScribe can run locally and reduce data-transfer exposure in tools that can genuinely save hours of work in qualitative interview research. They also make methodological decisions on your behalf without telling you. If you do grounded theory, you need to know which decisions those are.
- There Is No Blue Pill: The Epistemology of the Red Pill/Blue Pill Choice The red-pill choice is under-evidenced, not formally impossible to make rationally: its evaluation depends on priors, likelihoods, utilities, and unknown consequences. Cypher’s preference for simulated experience can be separated from his betrayal.
- The Oldest Algorithm in the World Plays the Clave 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, produces patterns that can be compared with timelines documented in several musical traditions. The mathematical similarity does not establish a shared origin, cultural equivalence or historical transmission.
- The Papertrail: AI PDF Renaming and the Tokens That Make It Interesting 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 project, now called Folionym, is at github.com/sebastianspicker/folionym.
- The Oracle Problem: What The Matrix Got Right About AI Alignment The Oracle is the most interesting character in The Matrix for anyone who thinks about AI alignment. On one reading, she manages Neo’s beliefs for an outcome she judges good. That makes her a useful fictional case about honesty, autonomy, and paternalism—not a textbook diagnosis of a real AI system.
- From Thought Experiment to Qubit: Schrödinger’s Cat at Ninety 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 can bias bit-flip errors exponentially with photon number under appropriate stabilisation, and are a serious candidate architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computation. The cat is no longer a paradox. It is a qubit.
- Below Threshold: What Google’s Willow Chip Actually Proved 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.