Gravity, Guardrails, and the Boot

The White House just banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from its grounds. Reporters were turned away. Credentials were confiscated. Trump called their reporting “FAKE NEWS,” said other outlets could follow, and described the offending press as a threat to “national security.”

Being Taught to Count

A boy asked me how long I’d been teaching. When I said fifteen years, he asked whether I was burnt out.

I told him no. That probably eighty percent of my interactions with students are positive. I enjoy being around them. They leave me with a weird hope about the future.

GrAss: a teacher-designed grading assistant

I've been working on a project for a while now and wanted to share a brief glimpse of it and also kind of document what has been occupying my time: GrAss: teacher-designed AI & grading system. 

The Education of an Oracle

“Gambling with our lives,” warned departing Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon. Now Dario Amodei writes, “We must slow the pace.” The people building powerful minds are warning that their ability to control them may not keep up.

I remain an apocaloptimist. 

The Robots Have Smokestacks

Krystal Polk’s family has owned its Southaven land for generations. Now, she tells Scientific American, company representatives question relatives near the property, and the family carries tax records to establish that it belongs there. Across the road stands the power plant feeding Elon Musk’s AI ambitions.

The Listener Before the Song

In a Thai mangrove, fireflies flashed while nearby crickets chirped at almost the same tempo. For a moment it looked like interspecies music: light and sound keeping time. Then the analysis dissolved the romance. The two species were not synchronized. They were not answering one another. They had simply arrived at nearly the same beat.

Holding the Cosmic Door Open

Yesterday, the inward spiral and axial stretching in OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes announcement made something click. Its technical paper constructs a smoothly forced fluid flow whose velocity becomes unbounded in finite time while its total kinetic energy remains bounded. Viscosity is still present. The flow concentrates despite it.

My mind went straight to black holes.