The unreasonable effectiveness of failure:
Science works by trial and error. But we often underappreciate the "error" part. Processes that try to eliminate failure also necessarily inhibit progress. Here's the mathematical argument:

Why do people in the SF bay area make so much money? Reading Steven Pinker's latest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..., sparked the idea that it might be because this region has expertise for solving an economic coordination problem called the Stag Hunt in game theory.

The AIs know me pretty well. That's ... good?

Hanging out in sfba (Sunnyvale) this week.

Short trip to silicon valley (Sunnyvale)!

Evaluate software and code like AI models do it internally, by the number of bits of, universal, non-overfitted, non biased, explanatory knowledge having been encoded into the code base. benoitessiambre.com/haystacks.html

From @matt-levine.bsky.social. The silver lining for non-US countries is that if we play our cards right we might, with the push the current US government is providing, attract more tech, science and finance work while the US is focusing on getting the factory work.

I'm excited to see that a team explicitly tried a Minimum Description Length approach to solving ARC-AGI: "CompressARC searches for the shortest possible description of a puzzle that can accurately reproduce the examples and the solution when unpacked.". arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/c...

One of my all-time favorite album.

Playing music on my Tektronix (all credits for the music go to oscilloscopemusic.com )

Pics I took last evening of the oscilloscope, scantily clad.

Santa was generous this year and got me an antique oscilloscope for Christmas.

Unix was an effort to take Multics, a too modular operating system, and integrate the good parts into a unified whole. Even though there were benefits to the modularity of Multics (eg. replacing hardware in servers without reboot, rare at the time), it was also its downfall.

Happy New Quarter Century!

Reskeet with a picture of yourself where you’re vaguely menacing.

How to leverage the lightcone around the source of truth with Postgres: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4203...