Zotero Catalogue

vector and full-text search built on object storage: fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable

A love letter to turbopuffer, a new kind of AI company

In light of Portland’s Royal Sonesta Hotel—bought in 2016 for $108.3M, and selling this week for a reported $6.83M, a 93% drop —I am re-upping my monograph “The Gloss of Good Intentions: How Portland Blew a Chance to Become the Next Great American City.”

I’m aetos, a systems engineer driven mostly by curiosity and an unreasonable attention to detail.

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Swarms of Claude and GPT agents in Minecraft and Mindustry.

Young adults are taking a more pragmatic and career-oriented approach to education than previous generations

One of the things that bugs me about many weblogs is that there is absolutely no information on the writer and their background. Without this background, I often wonder “why the hell should I care about what’s being said here?” Hopefully this page will let you decide if my opinions matter or not. Its length […]

Weaving your favorite blogs, social media, and more into a unified and chronological timeline.

I’m writing this post from a hospital bed. And I couldn’t be happier. You hear folks say chemotherapy sucks, but until you go through it yourself, you don’t really know how bad it can be. It remains a popular activity only because it’s better than the alternative. My first exposure to chemotherapy was with this […]

OpenAI shares model results on the Kakeya conjecture, Exponential Time Hypothesis, and quantum chromodynamics—and how researchers can verify and build on them.

Anthropic's IPO filing dedicates 80 pages to the risks of AI, nearly double the 48 pages it spends discussing its business plans, according to Reuters.

More and more of your terminal work now runs through tools that push the terminal harder than a shell prompt ever did: AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex, full-screen apps like Neovim and tmu

The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I have a spicily optimistic take: I think there's a huge opportunity for junior engineers.

Reflections on a Flamewar (May 14, 2011) Spoiler: Actual change of opinion below!  You’ll need to read to the end, though. I’ve learned that the only way to find out who reads this blog…

5 posts published by Scott during December 1999

As I announced on this blog a couple weeks ago, I’m teaching a new course this semester at UT Austin, entitled AI Alignment Theory. To call such a course “timely” seems like an un…

Keep going! Check out the next lesson and practice what you’re learning: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/a...

We sought to determine whether reading a novel causes measurable changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain and how long these changes persist. Incorporating a within-subjects design, participants received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on 19 consecutive days. First, baseline resting state data for a “washin” period were taken for each participant for 5 days. For the next 9 days, participants read 1/9th of a novel during the evening and resting-state data were taken the next morning. Finally, resting-state data for a “wash-out” period were taken for 5 days after the conclusion of the novel. On the days after the reading, significant increases in connectivity were centered on hubs in the left angular/supramarginal gyri and right posterior temporal gyri. These hubs corresponded to regions previously associated with perspective taking and story comprehension, and the changes exhibited a timecourse that decayed rapidly after the completion of the novel. Long-term changes in connectivity, which persisted for several days after the reading, were observed in bilateral somatosensory cortex, suggesting a potential mechanism for “embodied semantics.”