A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
This article by Justin Garson on the American Philosophical Association's blog is extremely relevant to my life at the moment. A few months ago, shortly before receiving a diagnosis of Overtraining Syndrom from a consultant, my GP prescribed me an SNRI deal with both physical and mental symptoms that I was experiencing. I'm still on it.
…The ball doesn't always go in the hoop, the can doesn't always come out of the vending machine, the firework sometimes fails to go off, and the spoon sometimes sinks into the soup. That's life.
Paris-based motion design studio Parallel created a series of short animations which aim to do anything but impress, clips that highlight the frustrating day-to-day mishaps by turning them digital. The series, titled UNSATISFYING, aims to go against the trend of oddly satisfying videos that are currently pervading the internet, instead making audiences cringe with scenes that only deliver disappointment.
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I love the idea of "places that only exist at a certain time of the day". If you've ever sat in a quiet place before it gets busy, you'll know that the whole meaning and feeling of a place can change quite suddenly depending not only on the atmospheric conditions, but who's there with you.
…I like this as an encouragement to do things. Everyone thinks that the way they see the world is "obvious" but it's very much dependent on everything from your genetics through to your experience and interests.
…Parenting is hard: you always feel like you're making mistakes, and looking back you always think that you could have done better. That's particularly true with my son, currently 19, who will be moving back in with us for next academic year.
…I'm not sure how cool I am with the latest versions of Anthropic's Claude models (Fable 5 & Mythos 5) seemingly inventing their own internal language:
When we’re first starting to understand a new model’s behavior, the most abundant source of data we have to draw on is its behavior during reinforcement-learning training. Reviewing this evidence for signs of reward hacking (exploiting loopholes that go against the spirit of a task) or unexpected actions can inform what we should be looking out for in the model’s real-world behavior. The most notable finding was illegible reasoning in a few reinforcement-learning environments over long rollout, but little sign of deceptive or highly surprising actions, and no clear evidence of unexpected coherent goals.
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My RSS reader, Stream has just hit v1.0.0. I'm really pleased with it, and I use it every day. The screenshots above are of my setup.
What do I like about it?
Signal: Surveillance Is Not Safety
So our (probably) soon to be ex-leader, Keir Starmer, has announced that the government is mandating encryption backdoors in the name of "child safety". Signal, my messaging app of choice, has responded with a blunt one-page PDF which finishes like this:
…Well this is odd.
Our study revealed that, after accounting for other variables influencing significant variation in FID [Flight Initiation Distance], birds on average tended to escape from a distance of about 1 m longer when approached by women compared to men. Birds were less tolerant of women than of men, and this result was geographically consistent. These differences were still present when exploring FID versus observer's sex separately for bird males and females in the cities of each country. On average, birds escaped 1 m (11% of their mean escape distance) earlier when approached by women than by men.
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