Ex-Bell Labs/AT&T Research'er making art & technology in Berlin. 🐘@jack@jackrusher.com 🐦@jackrusher
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This is excellent. 👌🏼 “Open source, the thing that drives the world, the thing Harvard says has an economic value of $8.8 trillion. Most of it is one person. And I can promise you not one of those single person projects have the amount of resources they need” opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-...
a stinging indictment of Dublin’s house prices
Looking for a new project? Want to help out jank and the #clojure community? Help us build out the clojure-test-suite! Anyone who knows Clojure can do this and the workflow is very easy. Try it out! github.com/jank-lang/cl...
Cone of possibilities in both directions. Nice.
One day, I will wander outside the isoverse and revisit my earlier hunting grounds of computational geometry.
A few days ago, Berlin opened a new stretch of urban motorway, with the stated aim to reduce congestion. Today, the stretch was temporarily closed because of too much congestion.
One of my love languages, honestly
J Mascis?
people faced with a negative-sum situation will often roll up their sleeves and put in the hard work it takes to make things even more negative-sum
Seamus Heaney's last words noli timere (don't be afraid) texted to his wife, Marie, minutes before he died (August 30, 2013).
I’ve seen a fair bit of technical writing come out fine. Anything with literary qualities ends up worse, and poetry worst of all. I could speculate about connotation vs denotation, representation in the training data, &c, but 🤷🏻♂️
We may have differently calibrated sensors
I mean that you can get them to generate prose of reasonable quality in various styles, but the poems and song lyrics they produce are almost always quite bad.
It's true that LLMs are particularly bad at poetry, I think because to work well poetry must by nature be far from the central part of the distribution of words...
It’s a computational notebook, where all cells are running all the time. Fascinatingly, the UI is the code, adorned with small widgets. I think legibility could be improved for other users, but this points to possibilities in other domains.
1/ Super-excited to release the first complete rewrite to the Pyret home page in 10 years, corresponding to major language improvements! So many cool new things, let me give you a brief tour: ↵ pyret.org
Just be careful you don’t ride this line of thought to Pascal’s wager…
My gentle beginner-friendly introductory Sonic Pi course is currently discounted for only one more week. Learn the basics of coding *and* music - no prior experience necessary. Use code SUMMER_SALE to unlock a 33% discount - only valid during August. sonic-pi-studio.teachable.com/p/sonic-pi-i...
gosling "he just took all the code and edited the copyright notices" www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ6X...
Paul. You have a blog!
“I mix mathematics and art every day.” #BenoitMandelbrot
If you're in the bay area, they're doing a garage sale today!
I’ll be part of a new show at Gazelli Art House, showing some new work. Private view October 2nd. RSVP here www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/preview-su...
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
The ability to talk about geometry in coherent English does not equal understanding geometry. We have neurons in our hippocampus and our entorhinal cortex that turn into a geometry engine. ChatGTP5 does not and confidently spews bullshit about the simplest of things. mindmatters.ai/2025/08/chat...
“Your soul is what you make it, that is everywhere you go” youtu.be/Ap1z0z1_kkE
why is the useless stochastic parrot so good at this
!!!
"I see politeness as today’s punk rock because it so transgresses the spirit of our times." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
100 Regentonnen für Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg ➡️ www.berlin.de/ba-friedrich...
Children build math skills on a “cognitive bridge” between space & number. But where does it come from? Our new study finds monkeys transfer learning and abstractions across geometry & numerosity, revealing the evolutionary roots of basic math development. 🧪🧠 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
"Instead of defining use districts in terms of exclusivity, other countries define them in terms of predominance; i.e., residential zones are dominated by dwellings, yet they allow other appropriate uses which enable and complete everyday life."
“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” #Picasso
UK study showing that, as many suspected, SUVs are deadlier for pedestrians than other smaller cars. And they’re particularly so for children and young children.
This is the best critique I've read of ChatGPT in a long time, perhaps because it's through the lens of ChatGPT as a product, from the viewpoint of a user, rather than focusing on the technology. By Paul Ford. aboard.com/desperately-...
Not just art. Talking. Writing. Editing. Designing. Coding. Thinking. Doing well at anything takes years of practice. Ceding that to a machine defeats the whole purpose of taking pleasure from one's chosen path in life.
Since the beginning of the year I’ve been working on probabilistic programming languages with Vikash’s group. This talk gives some insight into what we're trying to do: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j2S...
“Metalinguistic abstraction — establishing new languages — plays an important role in all branches of engineering design.” #SICP
rotate line of pixels 2° every frame nearest-neighbor interpolation (w/ @obtusatum.bsky.social)
the material does not have individual parameters, except colour. but it does (BRDF-like) sampling for lambertian and diffuse (specular) reflection, and some AO. adjusting it with individual parameters (per face) is straightforward (i hope). now i need glass
Looks great!
The last 3 years have been a good reminder that donations are not a sustainable business model... Sadly, the broad downturn in the tech sector impacted significantly both private and company donations to OSS.
And here’s an example of what we sound like when we improvise together. The description at the other end of the link has some details… on.soundcloud.com/IEPCTZbqnYZi...
Do it again, but with computational complexity
I think it's time to give up the idea that Capital only thrives under liberal institutions.
It should not require special knowledge to know how to bike around safely in a city
Oof 🥵
If you understand what software engineering as a career actually entails (lots of people and organizational problems, understanding legacy code and tradeoffs) you are at a career advantage over those who understand the job as just producing code. Those jobs could be replaced. But that ain’t the job
The characteristic polynomial of a matrix A is defined as P(λ)=det(A-λI), and encodes the information about its eigenvalues. Thanks for coming to my Det talk.
Unsurprisingly common… www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...
the model is not the territory
Visit Nervous System this weekend for our first ever open studio! 8/16 10am-4pm in Palenville, NY (near Catskill) n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/blog/?p=9816
Somebody on LinkedIn said what we're all thinking.
“The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.” #DonaldKnuth
Oxide is hiring for thirteen (13) fully remote roles (some of which would take more than one hire) and every single one pays $235k
really feels like housing affordability is one of the most important political issues of our time, affecting nearly every aspect of our lives, and everyday our mainstream political discourse is about whether sour cream is woke or not
You know the Feast of Fools/Shrovetide tradition where the serfs run the manor/cathedral? That’s what Summer Streets is in NYC. The roads are so smooth, the path so safe. If people had the same rights as cars in America we could be a great nation.
low fidelity test rendering with experimental bloom-like effect in magenta
Google’s horrendous search "AI" just informed me that “there are 354 direct flights per week between Berlin and Tashkent”, of which there are actually… zero.
Saw ‘How a Spiral Works’ at the Berlin Circus Festival last night. It was a superb, deeply emotional performance, and the first time a dance piece has made me spontaneously weep. www.berlin-circus-festival.de/howaspiralwo...
How long do you usually spend on the check phase?
is there something like kickstarter + gumroad? announce a digital product, if enough people pre-buy you make it, if not, they get a reinbursement.
“We humans are not very good at identifying the heuristics we ourselves use.” #JohnMcCarthy
West Village 1971
the brain that can see a face in a wall outlet was always doomed to hear the voice of God in a markov chain
As end-of-empire scenarios go it is so much more dignified to get your capital city sacked by the Visigoths than to have a bunch of illiterate rich people in their 70s doing it through a series of incomprehensible tantrums because their brains were defeated by their phones.
The good Beefheart is very good
Played a set of completely improved music for two loopstations and strings last night 😊
Was David Lynch describing the jhanas in his account of transcendental meditation? (from Catching the Big Fish)
Many such cases
“I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.” #BuckminsterFuller
“Ayre”
One of those rare cases where I agree with something coming out of LLM-related research. All useful information exists in a band of algorithmic information theoretical complexity space, and it turns out that systems built to compress information into a useful representation also thrive in that band.
“Our findings propose that intelligence emerges most effectively at the boundary between order and chaos.”
A logical explanation of uncertainty.
It’s a fast sampler 🏎️
"The day with its cares and perplexities is ended and the night is now upon us." Au revoir, Robert Wilson. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/t...
If you look up the word in the Oxford dictionary, Edison used the term "bug" in the late 1800s to refer to engineering flaws, so Hopper may have used it first for computers (and gets full credit for the joke mentioned here) but the term in general did not originate with her.
Correct link… www.computerhistory.org/tdih/septemb...
Unspeakably metal ink on this woman who lived in Siberia 25 centuries ago.
250730 9 lines interrupting a grid #GenerativeDice
The point is, the monkeys making the loudest noise have the smallest balls. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26592343/
I'm hiring a researcher in my team at Apple. Please apply at jobs.apple.com/en-us/detail...
einstein sent this to curie in 1911 when she was being harassed by tabloids. it contains everything you’d want in such a letter: (1) your haters are trash (2) you’re a baller, a true queen (3) i have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in planck’s radiation field 🧪⚛️
📰 Future of Coding Weekly 🎙️ FoC 77 • As We May Think by Vannevar Bush 📄 Boxer: A Teacher's Experience 🎛️ Frame of preference 🔗 newsletter.futureofcoding.org/posts/future...
Absolute legend
It is pretty noticeable that even as mainstream opinion on Israel and Gaza finally shifts, you don’t hear the Responsible Adults apologizing for punishing all the college kids protesting the atrocities. Quite the opposite in fact!
Flawless performance from Morcheeba at the Opera Leśna (“Forest Opera”) in Sopot last night. I last saw them around 25 years ago, but Skye Edwards hasn’t aged a day and Ross Godfrey remains an exceptional and highly underrated guitarist.
“We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.” #TomStoppard
The long term value of Recreational Programming (apart from enabling you to enjoy what you are doing again) comes from allowing you to explore unusual things outside of the local optimum that the market pressure forces you into.
PSA: cubes are visible in mirrors
Thought experiment: Most programming languages were designed in an era where mostly one programmer coded in isolation. If you were designing a language for modern collaborative programming/commenting/etc., what would you change? How would you *modify* existing languages?
‘“Once you reach a certain age, it’s like you can’t do anything any more,” MacDonald says. “Trainers and coaches dumb down everything for older people, but old people are capable of more than they think.”’ We will all grow old and die, but not at the same rate. You must use your body or lose it!
We present a simplified, p5.js version of the vocal tract synthesizer from Neil Thapen's popular Pink Trombone, adapted for use in a creative coding assignment concerned with interaction design and absurd puppeteering. Interactive: editor.p5js.org/golan/sketch... Writeup: github.com/golanlevin/6...
Flowers are amazing. I wonder how many generations of selective breeding it took to produce Dahlias this beautiful…
It really is great
