A terminal UI for tracking everything about your home. Single SQLite file. No cloud. No account. No subscriptions.

What if instead of measuring AI by the standard of human intelligence, we measured human intelligence by the standard of AI. We have a clearer understanding of how AI works, than how the human brain works. Could this exercise actually help us derive some insights into ourselves?

The paper argues that we’ve been actually doing this for decades, starting with how superhuman abilities demonstrated by Deep Blue made us reconsider what it means to be “good at chess”, and more recently reconsidering the most intimate parts of human existence, language.

The main question raised by this paper is, since we derive so much of our self-image from language, and the task of language generation can be automated, then what are we, as humanity, still contributing?

It might be the case that currently, LLMs are just parroting us, but we’ve also seen an exponential increase in the ability of LLMs to solve problems which require compositional generalisation way outside of the patterns and combinations of concepts represented in their training data.

One conclusion this paper draws is that much of the success of LLMs comes from our own autopilot approach to language. We also are often too quick to give a standard response rather than pay attention to the details of a question, we too, often follow a very rote, algorithmic way of learning foreign languages.

Still really really hard to work with large codebases without AI, it’s really mentally draining, but I think it’s because I’ve relied on Claude Code for so long. This is so ironic, since refactoring large codebases should’ve been the Achilles heel of coding agents.

I went back to my vim strategy to understand where I’m going wrong and why it’s hard for me to keep more than 3 pieces of code referencing eachother in my mind.

Long read about how the reading revolution of the 18th century was “a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancient regime”, how the rapid expansion of literacy helped destroy the old system of government with kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom, and how our modern loss of literacy is incompatible with democracy.

Google Maps is not a directory, it’s a market maker. A lot of interesting findings in this one, including that Google Maps is surprisingly bad at categorising cuisines and restaurants (I’ve seen this as well in Taiwan), as well as the author’s own algorithm for finding underrated gems (and avoiding overrated restaurants) in London.