The Curious Engineer

All blogs / AI / ML

argmin gravitas

gleech.org

AI / MLEssays / personalSociety / politics / economyScience

’10’15’20’25
Posts
253 from 1 Mar 2009 to 28 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (11 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://www.gleech.org/feed.xml

2026 6

  1. Timeline of emergent capabilities
  2. Bayes
  3. Bayes
  4. A Life Really Worth Living
  5. Eulogy
  6. Transnormalism

2025 27

  1. AI in 2025: gestalt
  2. My politics
  3. Paper AI Tigers
  4. The jailbreak argument against LLM values
  5. Ways we can fail to answer
  6. What god has to do in mathematics
  7. prospective science please
  8. NY sounds
  9. AI breakthroughs 2024-2025
  10. AI editing: a test
  11. Abusing "inference"
  12. Tallinn
  13. On 900 albums of 2024
  14. Origins of human intelligence
  15. Aberdeen
  16. Glasgow
  17. Rats and trads
  18. theisms
  19. ambitions
  20. Psychology and fictions of language models
  21. How I don't use LLMs
  22. streaming vs listening
  23. vignettes from 2024
  24. acoemetae
  25. Max Chiswick (1985 – 2025)
  26. Curate
  27. My favourite essays

2024 18

  1. Bristol
  2. It's full of blogs
  3. Transformer++
  4. I see the light
  5. acts of early genius
  6. nonmonetary payoffs to starting a company
  7. Rescuing an old book
  8. Memento
  9. Mitchell's open problems
  10. Piled higher and deeper
  11. phdiary
  12. What's stopping you?
  13. Google-fu and Scihub-jutsu
  14. [DRAFT] Against grad school
  15. The best of Siderea
  16. Ten Hard Problems in and around AI
  17. 'The Maniac' (2023) by Labatut
  18. The Boy and the Heron: renunciations

2023 15

  1. Log of self-experiments
  2. idiopathies
  3. Every Mountain Goats song ever recorded including those which have a Death Geas placed upon em by the Author
  4. The brightness that comes before
  5. Spotify is not a social network
  6. Pop auteurs
  7. Mathematical dark matter
  8. Great work
  9. Learn stats without going mad
  10. me on ClearerThinking
  11. LLM alignment via activations
  12. Taylor Swift as blurry jpeg
  13. [DRAFT] Florence
  14. Can policymakers trust forecasters?
  15. 'Disco Elysium' (2019): Part 1

2022 23

  1. Hugh Thompson Jr (1943 – 2006)
  2. James Lovelock (1919 – 2022)
  3. Carl Djerassi (1923 – 2015)
  4. The ladder of abstraction
  5. get hype
  6. On forced association
  7. To be led out
  8. Cracking country
  9. Peter Eckersley (1979 – 2022)
  10. The best of Scott Aaronson (for laymen)
  11. The sense of a start
  12. Scoring the Big Three
  13. prospective nostalgia
  14. brief history
  15. Bruce Kent (1929 – 2022)
  16. Frank
  17. Covid memorial: 1ppm
  18. Paul Farmer (1959 – 2022)
  19. Comparing experts and generalists
  20. Phil Harvey (1938 - 2021)
  21. Legacy and the memory of legacy
  22. Songs for the Extremely Online
  23. von Neumann

2021 12

  1. 'Terra Ignota': the ecstasy of uncertainty
  2. Favourite maths tools
  3. Drake, Hanson, and the meaning of life
  4. Cracking cultures
  5. Do masks work against COVID, at scale?
  6. Highlights from my Gists
  7. 'Trompettes de la Mort' (2005)
  8. Why worry about future AI?
  9. Using courts for algorithmic fairness
  10. The One True Sceptic
  11. Unthinking meat
  12. Irony, sincerity, nostalgia, neoteny

2020 20

  1. hope dies last
  2. Graphs are cool
  3. Stimulant tolerance, or, the tears of things
  4. Metabolism is violent
  5. Better ways to write maths
  6. The World Sound
  7. Against the Culture
  8. AI alignment & academia
  9. Crossing the ocean of my ignorance
  10. Self-help, hard and soft
  11. AI ethics for present & future
  12. Blogging is dead, long live sites
  13. Rational emotions & emotional machines
  14. Robots, Games, Life, Markets
  15. Things I Use
  16. Notes on inductive logic programming
  17. 'Starting Strength' by Rippetoe
  18. 'Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor' (2019)
  19. Reversals in psychology
  20. Uncritical thinking

2019 15

  1. The trouble with supplements
  2. 'The Odyssey' (2017) by Emily Wilson
  3. Notes on OpenAI Five
  4. Insurance isn't necessarily a scam
  5. Bad introspections
  6. Consent as conclusive evidence
  7. On inhabiting a giant corporation
  8. 'Scarcity' (2013) by Shafir & Mullainathan
  9. 'Waking Up' (2014) by Harris
  10. Yoga hypothesis dump
  11. 'Ficciones' (1944) by Borges
  12. Rebellion, and rebellion against rebellion
  13. Maths at the Open University
  14. 2017 Worldview in Five Books
  15. Perelman

2018 15

  1. 'Homicide' (1991) by Simon
  2. 'Blindsight' (2006) by Watts
  3. A common cause in a general end
  4. Hardening the browser
  5. 'The Patrick Melrose Novels' by St Aubyn
  6. Broadness and philosophical rank
  7. 'The Unpersuadables' (2013) by Storr
  8. 'Why Moral Theory is Boring and Corrupt'
  9. 'Curiosity' (2012) by Ball
  10. 'Strangers Drowning' (2015) by MacFarquhar
  11. Einstein
  12. 'The Great Influenza' (2004) by Barry
  13. Preventing Side-effects in Gridworlds
  14. How lethal are the Tories? Part 1
  15. A ceiling for human expertise

2017 14

  1. Enigma
  2. Disambiguating the first computer
  3. Why I'm not a philosopher
  4. You do you
  5. Is education worth it for society?
  6. 'Hitler's Uranium Club' (2008) by Bernstein
  7. Why care about genetic privacy?
  8. Does the gut cross the epistemic barrier?
  9. π vs τ as clash of worldviews
  10. Who would I be in history?
  11. Data Science FAQ
  12. Is Yitang Zhang an intellectual?
  13. The presumed worth of anthropology
  14. Estimating political controversy

2016 7

  1. Effective Altruism Global: x: Oxford
  2. The Worst Game Ever
  3. Automatic for the people
  4. Existential overheads
  5. on veganism
  6. magic words
  7. troubleshooting a boot drive

2015 7

  1. Learn PHP Without Going Mad
  2. A decomposition of decompositions
  3. Modelling linguistic accommodation
  4. Present pieties
  5. Can you trust your methods?
  6. Why is quality rare?
  7. Conceptual conversions

2014 5

  1. Comparing up and down
  2. Anaesthetatron
  3. What's the highest moral wage?
  4. Rorty and the Wild Party
  5. Virtue, work, and the world to come

2013 4

  1. Limits to self-invention
  2. 'The Decline' (1999) by NOFX
  3. Taking Hume's name
  4. Civ's implicit social theory

2012 5

  1. to desperately instrumentalise myself
  2. Should we abolish foreign aid?
  3. Frege's grand failure
  4. On calling people brainwashed
  5. Misreading Russell on radical scepticism

2011 9

  1. 'The Scotch' (1880) by Friedrich Nietzsche
  2. Economics as philosophy of life
  3. Rubinations
  4. the arts lie dreaming of the life to come
  5. A Sentimental Journey Through Parts of England
  6. The typical language of postmodernism
  7. 'Infinite Jest' (1996)
  8. 'Why study economics?'
  9. Staring at mystics

2010 6

  1. 'Have One on Me' by Joanna Newsom
  2. Showing over saying
  3. Punk as ideology
  4. love, analytically
  5. Reading.
  6. Interview: Chuck Ragan

2009 1

  1. Neither Turing, neither Searle

Undated 44

  1. Grad school by numbers
  2. The grad school novel
  3. 'Methods Failing the Data, Data Failing the Methods'
  4. things I didn't do for my thesis
  5. Species.
  6. Architectonic.
  7. Art
  8. Selected posts.
  9. Blogroll.
  10. Redirecting…
  11. Bounty.
  12. Night Call, Collect.
  13. Breadth.
  14. Code
  15. French and English.
  16. Little technologies in this site.
  17. CV.
  18. deaths.
  19. The End of the World.
  20. Favs
  21. Food
  22. Incompatibilities.
  23. Posts by importance.
  24. Journalists.
  25. My judgment.
  26. Leadership.
  27. Metrics.
  28. Albums.
  29. Now
  30. Opinions.
  31. Papers.
  32. Phd
  33. playlists.
  34. Favourite poems.
  35. Poems
  36. Psyche
  37. Quotations.
  38. Random.
  39. Recommended:.
  40. Research.
  41. Technical books.
  42. Topic modelling ML workshops.
  43. Tweets.
  44. Creative Commons