Shriram Krishnamurthi

In addition to the many things I didn't like about the Natural History Museum in London, one thing I especially disliked is a huge wall given to showing *constellations* (or, as I prefer to think of them, "old-school hallucinations"). Let's have some actual science, people.

OMG this is amazing! Is this by Claude Code? What was the prompt — the first para?

Claude makes an incredible writing companion. I took @shriram.bsky.social's advice and installed Claude code, and I'm using it a sounding board for working on my book. What would have been a day or two kicking around a concept until it crystalizes has become tens of minutes of discussion.

Yes, exactly!

Iranian-born Soheila Sohkanvari's brilliant Leave to Remain, currently on display at the Tate Britain, has numerous real passports from various countries, with fake passport-style stamps alongside real ones.
kristinhjellegjerde.com/news/112/

Procession of cars flying the Iranian lion-and-sun (pre-Islamic Revolution) flag.

Certainly picked an interesting day to walk past the Iranian embassy… There's not going to be a lot of quiet in Knightsbridge tonight!

An empty bench in Soho Square

🎶 An empty bench in Soho Square
If you'd have come you'd have found me there 🎵
—Kirsty MacColl

Yeah, I saw this, amazing stuff!!!

Sorry, India is 5x the size of the US, so Indian English is the new Queen's English!

Absolutely perfect use. You wonder how we got by in olden times.

"Sorted" crept into my vocab about two weeks ago and is now firmly wedged in there.

Neighborhood snow art contest at Billy Taylor Park and Lippett Park Saturday 10am-2pm. Win $50 prizes. Suggested categories include Best Representation of Hope St, Best Snow Perspn, Best Snow Fish, Best Under 10 Artist. Brought to you by Hope St Merchant’s Association, Summit a neighborhood Association and Mount Hope Community Center (image of a child admiring a large snow sculpture of a cat)

Please share:

PVD snow art contest happening tomorrow Sat Feb 28, 10am-2pm, simultaneously at Billy Taylor Park and Lippett Park SE corner. Compete to win $50.00 gift cards for your choice of Hope Street merchants!

Judges include @sueanderbois.bsky.social and @mackdistrict6.bsky.social

Every now and then you come across a store that is so wedded to its craft that you hope it'll stick around for ever. James Smith & Sons' Umbrella Shop in London is one of those.
www.james-smith.co.uk

claude's kitchen

Uh oh. Good thing they're not loosening AI guardrails (for this week, anyway), I guess!

In related news, I may have had some success in spreading "y'all" in Bristol UK.

I have spent too long in the UK; I'm now referring to everything as "brilliant". "Here's your sandwich" - "brilliant". "Coffee is ready" - "brilliant". Please give me a few weeks for this to wear off.

How Far Can AI Go in Solving Math Mysteries? AI is tackling PhD-level math, but can it keep up with the toughest challenges yet?

For more depth, this IEEE piece is good: spectrum.ieee.org/ai-math-benc...

I think you clearly don't know enough about the German rail system. (-:

I only wish there *were* a special transportation ticket, like the German one… Actually kinda' sad to be missing a once-in-50-years snowstorm, especially since I could have ridden it out from the comfort of home.

Good point. Or would you just demand it never read the test suite (like a robots.txt but for files it shouldn't read)? Administratively it's a lot more work to engineer the repo otherwise.

If you can magically cons up that amazing test suite (or have 40 years of manual labor that happened to produce one for you)!

Yep. There's only one academic department, artificially subdivided.
www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.p...

GEEZUS. Did you check the actual code and confirm that you agreed with this assessment?

I think it's really awesome that CS did *not* split up, and instead is a big umbrella, despite the best efforts of, say, the theorists ("is HCI even CS? where's the CS in it?"). It's been really healthy for the subject to NOT split up.

It handled Zig fine too, huh? That's…neat and scary.

Haha, that's very funny — channeling Yaron and Kmett! I would be terrified to be reviewed by Kmett, you need AI-levels of fearlessness to handle that!

From the Claude team itself:

I'm several thousand miles away, in the UK…

E.g., "porting legacy COBOL code to Java" before "Porting code", "compiling C to assembly" before "compilation" (though that is one of the most obvious boxes and perhaps least needing of examples). Follow the "two examples, then the abstraction" structure rigorously everywhere.

I think it's a neat table, but it's hard to tell what you mean in several cases. I think it would be better to start with one concrete, canonical-ish or at least totally unquestionable example in each box, *then* give the generalization of it. ↵