iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 21h

where have you gone, Herbert Simon, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you etc etc.

2. I shall disclaim responsibility for this particular choice of terms. The phrase “artificial intelligence,” which led me to it, was coined, I think, right on the Charles River, at MIT. Our own research group at Rand and Carnegie Mellon University have preferred phrases like “complex information processing” and “simulation of cognitive processes.” But then we run into new terminological difficulties, for the dictionary also says that “to simulate” means “to assume or have the mere appearance or form of, without the reality; imitate; counterfeit; pretend.” At any rate, “artificial intelligence” seems to be here to stay, and it may prove easier to cleanse the phrase than to dispense with it. In time it will become sufficiently idiomatic that it will no longer be the target of cheap rhetoric.

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Bertolt Brecht, "Stories of Mr. Keuner"

Originality

"Nowadays," complained Mr. K., "there are innumerable
people who boast in public that they are able to
write great books all by themselves, and this meets
with general approval. When he was already in the
prime of life the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu
composed a book of one hundred thousand words,
nine-tenths of which consisted of quotations. Such
books can no longer be written here and now, because
the wit is lacking. As a result, ideas are only produced
in one's own workshop, and anyone who does not
manage enough of them thinks himself lazy. Admittedly,
there is then not a single idea that could be
adopted or a single formulation of an idea that could
be quoted. How little all of them need for their activity!
A pen and some paper are the only things they are
able to show! And without any help, with only the
scant material that anyone can carry in his hands, they
erect their cottages! The largest buildings they know
are those a single man is capable of constructing!"

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This was another standout passage:

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I need to start carrying Cioran and Eliade in my bag alongside this book, for the full Romanian immersion.

a flat white and a copy of “Dependence with Complete Connections and Its Applications” by Iosifescu and Grigorescu

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

This is a bit all over the place, but: fried longanisa sausage, okra in tomato sauce, dirty rice.

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

trip down memory lane: Pie ’n Burger, Pasadena, CA, 10 years ago

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

this week’s Negroni proposition 1oz Roku gin 1oz Oka Kura sweet Japanese Bermutto sake vermouth 1oz Select Aperitivo

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

absolute banger arxiv.org/abs/2609.28591

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

“established … by a number of savants (mostly from the Soviet Union)” — LaSalle and Lefschetz, “Stability by Liapunov’s Direct Method,” 1961

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Can anyone guess which philosopher wrote this, without looking it up?

Matter is not "substance", since it is not conserved: it can be destroyed, and it can be created. Even the most stable particles, the nucleons, can be destroyed by collision with their anti-particles, when their energy is transformed into light. Matter turns out to be highly pa~ked energy, transformable into other forms of energy; and therefore something of the nature of a process, since it can be converted into other processes such as light and, of course, motion and heat.

Thus one may say that the results of modem physics suggest that we
should give up the idea of a substance or essence.4 They suggest that there is no self-identical entity persisting during all changes in time (even though bits of matter do so under "ordinary" circumstances); that there is no essence which is the persisting carrier or possessor of the properties or qualities of a thing. The universe now appears to be not a collection of things, but an interacting set of events or processes (as stressed especially by A. N. Whitehead).

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

<the Simpsons comic book store guy voice> worst horseshoe ever!

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

realizable.substack.com/p/how-to-do-...

Biological evolution has endowed us with incredible capacity for doing things with natural signs. Language is just a small part of it, and there is now a great deal of work using Transformer-like architectures on suitably tokenized nonlinguistic data (vision, motion, etc.). In fact, according to the “throwing hypothesis” put forward by the neuroscientist William Calvin, our ability to “compute” with language could have emerged by recruiting existing neuronal architectures that had evolved for better control of motion sequences, including timing, planning, and the use of forward predictive models with token-like information interfaces. If that’s the case, then “computing with words” is just a special case of “computing with signs,” the architectures for which were already present in hominid brains.

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Yes, exactly. I was discussing Omohundro’s paper here, aiming for a similar critique: realizable.substack.com/p/supertzar-...

As I already noted above, Good’s definition of ultraintelligence is unworkable because it discusses human intellectual activities in a timeless setting of Savage’s smal world. It assumes that human psychology is fixed and that the range of human intellectual activities can be circumscribed in advance. From this, Good argues, ultraintelligent machines will be able to bootstrap their abilities in an intelligence explosion. This sort of “recursive self-improvement” is now one of the core concepts taken for granted in all the discussions on AI risk. However, a more explicitly psychological argument was put forward in 2008 by Stephen Omohundro in his paper “The Basic AI Drives.” Omohunrdo, a mathematician and a physicist by training, spent a few years as faculty in the department of computer science at my university and, among other things, was one of the authors (together with Stephen Wolfram) of a 1987 technical report envisioning a “tablet personal computer of the year 2000.”

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

A modest proposal for reorganizing the production and reproduction of mathematical knowledge, courtesy of Asimov's Second Foundation:

"If I may interrupt, Speaker - How is a change made?"
"Through the agency of the Radiant. You will find in your own case, for instance, that your mathematics will be checked rigorously by five different boards; and that you will be required to defend it against a concerted and merciless attack. Two years will then pass, and your development will be reviewed again. It has happened more than once that a seemingly perfect piece of work has uncovered its fallacies only after an induction period of months or years. Sometimes, the contributor himself discovers the flaw.
"If, after two years, another examination, not less detailed than the first, still passes it, and - better still - if in the interim the young scientist has brought to light additional details, subsidiary evidence, the contribution will be added to the Plan. It was the climax of my career; it will be the climax of yours.
"The Prime Radiant can be adjusted to your mind, and all corrections and additions can be made through mental rapport.
There will be nothing to indicate that the correction or addition is yours. In all the history of the Plan there has been no person-alization. It is rather a creation of all of us together. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Speaker!"
"Then, enough of that."

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

I was making a related argument here: realizable.substack.com/p/seeming-li...

Cautious observers will be wary of reifying the state, i.e., raising it from the status of a theoretical entity introduced only order to save the phenomena to something that is real in the sense of Ian Hacking, i.e., an entity with causal powers that we can manipulate. This sounds somewhat like behaviorism, but behaviorists like B.F. Skinner were simply hedging their bets: All talk of neural correlates of external behavior has to wait until we have made sufficient progress in neurophysiology.

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

The Bullshit Job (my riff on The Desk Job cocktail from Cure in Rochester, NY) 3/4oz Cardamaro 3/4oz Cynar 3/4oz Plantation OFTD overproof rum 3/4oz Ron Zacapa 23

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

One of my favorite references to petty academic feuds in the Renaissance, from Anthony Grafton's introduction to NYRB edition of Cardano's _The Book of My Life_:

"His troubles began to arrive in battalion strength, more-over, just when his career reached its peak. He moved to the ancient university of Bologna in 1562, hoping to find a haven from his colleagues' plots and attacks. But in Bologna too, his colleagues criticized him in public and undermined him in private. His enemies advised his students to study with others, assigned his favorite lecture times to rival teachers,"

"and then complained about his courses' low enrollments. His eldest son, whom he adored and saw as endowed with immense promise, was arrested, condemned, and executed for poisoning his wife, and Cardano found himself forced to expel his younger son from his house as a thief."

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Everything is Gaussian random fields.

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Cynar Spritz with a couple of dashes of Végétal de la Grande-Chartreuse:

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Writing this from one of several locally owned coffee shops in my small, pedestrian-oriented university town in central IL.

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

cold summer borscht + a dirty gin martini

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Stanislaw Lem, _His Master's Voice_:

"Not for a minute did I put stock in any of the conjectures
about the signal. The telegraphed individual, the blueprint of
the “great brain,” of the plasmic “informational machine,” of
the synthetic “ruler” who was to conquer Earth— all this was
borrowed from the poverty- stricken repertoire of ideas which
civilization, in its current technological form, had at its disposal.
These imaginings were a reflection— much like the themes of
science- fiction novels— of society, and of society primarily in its
American version, whose export outside the States prospered
around the middle of the century. They were either fashion-
able novelties or else conceptions built on the game principle
“it’s them or us”— and never did the insipidity of invention, its
enchainment to Earth in the narrow channel of historical time,
appear more obvious to me than when I heard these theories,
seemingly bold but in reality pathetically naïve."

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Yifeng Chu and I just posted our paper on chaining-type bounds for expected soft maxima of Gaussian processes. The analysis makes use of a nice blend of ideas from probability, statistical physics of disordered systems, and information theory. arxiv.org/abs/2606.22611

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

my version of Hugo Spritz St. Germain lemon juice magnolia pear shrub prosecco seltzer lemon, mint

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Peter Winch, writing in 1958, prefigures a lot of the current obsessions at the intersection of AI and language:

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

4 dashes angostura bitters 2 dashes chocolate bitters 1/2 oz falernum 1 oz Batavia arrack 1 oz Appleton Estate 12 Jamaican rum

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

White Negroni, Mood Indigo edition 1oz Empress 1908 indigo gin 1oz Luxardo bitter bianco 1oz C. Comoz vermouth blanc

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

100% Subcreation and eucatastrophe are both very important concepts in Tolkien's system of the world. Their significance in the context of AI did occur to me: realizable.substack.com/i/169938087/...

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Pope Leo on “AI alignment” — whose values will these systems be “aligned” with?

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

I've been on a Gian-Carlo Rota reading binge lately, and this resonated:

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Emergency morning deep frying session: making patacones to go with the kiddo’s presentation on Ecuador in 6th grade Spanish.

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