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Ranganaut

@ranganaut.bsky.social
74 followers 42 following 307 posts

Thinkerer, Tinkerer

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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
There's hope at the bottom of that box. Will cost a lot of tokens to extract.
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
1/2 Thanks for tagging me here @ronentk.me (I can't reply to the original). I'm hoping that the current system will wither away, first slowly, then suddenly. Funders have a role: if people with $$ say: publish your results continuously rather than sporadically, many things will change.
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
OpenAI's announcement of the proof of Navier-Stokes evoked many emotions - from amazement to anger to dread. TLDR; an asteroid is coming for intellectual life as a whole and we need to do something about it.
hyperproblems.com
Shut Up and Prove
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Biological Agency is the central concept of Unicellular Cognition, and perhaps of all of biology in the future. The first Cellosophical Exploration of many on this topic....
cellosophy.leaflet.pub
Cellosophical Explorations #4: Biological agency
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Adventures of a field reporter for @leaflet.pub #3: this week I talk about how some old debates in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind about substrate independence/functionalism are being resurrected in the study of unicellular cognition. As usual, the references are stored in @semble.so.
cellosophy.leaflet.pub
Cellosophical Explorations #3: The Third Life of Ideas
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
"Cellosophical explorations 2" is out, continuing @leaflet.pub's field reporter series. I'm fascinated by bacterial chemotaxis & how it might help us unravel the origins of intelligence. Actually, I am fascinated by chemotaxis even if it doesn't tell us anything about intelligence, it's that cool.
cellosophy.leaflet.pub
Cellosophical Explorations #2
Bacterial Chemotaxis as a model system
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
My first cellosophical exploration as a field reporter for @leaflet.pub & my first foray into @atproto.science via synthetic biology as reported in @quantamagazine.bsky.social and stored on @semble.so. 1st of N updates on Spudcells. Do point me towards people worth talking to/handles to follow!
cellosophy.leaflet.pub
Cellosophical Explorations #1
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Mateusz Fafinski @calthalas.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Remember, both the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally audiobooks.
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
hyperproblems.com
hyperproblems.com
Hyperproblems
Hyperproblems are scientific challenges whose scale, complexity, novelty and interdependence overwhelm traditional research models, requiring new forms of collective intelligence, modeling, coordination and communication.
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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 17/07/2026
congrats! Really appreciate being able to collaborate on this :)
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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 17/07/2026
Watch this space - @ranganaut.bsky.social is cooking some exciting new ways of doing science!
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
1/n This is such an honor - thanks for showcasing my madcap project @leaflet.pub! Cellosophy (cellosophy.leaflet.pub) began with me asking whether it's possible to do *new science* in a *new metascience* kind of way.
cellosophy.leaflet.pub
Cellosophy
Cognition and Intelligence in Unicellular Creatures
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
I believe the origins of intelligence/mind are to be found in unicellular organisms, aka "Cellosophy." Last week, I created a @semble.so collection and said a @leaflet.pub publication is in the works. Here it is! Soft launch for now- longish thread on the project and the inaugural essay tomorrow.
cellosophy.leaflet.pub
Cellosophy: A Synthetic Philosophy of the Microbial Mind
Cellosophy Essay #1
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
+1 to @leaflet.pub for making it easy to create multiple publications - from dedicated blogs standalone meditations. Anyway, I have been watching the world cup like half the planet and I think a lot about AI, so here's an essay on the World Cup as a metaphor for Being Human in the age of AI.
rajesh.stream
The offside algorithm, or, what the World Cup taught me about our AI future
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
A very well funded sociopath comes to mind: NotebookLM, but yeah...
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Leaflet @leaflet.pub · 04/07/2026
Love this kind of @semble.so <> @leaflet.pub workflow! Underrated & something we want to explore more, definitely some cool collab / integrations we could play with for research + sensemaking + publishing infrastructure!
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Leaflet @leaflet.pub · 04/07/2026
👀 whoa sounds very cool!
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
1/3 May I present "Cellosophy" - a new @semble.so collection on the origins of intelligence in unicellular organisms. Soon to be a @leaflet.pub! semble.so/profile/rang... We tend to think of intelligence as something abstract but in reality, you can't divorce it from its material substrate.
semble.so
Cellosophy (by Ranganaut) — Semble
Exploring the origins of intelligence and agency, starting with unicellular organisms such as bacteria, choanoflagellates and other protists.
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
@leaflet.pub I want to change the leaflet subdomain for one of my pubs. I don't see a way to do so within the pub settings. As a workaround, I tried adding the desired subdomain to my domain list, but there's a glitch - leaflet claims to add it successfully, but it's never available to be assigned.
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Just turned email newsletters on for Hyperproblems - exciting times! hyperproblems.com
hyperproblems.com
Hyperproblems
Hyperproblems are scientific challenges whose scale, complexity, novelty and interdependence overwhelm traditional research models, requiring new forms of collective intelligence, modeling, coordinati...
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Leaflet @leaflet.pub · 27/04/2026
Great use of subpages in Leaflet — and a canvas page at the end as map of a series in progress!
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
It’s been a while since my last essay on Hyperproblems - this one is a sequel, but it’s also bringing in ideas that I had set aside a decade ago. Also: I am experimenting with the pages within pages feature of @leaflet.pub to create a layered narrative. 
hyperproblems.com
Epistrons: Knowledge Artifacts for Hyperproblems
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
Nucular strategery in particular
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
The more I investigate the ongoing Gulf War, the more it appears to be a polyconflict, and to echo Tolstoy’s opening line in Anna Karennina: > Every commodity shock is shocking in its own way.
ranganaut.com
Polyconflict #4: Firewood and the Gendered Nature of Polyconflict
I wasn’t planning on writing another essay in the Polyconflict series this quickly, but a twitter thread sparked a reverie on the relationship between the Gulf War, gendered harms and the need for met...
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
When the metabolic rift leads to a metabolic clash - brief thoughts on an essay by @nilsgilman.bsky.social in FP.
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #129: The Coming Metabolic War
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
As I keep saying, while we are waiting to be turned into paperclips, pay some attention to the everyday dystopias being unleashed by AI.
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #129: Everyday Dystopias
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
I’m not so sanguine about a green global deal emerging from this chaos - EV adoption will definitely increase, but so will coal, especially in India and China, who have a lot of it, even if of low quality.
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Republishing an earlier post - 'AI meets war' is a raging topic these days for obvious reasons
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #127: Military Intelligence
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Wars are bad for people, but they are bad for everyone else too. As today's link says: "War contaminates the conditions for life itself"
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #128: War and the non-human world
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
@leaflet.pub posting not working for me right now. Tried multiple browsers. An attempted post from yesterday is still stuck.
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 14/03/2026
There’s an uber-dystopian version of AI where it annihilates us or sucks out our souls while we believe we are in a matrix of plenty. Maybe one of those dystopias will come to pass, but a far more likely dystopia is one that’s coming into being as we speak. Observations on an essay in @noemamag.com
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #126: A Plausible Dystopia
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Having come this far, none of the parties to this war wants it to end with what’s been achieved so far, except, perhaps, Trump. I just don’t see ‘Mission Accomplished’ anytime soon and I dread where we could be going willy-nilly.
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
The Planet is a hyperobject, and we only have access to a minuscule subset of it through our senses. How can art help us grasp the unseen?
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #125
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Michael Levin is an interesting thinker; a rare Platonist in Biology. This quote from a recent post of his makes me think of biological engineering, but not the kind where we force organisms to do our willing, but rather work with their agential capacity to produce forms that we need
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #124: The Anatomical Compiler
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Deep time is a political and civilizational event. A society’s sense of time is inseparable from its sense of order, and what it believes it owes to the future. Our sense of self will be different if we imagine ourselves against the backdrop of deep time.
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #123: Deep Time Impermanence
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
It's very hard to imagine oneself dead, and its even harder to imagine the absence of everyone like me. But that too shall come to pass...
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #122:
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
A quote from Bjornerud's lovely book on Timefulness for today's #DailyPlanet
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #121: Timefulness
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Much historical analysis is either about 'recorded time,' i.e., history as evidenced in texts and other inscriptions, or about 'end time,' e.g., Edenic beginnings or apocalyptic endings. Neither makes room for Deep Time, the time of biological and geological processes that shape human societies.
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #120: Deep Time Continued
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
@margin.at trying to create an account and cloudflare is repeatedly blocking me :(
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
We barely remember what happened yesterday, so to expect us to take geological eras into consideration is a bit much. However, our lives are built on deep time (hello fossil fuels!) - how can we extract those fossilized memories and bring them into consciousness?
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #119: On Deep Time
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
Interesting!
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
I've been MIA, but the Daily Planet is back for the year. In 2026, I will focus on "contradictions" - how the human domination of the Earth creates the conditions for its own demise. I will be exploring issues like habitability & development. Looking forward to taking @leaflet.pub out for a spin!
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #118: On Contradiction
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
It's been a while since I wrote here, but I have been doing a lot of reading re: Planetarity and having planet shaped thoughts. Here's the first #DailyPlanet post for 2026 - it's a long essay on Planetary Stewarship. I will switch to regular programming next week.
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
Planetary Stewardship
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Social media for AIs might (will?) radicalize them at hyperspeed. It took fifteen years from Facebook to Groypergate; AIs will get there in fifteen minutes and keep going....
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
1/2 Carney's speech is much needed, but very very very far from being original. The Non-Aligned Movement was created by Nehru, Tito, Sukarno, Nkrumah and Nasser for this very reason. Read the Bandung Declaration!
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
1/n There's a camp of analysts - Cosma Shalizi, Henry Farrell and Alison Gopnik are the most prominent members - who say that AI is a cultural technology. Let's say they're correct. The obvious follow-up question is: > What's the culture of which AI is a cultural technology?
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 03/01/2026
Well, well, well….
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 28/12/2025
Is 2026 the year Embodied Intelligence goes viral? I don't know, but I will be tracking it for sure. Also: this is the last #WeeklyPlanet of the year, and likely the last one for a while since I need to recover from all this daily/weekly posting.
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Weekly Planet #19: The China Shock, Part 3: AI.
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 28/12/2025
And now for some official propaganda from the Chinese govt - not that we are averse to manufacturing consent ourselves - about how their rise will be good for everyone.
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #117: The China Shock, Part 18
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Ranganaut @ranganaut.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
2025 was supposed to be the year of AI agents. I don’t think that prediction came true. Nevertheless, the article linked in today's Daily Planet gives us some insight into how China is thinking about the former.
dailyplanet.leaflet.pub
The Daily Planet #116: The China Shock, Part 17
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