Maxim Raginsky

it’s always coffee time

New blog post: A.I.: Anti-Intellectualism togelius.blogspot.com/2026/10/ai-a...

Came across the well-known quote of Oppenheimer in a book: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” That's the way it is with AI now.

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

Bertolt Brecht, "Stories of Mr. Keuner"

Y’all better be aiming at the good life, with and for others, in just institutions. Just sayin’.

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

In this episode of @braininspired.bsky.social, @mraginsky.bsky.social draws on control theory, engineering and philosophy to explore what makes biological brains intelligent, what AI is missing, and what principles underlie biological autonomy. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

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

my take on AI coming for mathematics

“[H]e did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they are exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they may have leisure to represent the cause of public morality.” (about Dr Lydgate in _Middlemarch_)

Your regular reminder.

“All prediction is conservative: it demands that we be as we are in whatever future it constructs.” — Paul Valéry, “Unpredictability” (1944)

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

lfg

I find the "digestion" metaphor (i.e., mathematicians "digesting" AI-generated proofs) vulgar and off-putting. It's a sign of the times, genuine intellectuals like Yuri Manin are being replaced by a new generation whose identity is shaped by narrow professionalization and impoverished imagination.

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

absolute banger arxiv.org/abs/2609.28591

here is a succinct thing I can say: "alignment"-style AI safety risks DO NOT EXIST or need remediation with LLMs as such (there are lots of other problems) and OpenAI and Anthropic are in the business of TRYING TO MAKE THEM EXIST so that they can remediate them.

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

I see Bluesky is now speedrunning the intentional stance and multiple realizability. Okay then, carry on.

This is going to be good!

No one should be taken seriously when they say things like “update my priors” unless they can explain how to derive the Kalman filter. Desperate times call for desperate measures, people!

It’s Popper.

I’m finally doing what I should have done long ago: read Middlemarch and The Recognitions before the year ends.

If you turn something into a benchmark with quantifiable rewards and progress metrics, don’t be surprised when the machines achieve dominance there. At that point it will be too late to gesture at intrinsic non-economic values, you’ve made them illegible (in Scott’s sense) to any outside observer.

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

i don't like that i feel like we're all getting dragged against our will into an all-media all-the-time LessWrong thread, an insanely annoying and disorienting experience that most people do not have sufficient experience or mental preparations to deal with

Some thoughts on what Hermann Weyl's dialectic of the infinite in science and mathematics has to say about the age of AI: realizable.substack.com/p/games-with...

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

The Navier-Stokes fight is a perfect encapsulation of where AI development is right now: this should be really cool and exciting, and instead because of Silicon Valley egos it's become a fight over cheating, surveillance, and companies trying to get one up over the other