Understanding the U.S. Strike on Venezuela: Heather Cox Richardson

The Trump administration takes aim at the rules based international order.

Less we forget

On the significance of Jane Austen

Henry Oliver, Why we love Jane Austen more than ever after 250 years, The Common Reader, Dec. 13, 2025.

From the article:

Why is Jane Austen quite so popular?

The reason is simple.

She invented the modern novel in order to answer fundamental questions about how to be good, happy, and flourishing in a commercial society. Her novels are about questions that are still central to our lives. How to live a good life in a commercial society? What is a moral education in the modern world? Who should we marry?

Jane reigns supreme because no other novelist else invented such important narrative techniques or had so much to say to readers about their lives and what it means to live in modernity.

Austen and the modern world:

Austen invented the modern novel at the moment when the modern world began. She was born as the world was entering a new epoch: Enlightenment, prosperity, liberty.

The year after Austen’s birth, The Wealth of Nations was published, and The Declaration of Independence was issued. Thirteen years later, the French Revolution started. In Germany, new ideas about subjectivity and personal development were being developed by Kant, Schiller, and Goethe.

It was a time of great evil: colonialism was rising to a peak, slavery and the slave trade had expanded, and penal laws were vicious and unjust. But it was also a time of a moral reformation. Christianity created the abolition movement. Enlightenment thinkers insisted on the obligations of human rights. Early feminist ideas were circulating. Theories of sympathy were becoming central to ethics.

Whatever we want to call this period—the decades that hinge around the year 1800—whether we say Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernity, the Great Enrichment, the Industrial Revolution, the birth of liberty—these ideas became the assumptions and conditions of our era.

There's much more at the link. 

Note: I discuss Pride and Prejudice in my article, The Evolution of Narrative and the Self (1993). In the terms I lay out there the novel is a Rank 3 form of narrative. Oliver is, in effect, arguing that Austen is a (the?) prototypical Rank 3 novelist, perhaps the first to get it all together in one text.

AI and biology: It's going to take awhile

Everyone’s hyped about “AI for Science.” in 2025! At the end of the year, please allow me to share my unease and optimism, specifically about AI & biology.

After spending another year deep in biological foundation models, healthcare AI, and drug discovery, here are 3 lessons I… pic.twitter.com/p6EOlymxio

— Bo Wang (@BoWang87) December 31, 2025

The final paragraph of the tweet:

We won’t make progress by treating biology like text. We’ll make progress by building AI that behaves more like a scientist : skeptical, iterative, and willing to be wrong.

Nor, I would add, is biology like chess, a finite, closed world.

From Hoboken to Manhattan

The Coming AI Resistance

Michelle Goldberg had an interesting column in the NYTimes yesterday, (Dec. 29): An Anti-A.I. Movement Is Coming. Which Party Will Lead It?

I disagree with the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, bitterly reactionary right-wing pundit Matt Walsh about basically everything, so I was surprised to come across a post of his that precisely sums up my view of artificial intelligence. “We’re sleepwalking into a dystopia that any rational person can see from miles away,” he wrote in November, adding, “Are we really just going to lie down and let AI take everything from us?”

A.I. obviously has beneficial uses, especially medical ones; it may, for example, be better than humans at identifying localized cancers from medical imagery. But the list of things it is ruining is long.

She then goes on to discuss some. She notes:

Despite Trump’s embrace of the A.I. industry, attitudes toward the technology don’t break down along neat partisan lines. Rather, A.I. divides both parties. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is a fierce skeptic; this month he proposed an A.I. Bill of Rights that would, among other things, require consumers to be notified when they’re interacting with A.I., provide parental controls on A.I. chatbots and put guardrails around the use of A.I. in mental health counseling. Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders suggested a moratorium on new data center construction. “Frankly, I think you’ve got to slow this process down,” he said.

Yet a number of leading Democrats are bullish on A.I., hoping to attract technology investments to their states and, perhaps, burnish their images as optimistic and forward-looking. “This technology is going to be a game changer,” Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said at an A.I. summit in October. “We are just at the beginning of this revolution, and Pennsylvania is poised to take advantage of it.” He’s started a pilot program to get more state employees using generative A.I. at work, and, by streamlining permitting processes, he has made the building of A.I. data centers easier.

Her final paragraph:

One major question, going into 2026, is which party will speak for the Americans who abhor the incursions of A.I. into their lives and want to see its reach restricted. Another is whether widespread public hostility to this technology even matters given all the money behind it. We’ll soon start to find out not just how much A.I. is going to remake our democracy, but also to what degree we still have one.

Trees & sky with clouds from April 2022

The computer scientist and the engineer look at AI

Half baked thought:

In discussions about AI, claims are often made about both capabilities and societal effects, and in practice the boundary is pretty blurry. Different personality types and professions see things through different lenses. At the risk of over-caricaturising,… pic.twitter.com/fvbvafCajO

— Séb Krier (@sebkrier) December 20, 2025

Programming with AI

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become…

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) December 26, 2025

Christmas at Longwood Gardens

A historical problem solved by a human but that is beyond chatbots

Elon Danziger, ChatGPT Will Never Beat Indiana Jones, NYTimes, Dec. 22, 2025.

Across from the Florence Cathedral in Italy stands a much older church, the Baptistery of San Giovanni. It is a beloved center of religious life, where many Florentines are baptized to this day. Staid columns and lively arches hug its eight sides, half-camouflaged in patterns of green and white marble. Without the baptistery’s emulation of the architecture of ancient Rome, it’s hard to imagine Florence birthing the architectural Renaissance that changed the face of Europe. Yet for centuries, there has been no compelling solution as to who built it and when and for what reasons. Decades ago, I gave tours of the baptistery and came to revere it, and in the early 2020s I began delving into its origins.

After years of poring over historical documents and reading voraciously, I made an important discovery that was published last year: The baptistery was built not by Florentines but for Florentines — specifically, as part of a collaborative effort led by Pope Gregory VII after his election in 1073. My revelation happened just before the explosion of artificial intelligence into public consciousness, and recently I began to wonder: Could a large language model like ChatGPT, with its vast libraries of knowledge, crack the mystery faster than I did?

So as part of a personal experiment, I tried running three A.I. chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini — through different aspects of my investigation. I wanted to see if they could spot the same clues I had found, appreciate their importance and reach the same conclusions I eventually did. But the chatbots failed. Though they were able to parse dense texts for information relevant to the baptistery’s origins, they ultimately couldn’t piece together a wholly new idea. They lacked essential qualities for making discoveries.

There are a few reasons for this. Large language models have read more text than any human could ever hope to. But when A.I. reads text, it’s merely picking up patterns. Peculiar details, outlier data and unusual perspectives that can influence thinking can get lost. Without eccentric or contrarian ideas, I never would have made my discoveries. [...]

Synthesizing so many pieces of medieval history into a new interpretation required stepping back and reconsidering their importance and how they relate to one another. A.I. may be able to optimize the process of collecting those pieces, but discovery means drawing new connections — something far beyond current A.I. capabilities, as the tests I did confirmed to me.

This is consistent with a series of posts I did on my own work: One about interpreting Jaws, one about investigating the "Xanadu" meme, and one about ring-composition in Heart of Darkness.

Biological computationalism (why computers won't be conscious)

Informal presentation: Consciousness May Require a New Kind of Computation, Neuroscience News, December, 23, 2025.

Summary: A new theoretical framework argues that the long-standing split between computational functionalism and biological naturalism misses how real brains actually compute.

The authors propose “biological computationalism,” the idea that neural computation is inseparable from the brain’s physical, hybrid, and energy-constrained dynamics rather than an abstract algorithm running on hardware. In this view, discrete neural events and continuous physical processes form a tightly coupled system that cannot be reduced to symbolic information processing.

The theory suggests that digital AI, despite its capabilities, may not recreate the essential computational style that gives rise to conscious experience. Instead, truly mind-like cognition may require building systems whose computation emerges from physical dynamics similar to those found in biological brains.

Key Facts:

• Hybrid Dynamics: Brain computation arises from discrete spikes embedded within continuous chemical and electrical fields.
• Multi-Scale Coupling: Neural processes remain deeply intertwined across levels, meaning algorithms cannot be separated from physical implementation.
• Energetic Constraints: Metabolic limits shape neural computation, influencing learning, stability, and information flow.

* * * * * 

Research Article: Borjan Milinkovic, Jaan Aru, On biological and artificial consciousness: A case for biological computationalism, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Volume 181, 2026, 106524, ISSN 0149-7634, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2025.106524.

Abstract: The rapid advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have galvanised public and scientific debates over whether artificial systems might one day be conscious. Prevailing optimism is often grounded in computational functionalism: the assumption that consciousness is determined solely by the right pattern of information processing, independent of the physical substrate. Opposing this, biological naturalism insists that conscious experience is fundamentally dependent on the concrete physical processes of living systems. Despite the centrality of these positions to the artificial consciousness debate, there is currently no coherent framework that explains how biological computation differs from digital computation, and why this difference might matter for consciousness. Here, we argue that the absence of consciousness in artificial systems is not merely due to missing functional organisation but reflects a deeper divide between digital and biological modes of computation and the dynamico-structural dependencies of living organisms. Specifically, we propose that biological systems support conscious processing because they (i) instantiate scale-inseparable, substrate-dependent multiscale processing as a metabolic optimisation strategy, and (ii) alongside discrete computations, they perform continuous-valued computations due to the very nature of the fluidic substrate from which they are composed. These features – scale inseparability and hybrid computations – are not peripheral, but essential to the brain’s mode of computation. In light of these differences, we outline the foundational principles of a biological theory of computation and explain why current artificial intelligence systems are unlikely to replicate conscious processing as it arises in biology.

What Era Are We Living In? | Robert Wright & Nikita Petrov

0:00 Teaser
3:00 What era are we living in?
3:57 David Bowie: "The Internet is an alien life form."
5:15 Bob: "It's like aliens are approaching, and we don't know their intentions"
6:23 Nikita: "COVID was weird, and nothing has been normal since"
9:02 The lab leak theory
13:58 How COVID killed consensus reality
17:36 Bob's case for international biotech monitoring
19:25 Vaccine geopolitics
24:08 Biothreat from existing AI models
25:32 Bob's candidate: We let machines guide our attention
31:51 Technological progress is like a cocaine high
33:05 How common is the idea that AI will be a big deal?
34:46 AI music is proliferating
39:58 When music is high stakes. Russian street musicians get arrested

Salt and Pepper

Sex Dolls, Robots, and AI companions

It's not what you think.

YouTube:

In this episode, Dr. Rena Malik, MD is joined by sociologist Dr. Ken Hanson to explore the surprising realities of sex tech, including sex dolls and AI companions. Together, they unpack who is really using these technologies, how they're reshaping intimacy, and the emotional bonds that can form between humans and artificial partners. Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the motivations, implications, and future trends in sexual technology and relationships.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:02 Who Really Uses Sex Tech
00:04:03 Sex Dolls
00:06:24 From Dolls to Sex Robots
00:24:30 AI Companions, Replica, Attachment
00:41:00 Gen Z, Loneliness, Community
00:54:06 Doll Brothels and Industry Ethics
01:02:10 Sex Dolls, Porn, and Fantasy
01:03:26 How Academia Sees Sex Tech
01:04:05 Why Sex Research Matters
01:09:01 Conclusion

Rick Beato prompts Claude and Suno to create songs