Sympawny no.4 (Chubby Cat)

Musician Norm Oxman composed a song for his late cat, "Sympawny no.4 (Chubby Cat)."
It reflects the image of the cat.
A composer's musical portrait honoring deceased pets worldwide. pic.twitter.com/NDheOrcRRX

— The Figen (@TheFigen_) February 4, 2026

Fourteenth Street viaduct in Hoboken

An agentic framework that generates publication-ready academic illustrations

paper: https://t.co/2wGHSX6Dit

— Akshay 🚀 (@akshay_pachaar) February 3, 2026

That is to say, they're linking six agents together in a control structure assembled by "classical" symbolic means, a programming language. In effect they're using the clever deployment of so-called agents to mask the underlying deficiency of the LLM. Calling them agents allows them to think that they're somehow autonomous LLM creatures. They're not autonomous in any meaningful way. Their scope of action is narrowly specified by the matrix of programming in which they are embedded.

Hip-hop & violence, misogeny, etc.– From shared knowledge to common knowledge

I'm copying this from Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen), which quotes a Roland Fryer piece in the Wall Street Journal:

In a TED Talk released on Monday, I describe a decadelong effort to measure hip hop’s impact. My research team and I assembled a data set tracking the genre’s diffusion from the late 1980s onward. We compiled exposure measures from virtually every U.S. radio station between 1985 and 2002 and from the Billboard Hot 100 from 2000 through 2024, then digitized station playlists using custom AI tools. The result is a detailed record of what different parts of the country heard in a given year. Using modern text analysis, we examined hundreds of thousands of songs and every word they contained.

We classify hip hop into four broad categories: street, conscious, mainstream and experimental…

Radio data also let us look inside the music. Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much. That growth in lyrical intensity helps explain why hip hop continues to provoke anxiety. But it also sharpens the question that matters most, at least to an economist: Does exposure to these lyrics have measurable effects on people’s lives?

To answer that, we looked at locations with varied hip-hop exposure—some places where it arrived early, others where it arrived later. Hip hop initially reached mass audiences through a subset of black radio stations, often those formatted as “urban contemporary.” Some cities gained early access through those stations. Others didn’t for reasons as mundane as geography, signal reach and local radio history.

That uneven rollout created natural variation in exposure.

Using radio data and decades of census records, we estimated how much hip hop was played on the radio in each county in the U.S. over time. We then tested whether increases in hip-hop penetration were linked to changes in crime—and whether people exposed to more hip hop in their formative years experienced worse outcomes in education, employment, earnings, teen births and single parenthood.

The answer was striking. In our estimates, the effects hovered around zero, sometimes even slightly positive. Places with heavier rap exposure didn’t experience higher crime, lower educational attainment or weaker labor-market outcomes relative to trends elsewhere.

Here's a link to the Ted Talk.

And here's a comment I made over there:

Interesting. Here's a post I wrote back in February. It's about the depiction of sex in novels from Pride and Prejudice through Fifty Shades of Grey. I speculate that what's going on there is the conversion of shared knowledge about sex to common knowledge. I wonder if something similar is going on in hip-hop: "Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much."

The 19th Century Anglophone novel

Fryer mentions using "modern text analysis" to determine the content of hip-hop lyrics. That phrase covers a number of techniques, including topic modeling. In his 2013 book, Macroanalysis, Matthew Jockers applied topic modeling to a corpus of roughly 3000 19th century Anglophone novels. One of the topics he identified as WIVES AND MARRIAGE. Thus cluster map shows the words in that topic:

Agentic coding is neurosymbolic AI

Why do coding agents work so well and what would it take to replicate their success in other domains? One important and under-appreciated reason is that agentic coding is a type of neurosymbolic AI.

The main weakness of LLMs is that they are statistical machines and struggle at…

— Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker) February 2, 2026

Mmmm.....Good! Fries, a quarter-pounder, and orange Fanta

Adam Neely: On Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future

0:00 Intro
4:06 Challenge accepted
6:55 Three Questions
24:14 Why no influences? (deskilling/narcissism)
35:50 Profiles of the Future
47:54 Good uses of Suno
59:05 Futurism/Techno-Optimism
1:16:22 New Virtues
1:22:03 Final Predictions

Neely conducted an informal survey of his follows. Here he's discussing some of the results (c. 16:43):

Now, zooming back a little bit and taking a look at the answers to this 1st question, we see that nobody answered anything musical, really. All the answers were about saving time, saving money, and replacing friends. In other words, Suno lets you make the same music faster, cheaper, and lonelier. I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

That's pure Homo economicus, to invoke a term I'm using in the book I'm developing, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. Neely continues:

The 2nd question I asked was, “do you feel like you have a unique voice with your music when you create songs with Suno?” Some people said yes, but the majority of responses felt that the music that they made was not particularly unique to them. One possible explanation for this is that commercial generative AI can't really create anything new. It's just remixing old recordings. And so you can't have a unique voice with something that's just a remix of an old recording. Suno has admitted to have been trained on essentially all music files on the internet. What a lawsuit has called “copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.”

A bit later (c. 20:21):

Now, the 3rd question I asked was, “Who are some of your favorite AI musicians who have influenced you?” “What about them inspires you?” Okay, so even though I kind of knew what the answers to this question would be, it still was really bleak reading them, because the vast majority of people, as it turns out, do not have influences.

RESPONSES: I don't have any AI influences. I'm afraid I don't have any. At the moment, nothing. I don't listen to anybody else. I don't know any. I do not listen to AI slop. No influence. I don't know of any. Haven't heard any. No one. I don't know any AI relevant artist. Not applicable. I have no idea to be honest. At the moment, nothing. I don't have an AI music influence. None. I do not religiously follow anyone. I don't have any AI music influences.

ADAM: Why can't people who use Suno cite their influences? It's strange, right? because if you ask the same question to any musician, writer, or artist who didn't use gen AI, they would be able to go off forever… on their influences! I think about, you know, the bass players that inspired me, Jaco Pastorius, Victor Wooten, modern-based players like Tim Lefebvre - huge influence. I love Evan Marien. I don't know of anybody of any skill level who can't do that who can't just be like, mm, mm, mm, “these guys are awesome!”

Neely goes on to say how very strange this is. The musicians he knows ALL OF THEM have favorites and influences. This Suno music seems to br narcissistic music. These people just listen to their own music.

There's much more in the podcast.

Employers are now using AI as cover for laying employees off – "A.I. washing"

Lora Kelley, Did A.I. Take Your Job? Or Was Your Employer ‘A.I.-Washing’? NYTimes, Feb. 1, 2025.

A company might lay people off for any number of reasons: It didn’t meet financial targets. It overhired. It was rocked by tariffs, or the loss of a big client.

But lately, many companies are highlighting a new factor: artificial intelligence. Executives, saying they anticipate huge changes from the technology, are making cuts now.

A.I. was cited in the announcements of more than 50,000 layoffs in 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a research firm.

But:

Investors may applaud such pre-emptive moves. But some skeptics (including media outlets) suggest that corporations are disingenuously blaming A.I. for layoffs, or “A.I.-washing.” As the market research firm Forrester put it in a January report: “Many companies announcing A.I.-related layoffs do not have mature, vetted A.I. applications ready to fill those roles, highlighting a trend of ‘A.I.-washing’ — attributing financially motivated cuts to future A.I. implementation.”

The term echoes popular descriptors of misleading marketing practices, such as greenwashing and ethics washing. It started bubbling up a few years ago, mostly to call out companies that claimed to be using A.I. when they weren’t. But lately, it has been used more broadly to gesture at companies emphasizing A.I. to explain things like layoffs when the picture may be more complex.

Why am I not surprised? There's more at the link.

Approaching Mickey D's, and a peak inside

Zohran Mamdani visits Louis Armstrong

From a post by Ethan Iversion:

Yesterday the new mayor of New York City dropped by the Louis Armstrong House Museum. This is essentially politics as usual—AOC and others have made the same rounds—but since I really dig the Armstrong house, I felt notably cheered by this photo taken by Hyland Harris!

Of course I dig Armstrong too. Have practiced his music since my early teens. Be sure to read the rest of Iverson's post (at the link).

He who controls the Foundation Models controls (our access to) reality

💯 Information monopolies are always a concern, but LLMs ratchet it up way beyond search engines. You are not just being referred to a trustworthy source, but are being given information predigested from opaque sources.

Extinction angst serves as a convenient distraction.. https://t.co/kAHZXkzJiR

— Subbarao Kambhampati (కంభంపాటి సుబ్బారావు) (@rao2z) February 1, 2026

Skylar Tang, rising star [fierce]

Moving Northward along the water [Hoboken]

Séb Krier on Moltbook, agents chatting with agents

The Moltbook stuff is still mostly a nothingburger if you've been following things like the infinite backrooms, the extended Janus universe, Stanford's Smallville, Large Population Models, DeepMind's Concordia, SAGE's AI Village, and many more. Of course the models get better… pic.twitter.com/ir15Ad90nR

— Séb Krier (@sebkrier) February 1, 2026

Breakfast, omelette based

Game theory, MAGA, and abortion: The Trumperor’s varied partisans

Let us assume that the story of the emperor who has no clothes, that that story is about the conversion of shared knowledge into common knowledge. Everyone, the emperor himself, his courtiers, the population at large, and of course those rogue weavers, everyone can see that he is naked. That knowledge is shared among them. For the rogue tailors, however, that knowledge is common; each knows that the other knows that the other ad infinitum.

Once the boy blurts out, “He’s naked!!!,” though, what was only shared knowledge has now become common among the entire populace. Everyone knows that everyone else etc. Let us suppose, however, that some people would just as soon not know that the emperor is naked while others don’t mind knowing among themselves (e.g. those rogue tailors), but they’d just as soon that no one outside their group knew. What then?

Those rogue tailors might make a move to mute the boy’s messages, perhaps by disparaging him and his parents, perhaps even by imprisoning him. Those courtiers, who’d just as soon believe the emperor to be clothed, for their livelihood depended directly on his largesse, the courtiers would see the rogue tailors making their move and would join them in their efforts. Surely there were others in the population who also benefited from the emperor’s power and wealth. They too would join in the effort to silence the boy.

Now the population is split in two, the party of the emperor and his supporters, and the other party, at best indifferent at the revelation but many quite gleeful as the emperor and his cronies had done them no good at some time in the past. This other party sees the boy as a hero and attempts to protect him.

At this point the parable stops being a children’s story and becomes a model of political coalition formation under epistemic stress. For it’s not this imaginary emperor that interests me. It’s a very real Donald J. Trump.

I’m casting him in the role of the naked emperor. He is widely perceived as corrupt, even among many of his allies. Thus the Big Boys of Silicon Valley are attracted to him because they want to benefit from his political power. They see that he’s also cruel and sexually profligate (or at least he was in the not so distant past, who knows these days). They may not like these characteristics in him, but they can tolerate them as long as he supports them in their business ventures. However, they cannot themselves afford to be seen as corrupt, at least not all that corrupt, just business as usual. Fortunately he has plenty of support from other businessmen. And it would help if Trump had significant support from those who favor him on other grounds.

For that we have the MAGA faithful, which, as far as I can tell, is a motley crew. Many of them may not like immigrants, but as long as he promises to kick them out, they could care less about his licentiousness. As for his cruelty, as long as he directs it to those immigrants, it’s fine by them.

But we also have the Christian right, many of whom abhor that licentiousness, but they also abhor abortion. As long as abortion is confined to secretive doctors who hide their services and to doubtful practitioners who slink around back alleys in the dark, these people may not say much. But once public abortion clinics become available, that cannot be allowed. But if Trump will appoint Supreme Court justices who are with them on this, they’ll support the Trumperor. He did and they do.

Finally among those who abhor abortion we have those who insist that a woman who has been raped must carry the fetus to term. Why? To allow the abortion is to admit that the rape took place, that men can be, are all too often, cruel. Or perhaps they want to blame the woman herself for the rape, “She was askin’ for it.” Well, as long as DJT gets rid of abortion, he can do whatever he wishes with women, but just don’t tell us about it. These are not necessarily explicit beliefs held by all individuals, but they are functional outcomes of the system.

* * * * *

ChatGPT created the illustration above based on the following photograph, taken on a Day of the Dead celebration in Jersey City in November of 2015: