2026-05-06 at

reflections on the endocrinology of study

Perhaps I have too much trauma from past learnings. Like, childhood learnings, before I started self-guided studies at 18. Often enough I run into a list of things I don't know, and I become afraid. Then I recollect myself and procrastinate before finally getting to the study. The study is usually easier than anticipated.

But this is a bit of an oversimplification. Based on my biased view of my own track record, my normal acceptance for stress is something like "75% of the time unsuccessful, with accompanying hormonal and neural responses", and "25% successful, ditto". Which is to say, I spend most of my life depressed, and make up for it more than adequately otherwise.

Then I reflect on the sort of people I think are foolish, who seem to spend the majority of their time talking about success, but then have these minority periods of time when they are depressed. But after all, the averages are equivalent, I suppose. So it is just a preference about how one wishes to spend time.

2026-05-05 at

Throwback : COPR

AI devs and cog-sci nerds : Kant's [ Critique of Pure Reason ] ! It's a 1781 AD European classic, on how to to quantify consciousness. No shit. Very relevant in 2026.


A dude on Threads referenced this classical text while objecting to something I wrote. I went back to check on terminology. It's been a while since I had to read CoPR in college - five years after I had gotten the summary of TI from Sophie's World. 


Here I highlight an important treatment of Kant's vocabulary : when he says "intuition" he's referring roughly to "dumb sensations" not to some intangible/ insensible thing.


Have fun reading CoPR if you can! Maybe get an abridged copy, or the AI summary will do. One of my two branches of college-era R&D was about this stuff, and that has continued into my work post-college : I'm still trying to learn how to talk to computers :P

Milestones in asynchronous computing

  • ORDVAC (1951) : on vacuum tubes : IAS, precursor to von Neuman, architecture : procured for ballistic compute : business computations could resume based on notifications, but storage media had to be periodically activated to retain data regardless of business
  • ILLIAC II (1962) : on magnetic cores : procured for research : but basically the same computer, and now relieved of the need to cyclically refresh memory; ancestor of POSIX signals in the 1970s
  • Software Actor Model (1973) : Hewitt abstracts the whole thing into software, with inspiration from Smalltalk's (1972) object-orientated model
  • Transmission Control Protocol (1974) : Cerf, Kahn, proposal
  • "make depend" (1978) : innovation to track dependencies in source code, with the "make" build tool (1976), but such features were not reliable for several years
  • VisiCalc (1979) : spreadsheet software for the Apple II : chained cellular recalculation
  • Erlang (1986) : first popular programming language utilising the Actor Model, just not the following keywords ...
  • F# (2007) : introduction of "async-bang!" keywords, later evolving in other languages into "async-await"