dynamic abstractions

Letting things build

This week I put together a reading list for my digital aura series. I recall starting to write around Thanksgiving — but when I looked back at my reading, I’d started reading for it months earlier. (No wonder it’s felt like such a big endeavor!)

papers.club

The Internet's Reading Group

Notes on the Synthesis of Time

Description loading…

Reading List: AI and the Future of Human Autonomy

Open-source reading list from a discussion group hosted by the Liberty Fund

Creative Reading: Scaffolding Reading for Transformation

However, recent work on augmenting reading largely focuses on making reading more efficient, especially in knowledge-intensive contexts where people must rapidly make sense of research papers and other complex documents (Lo et al., 2024). These systems often aim to help readers skim, summarize, and synthesize large volumes of information in order to reduce cognitive effort and accelerate document- and corpus-level sensemaking at scale (Gu et al., 2025; Lo et al., 2024; Fok et al., 2023). At one extreme, the form of reading implicitly envisioned by these systems may resemble what we call “reading to discard”: extracting the essential, actionable informational core of a document as quickly and efficiently as possible, so that the rest can be swiftly tossed aside—much like we often process inbound mail. This motivates us to ask what scaffolding approaches might resist “reading to discard,” what alternative forms of reading we might scaffold, and what alternative views and values of reading might guide the conversation.

In Which A Book Lexicon is Born

Hi everyone, We recently held a sync to discuss creating a shared book lexicon for the Atmosphere Protocol. I’ve shared the full recording (thanks Ronen!) and notes from the meeting here: Fathom with some early notes here: https://app.notion.com/p/Book-Lexicon-Session-1-211b2b43aabb8007b098d063972ca58c (also do we have a ATProto version of Notion yet?) The book logging social scene is highly fragmented. Dozens of Goodreads alternatives are competing but not interoperating, leading to a lack of...

A no-bullshit introduction to groups: Part 1.

An algebraic exposition of the basics of abstract algebra. Groups without symmetries.

Readwise: Get the most out of what you read

Easily revisit and learn from your highlights and annotations.

Hardcover

We're a social network for book lovers to find life changing books, track what you read & want to read, and connect with passionate readers.

Matter

Matter brings newsletters, feeds, and read-later into one beautiful interface. It’s the ultimate reading client for the open web.

Konrad Hinsen's blog

A much cited essay by Bret Victor, "Explorable Explanations", argues for supporting and encouraging active reading in communicating ideas. Explanatory text should thus be complemented by interactive visualizations and computational demonstrations, allowing the reader to actively engage with the ideas. If you haven't read Victor's essay yet, please do so now, and then come back here. It's not very long. What I am going to discuss is a variation on Victor's proposal, and I won't repeat his well-presented arguments.

Meandering on Manifolds: The Neural Geometry of Stories Over Time

To fully understand LLM representations, we must understand how they change dynamically, over the course of a prompt or conversation. We investigate these temporal dynamics with a simple case study: how do LLMs represent human emotions while reading short stories, both geometrically (in activation space) and temporally (changing from sentence to sentence)?