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!)

Notes on the Synthesis of Time

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Reading List: AI and the Future of Human Autonomy

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

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.

Hardcover

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Matter

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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)?

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)?

Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory

This book is an invitation to discover advanced topics in category theory through concrete, real-world examples. It aims to give a tour: a gentle, quick introduction to guide later exploration. The tour takes place over seven sketches, each pairing an evocative application, such as databases, electric circuits, or dynamical systems, with the exploration of a categorical structure, such as adjoint functors, enriched categories, or toposes. No prior knowledge of category theory is assumed. A feedback form for typos, comments, questions, and suggestions is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/160G9OFcP5DWT8Stn7TxdVx83DJnnf7d5GML0_FOD5Wg/edit

Chasing RATs: Tracing Reading for and as Creative Activity

Creativity research has privileged making over the interpretive labor that precedes and shapes it. We introduce Reading Activity Traces (RATs), a proposal that treats reading -- broadly defined to include navigating, interpreting, and curating media across interconnected sources -- as creative activity both for future artifacts and as a form of creation in its own right. By tracing trajectories of traversal, association, and reflection as inspectable artifacts, RATs render visible the creative work that algorithmic feeds and AI summarization increasingly compress and automate away. We illustrate this through WikiRAT, a speculative instantiation on Wikipedia, and open new ground for reflective practice, reader modeling, collective sensemaking, and understanding what is lost when human interpretation is automated -- towards designing intelligent tools that preserve it.

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