https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/2026-03-03.html

The 10 highest-rated articles on Hacker News on March 03, 2026 which have not appeared on any previous Hacker News Daily are:

https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/2026-03-03.html

senmut

minoanmiss -- I'm still processing.

May I suggest we remember her life as a artist, a creative force to be reckoned with, and one of the main reasons I personally re-evaluated my racism because of SO MANY insightful thoughts.

sovay

I was in the middle of making snow-delayed hamantashn when I heard that

minoanmiss who always raised a light for memory has gone out. She made art for my niece. I wrote "The House Snakes" for her. (She made art for it.) And once again the people who make this country so difficult to stay alive in are still burning and burdening this earth. I will raise a light, but I feel more like throwing a Molotov cocktail.

Current Music: The Pack a.d., "8"

adrian_turtle

I don't usually travel to a place for the place, as such. I've left home a lot, but in all but one case I've been going to visit a person or going to an event like a con. But Cattitude was having a hard time coping with winter, and then we had a blizzard, and it all got to be too much. So Redbird and Cattitude and I picked up and went to New Orleans for a few days, because it wasn't snowing there.

One of many challenging things about winter is that we still don't want to eat in company indoors. It has been SIX YEARS, and sometimes it feels like we are the only people in the country who care about public health and it is just so exhausting. (There were a few other people wearing masks in the airport, which felt good.) But the general frustration is still wearing, especially in winter. We were informed that New Orleans has lots of restaurants with patios that are open, even in February. The crowds recede after Mardi Gras, and the weather forecast was glorious.

New Orleans is a great city for dining. Unfortunately, it's a terrible city for ME to dine. I keep kosher in a very haphazard way (I won't eat pork or shellfish, but I don't care how the chicken was slaughtered), and I can't eat dairy products at all. Everything had shellfish or dairy or both. I went down there thinking most restaurants would have have at least one vegan item on the menu, but the places with outdoor dining or takeout generally did not.

The music was good. I need more music in my life.

whatever_scalzi_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/03/the-big-idea-kirsten-karschock/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59685

Does a mad scientist do what they do out of sheer love of the game, or because they can’t just up and quit doing the whole mad science thing? Do they love their work, or is it just unhealthy obsession? Author Kirsten Kaschock looks at some of fiction’s most well-known inventors in the Big Idea for her newest novel, An Impossibility of Crows, drawing parallels between herself, her main character, and all the truly mad creators of the past.

KIRSTEN KASCHOCK:

A crow the size of a horse.

The dream terrified me but not the way you’d think. I was drawn in. A little hypnotized. Even in the dream I wanted to understand how the thing came into being. And, in the dream, the crow wasn’t threatening me—just doing crow things.

The crow kept coming back, not at night, but in my wandering mind or whenever I saw an actual crow. I’d look at one walking in the snow or huddled in a tree and think to myself, “What if?” That’s when I started sketching the crow’s maker: Agnes Krahn.

I needed to know who would decide to build (I often call it building rather than breeding for reasons I can’t quite explain) a crow of such size and why? To figure that out, I started writing as if I were Agnes—a scientist, of course—commenting on her world in real time. The book had to be a diary. But because she was a scientist, an ex-chemist to be exact, Agnes also included her research in these pages. And then, other odds and ends kept arriving, including letters from Agnes’s long dead mother. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized that the book would be so closely linked to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—which is also epistolary and multivocal. But there was already a marked difference. Agnes, unlike Victor Frankenstein, is a woman.

How many other unhinged women scientists have found their way into literature? Fewer, I’d wager than their male counterparts. I imagined Agnes’s reasons for building Solo (the crow’s name is Solo) to be different than most of the mad scientists’ I have read, and more like Mary Shelley’s own backstory: never knowing her own mother, her loss of a child, a need to prove herself to the poets among which she found herself.

I knew Agnes wasn’t driven by ego or ambition, exactly. She isn’t selfless either. God no. But her obsession with increasing the size of the bird has a reason other than narcissism: she wants to provide her daughter with wings.

This is where Agnes and the character of Victor F. part ways. When I realized why Agnes was building Solo, she started to resemble other creators from other stories.

Agnes wants to give her daughter this crow, but what her daughter thinks or feels about this is irrelevant. Agnes is trying to provide an escape route for someone who—I learned while writing her—does not feel particularly trapped. But Agnes is oblivious to how her daughter perceives herself. In this way, Agnes is as monstrous as most mothers.

The model I used for their relationship is actually that of a father and son—Daedalus and Icarus. I’ve long loved this Greek myth, although it was taught to me as a tragedy of disobedience: warned about the dangers of flight, Icarus cannot help but fly too close to the sun. But what if the fault lies with Daedalus, who should have known his child better? In my novel, Agnes does not know her daughter at all. This is both their tragedy and another mystery I had to solve: Why doesn’t she? Writing a Gothic Horror novel turned into a bit of a rabbit hole… a Russian doll. The book kept asking me why things are the way they are. Why people do the things they do. And at the bottom of every version of Agnes I found another woman, another layer of hurt.

To be honest, this is why I write in the first place. To get to the under-questions, the ones below the surfaces of thought.

Solo, the crow, is in some ways a cipher: a darkness onto which I was reading human nature. But Solo is also very real. He is an immense crow, with all the intelligence of a crow (maybe more), and thus he is horrifying in his own right. That’s how we read each other, too. We know people as what they are to us, and only if we are incredibly lucky and attentive do we ever learn who they are beyond our needs, fears, and desires of them.

Agnes is the only one in the book who doesn’t see Solo as an existential threat, or not until it is too late. She may not admit it to herself, but as she builds him—he grows into a replacement for her daughter rather than a gift to her. She is Mary Shelley. She is Victor Frankenstein. She is Daedalus. And she is Gepetto. As she gets more and more drawn into her experiment, her attention to her family wanes and her devotion to the crow increases. I, myself, am married to a scientist. I am an artist. We have both done this with our work. We do this. Agnes is also him. And she is me.

Her madness I am familiar with: Agnes wants to create a life larger than her own. Somehow, she believes that Solo can free her from her guilt and grief.

The big idea in An Impossibility of Crows is this: when you bury your feelings they don’t stay dead—and when they rise up, they may find a form beyond any you can hope to control. I began writing with a single frightening image. I moved quickly from there to considering the crow’s creator. Then, in seeking to understand Agnes, I progressed through a series of models towards my own reasons for making.

I had a teacher once who said that writers only write about three things: sex, death, and writing. And then there’s this old joke: if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother. I think many things can be true at once. Nothing is ever Solo. And everything is.

—-

An Impossibility of Crows: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/03/the-big-idea-kirsten-karschock/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59685

oursin

Have just been reading a very odd book - sortes ereader, something it appears I bought when you could still convert Kindle books to Kobo epub, cannot recall if it was something someone had recommended or what.

LH Johnson, Tell Me of a Girl (2018) - independently published, a retelling of The Secret Garden.

I am not sure why. Because usually if people are doing a retelling they are remixing or shaking up in some way? Okay, this did do some kind of vaguely different backstory of Mary's relationship with her mother, but otherwise it followed the story pretty exactly though leaving stuff out, and much of what was actually in the original seemed terribly washed out.

Characters who are vivid presences in the original seemed muted (Martha, Ben Weatherstaff, Dickon, the robin) - and devoid of Yorkshire speech to boot.

One might have expected that maybe a retelling might do what that recent reworking of Katy did and be a bit more disability positive, but no.

Mary Lennox is already a stroppy young person who doesn't exactly need to grab more agency, hmmm?

It's also done in a rather annoying typographical style.

At the end the author indicates that it's not only in dialogue with Burnett's original but with a whole swathe of scholarship on Golden Age children's lit. Maybe it came out of the project for a course???

I could see it sort of working as the basis of a rather moody atmospheric movie version?

Has anyone else come across this? I'm really not sure what to make of it.

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/03/the-big-idea-kirsten-karschock/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59685

KIRSTEN KASCHOCK:

A crow the size of a horse.

This is where Agnes and the character of Victor F. part ways. When I realized why Agnes was building Solo, she started to resemble other creators from other stories.

To be honest, this is why I write in the first place. To get to the under-questions, the ones below the surfaces of thought.

Her madness I am familiar with: Agnes wants to create a life larger than her own. Somehow, she believes that Solo can free her from her guilt and grief.

—-

An Impossibility of Crows: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/03/the-big-idea-kirsten-karschock/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59685

tamaranth

2026/031: Frankenstein in Baghdad — Ahmed Saadawi (translated by Jonathan Wright)

‘I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as rubbish, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial.’ [p. 27]

Baghdad, 2005: after the American invasion and occupation, just as the sectarian civil war is kicking off. Antique (junk) dealer Hadi, trying to retrieve a friend's remains after a car bomb, finds that body parts at the mortuary are all jumbled together, with little effort to reconstruct each corpse. He begins to assemble a body, picking and choosing from the scraps of anatomy that are in plentiful supply on the streets of Baghdad. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: thoughtful

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-windup-girl-by-paolo-bacigalupi/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=65574

The Windup Girl won the Nebula for Best Novel in 2010, and was the joint winner of the Hugo for Best Novel along with The City & the City, by China Miéville. It also topped the Hugo nominations ballot.

This is the only tied result for the winner of any category for the regular Hugos since 1993. (In the forty years before that, there were eleven ties, including one for the then Campbell Award; but voter participation was much lower.) We also had a tie for the Retro Hugos in 2020; I remember vividly spotting it as I went through the results while driving through France (I was not at the wheel).

The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Windup Girl is:

And then she wonders if she has it backwards, if the part that struggles to maintain her illusions of self-respect is the part intent upon her destruction. If her body, this collection of cells and manipulated DNA—with its own stronger, more practical needs—is actually the survivor: the one with will.

When I first read it, shortly after it won the Nebula, I wrote:

Emiko, the girl of the title, is an artificial human being of a near-future world ravaged by agricultural disaster, created as an escort for a Japanese businessman and abandoned by him in Thailand. She, like all her kind, is easily identifiable by her jerky body movements, and is subject to instant destruction at the whim of the law (not to mention the risks of metabolic overheating). Her personal dilemma, trading her body for self-preservation, intersects with a political and environmental crisis in Thailand, with fairly catastrophic consequences. It is a fast-paced book which beat out Miéville’s The City & The City for the Nebula, and I’ll find it difficult to choose; while Bacigalupi’s vision is less audacious, he carries it off rather more consistently. Some nasty sex and violence so not for all readers.

In the end, my thinking was matured by reading several feminist critiques of The Windup Girl, and I put it third on my ballot, behind both The City & the City and Palimpsest by Cat Valente (so mine was one of the 24 votes that transferred from Valente to Miéville on the third round). I also put it second last on my BSFA ballot the following year.

Rereading it now, I have to be honest, I really didn’t like it. The lushly imagined Thailand is rather Orientalist, and the protagonist is not just a whore with a heart of gold, she’s a robot whore with a heart of gold. (To be crystal clear: my objection is not to sex work, but to clichés.) There is a lot of sexual violence which doesn’t advance the story at all. Maybe it was just my jet lag in California, but I also found the plot difficult to follow. I’m dropping my opinion of it from mediocre to actively bad, as has happened occasionally in this sequence of reading.

But if you want to, you can get The Windup Girl here.

Incidentally I have also found that it is the best-known book set in Thailand, as measured by LibraryThing. (The Beach by Alex Garland has a lead on Goodreads.)

That year, the Hugo for Best Novella went to “Palimpsest”, by Charles Stross; for Best Novelette to “The Island”, by Peter Watts; and for Short Story to “Bridesicle”, by Will McIntosh. This was the last time (so far) that the four traditional fiction Hugo categories were all won by white men.

The Nebula for Best Novella went to The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, by Kage Baker; for Best Novelette to “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast”, by Eugie Foster; and for Short Story to “Spar”, by Kij Johnson.

The following year, the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel both went to Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis, but I am going to skip it as I wasted far too much time on reading it the first time round. That means that the next post in this sequence will be about Ken Liu’s short story “The Paper Menagerie”, Kij Johnson’s novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, and Jo Walton’s novel Among Others.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-windup-girl-by-paolo-bacigalupi/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=65574

markdominus_feed

https://blog.plover.com/2026/03/03#Bo-Diddley

Bo Diddley's cover of "Sixteen Tons" sounds very much like one of my favorites, "Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover". It's interesting to compare.

Thinking on that it suddenly occured to me that his name might have been a play on “diddley bow”, which is a sort of homemade one-stringed zither. The player uses a bottle as a bridge for the string, and changes the pitch by sliding the bottle up and down. When you hear about blues artists whose first guitars were homemade, this is often what was meant: it wasn't a six-string guitar, it was a diddley bow.

But it's not clear that Bo Diddley did play his name on the diddley bow. "Diddly" also means something insignificant or of little value, and might have been a disparaging nickname he received in his youth. (It also appears in the phrase "diddly squat"). Maybe that's also the source of the name of the diddley bow.

https://blog.plover.com/2026/03/03#Bo-Diddley

markdominus_feed

https://blog.plover.com/2026/02/12#micro-worlds-2

In a recent article about John Haugeland's rejection of micro-worlds I claimed:

as a “Large Language Model”, Claude necessarily includes a model of the world in general

Nobody has objected to this remark, but I would like to expand on it. The claim may or may not be true — it is an empirical question. But as a theory it has been widely entertained since the very earliest days of digital computers. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, the first person to seriously investigate machine translation, came to this conclusion in the 1950s. Here's an extract of Haugeland's discussion of his work:

In 1951 Yehoshua Bar-Hillel became the first person to earn a living from work on machine translation. Nine years later he was the first to point out the fatal flaw in the whole enterprise, and therefore to abandon it. Bar-Hillel proposed a simple test sentence:

The box was in the pen.

And, for discussion, he considered only the ambiguity: (1) pen = a writing instrument; versus (2) pen = a child's play enclosure. Extraordinary circumstances aside (they only make the problem harder), any normal English speaker will instantly choose "playpen" as the right reading. How? By understanding the sentence and exercising a little common sense. As anybody knows, if one physical object is in another, then the latter must be the larger; fountain pens tend to be much smaller than boxes, whereas playpens are plenty big.

Why not encode these facts (and others like them) right into the system? Bar-Hillel observes:

What such a suggestion amounts to, if taken seriously, is the requirement that a translation machine should not only be supplied with a dictionary but also with a universal encyclopedia. This is surely utterly chimerical and hardly deserves any further discussion. (1960, p. 160)

(Artifical Intelligence: The Very Idea; John Haugeland; p.174–176.)

Bar-Hillel says, and I agree, that an accurate model of language requires an accurate model of the world. In 1960, this appeared “utterly chimerical”. Perhaps so, but here we are, and 55 years later we have what most agree is a language model capable of producing intelligible text complex enough to fool sophisticated readers. Even people who call the LLM a “stochastic word garbage spewer” and object when it is called “AI” seem to have no qualms about the term “large language model”.

The Winograd SHRDLU project was an attempt to construct a world whose model was small enough to not be utterly chimerical. This worked, but as Haugeland says, it wasn't actually interesting.

Doug Lenat tried for forty years construct an explicit world model. When he died in 2023 I think people still considered the project to have been utterly chimerical.

I may be misrepresenting Bar-Hillel's views. He didn't actually say “world model”, he said “universal encyclopedia”. Lenat's project's name, “Cyc”, acknowledges this: “Cyc” is short for “encyclopedia”. And until recently a universal encyclopedia did seem, to many, to be utterly chimerical. (Imperial China produced many interesting attempts.) But we do now in fact have a universal encyclopedia, and Claude has ingested that universal encyclopedia.

Let's try it and see

Bar-Hillel thought that the “box is in the pen” example proved that machine translation would be at the very least extremely difficult: it requires understanding of the usual relative sizes of boxes and pens, and that the possibility of such understanding in general “hardly deserves any further discussion”.

I asked Claude:

Consider the sentence “the box was in the pen”. What does “pen” mean here?

Claude said:

Most likely a playpen or animal pen (enclosure), since a box wouldn't fit inside a writing pen.

Presumably Bar-Hillel's article and Haugeland's book was in Claude's training data, and perhaps it somehow absorbed the right thing to say here without actually knowing anything about boxes or pens. I tried the next similar example that came to mind:

How about “suit” in “what suit was the king”?

Playing card suit - hearts, diamonds, clubs, or spades.

Why?

The context "what suit was the king" is the standard phrasing for identifying a playing card. A king is one of the face cards in each suit, so asking about its suit is a natural card game question.

Okay, that's just what I would have said.

Why couldn't it be a human king wearing a suit?

It could be - I jumped to the card interpretation because "what suit was the king" uses "suit" as a predicate noun, which is uncommon phrasing for clothing. You'd more naturally say "what suit was the king wearing" or "what kind of suit did the king have." But without more context, the clothing interpretation is perfectly plausible.

I think Claude is wrong about the grammar here. I'm not sure what “predicate noun” means and I suspect Claude is using the term incorrectly. I can't understand “what suit was the king?” as grammatical in any plausible construction, only in highly contrived situtations such as an evil wizard transforming the king into a suit of armor and hiding him in the armory.

But if one agrees to take it to mean “what suit does the king have” I agree that this is a perfectly plausible interpretation even though there isn't anything clearly clothing-related nearby, and if one assumes it meant “what suit was the king wearing” then the clothing interpretation is unavoidable.

Could it be a lawsuit?

Yes - "what suit was the king" could mean what lawsuit the king was involved in. That reading makes grammatical sense, though it would be more natural with "in" ("what suit was the king in"). Context would be needed to distinguish between cards, clothing, and lawsuits.

Again I disagree that this makes grammatical sense. Without “in” I think a native listener would be at least puzzled. (“Do you mean ‘what suit was the king involved in?’?”)

Could it be a misspelling for “soot”?

Yes, that's plausible - "what soot was the king" could be asking what type of soot the king was covered in or exposed to. Though it's an odd question without specific context like a fire or industrial setting.

In my opinion, it is not grammatically plausible.

However, I think focusing on the grammatical errors would missing the point. The “soot” interpretation is unlikely, I think the bad grammar rules it out, and Claude's response does not seem to recognize this. But Claude does express understanding that that the interpretation is unikely without some surrounding soot-related context, and a reasonable idea of what that context would need to be like.

What if it were “what color is the king”?

If it's "what color is the king," then the card suit interpretation becomes much less likely (suits aren't typically described as colors, though red/black could work). It's more likely asking about a physical object - a chess piece, a game token, a statue, or similar - where the king's color is relevant.

I had been thinking of “color” as referring to the king's skin color, but I agree that the chess piece or game token interpretation is more plausible. Again Claude seems to understand something about how we talk about things. If the king were a playing card, we might be asking if it is a red king or a black king. But without that context it's now more likely that the king is a chess piece than a playing card.

What if the sentence was known to have been translated from German?

That would strengthen the card suit interpretation significantly. German card suits (Herz, Karo, Pik, Kreuz) are often called "Farbe" (color) in German card game terminology, so "what color is the king" could be a literal translation of a question about which suit a king card belongs to.

That's just what I would have said.

Could “suit” have been an accidental misspelling of “age”?

On a standard keyboard, that seems unlikely - 'a', 'g', 'e' are nowhere near 's', 'u', 'i', 't'. Autocorrect or speech-to-text could produce it, but not a typical typing error.

I thought Claude might botch this. There is no grammatical or semantic reason why “what age was the king” doesn't work, so the only reason to reject this is orthographic. And Claude's grasp of spelling still seems quite weak. The other day it claimed that “‘Warner’ is likely either a typo for ‘Cham’ or …” which couldn't be wronger. I told it at the time that it is impossible that "Cham" could be a typo for “Warner”, and if pressed to explain why, I would have said something like what Claude said here.

Tentative conclusions

Interesting as this all is, it is a digression. My main points, again:

It is at least plausible that coherent speech requires a model of a large fraction of the world, and, while it may yet turn out to be false, this theory has been seen as plausible for generations.
Whatever else Claude can or can't do, it can certainly speak coherently.
Therefore Claude probably does have something like a model of a substantial part of the world.
In 1960 this appeared completely impossible.
But here we are.

Addendum

20260214

I disagreed with Claude that “what suit was the king” made grammatical sense. Rik Signes has pointed out that it it is certainly grammatical, because the grammar is the same as “what person was the king” or “what visitor was the king”. My discomfort with it is not grammatical, it is pragmatic.

https://blog.plover.com/2026/02/12#micro-worlds-2

markdominus_feed

https://blog.plover.com/2026/02/05#micro-worlds

Buy
Artificial Intelligence

from Bookshop.org
(with kickback)
(without kickback)

One of the better books I read in college was Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (1985) by philosopher John Haugeland. One of the sections I found most striking and memorable was about Terry Winograd's SHRDLU. SHRDLU, around 1970, could carry on a discussion in English in which it would manipulate imaginary colored blocks in a “blocks world”. displayed on a computer screen. The operator could direct it to “pick up the pyramid and put it on the big red cube” or ask it questions like “what color is the biggest cylinder that isn't on the table?”.

Haugeland was extremely unimpressed (p.190, and more generally 185–195):

To dwell on these shortcomings, however, is to miss the fundamental limitation: the micro-world itself. SHRDLU performs so glibly only because his domain has been stripped of anything that could ever require genuine wit or understanding. In other words, far from digging down to the essential questions of AI, a micro-world simply eliminates them. … the blocks-world "approximates" a playroom more as a paper plane approximates a duck.

He imagines this exchange between the operator and SHRDLU:

Trade you a squirtgun for a big red block.

SORRY, I DON'T KNOW THE WORD "TRADE".

Oops, a vocabulary snag. Fortunately, SHRDLU can learn new words; Winograd taught him about steeples, and now we'll tell him about trades (and squirtguns).

A "trade" is a free exchange of property.

SORRY, I DON'T KNOW THE WORD "FREE".

A "free" act is done willingly, without being forced.

SORRY, I DON'T KNOW THE WORD "ACT".

"Acts" are what people do on purpose, and not by accident.

SORRY, I DON'T KNOW THE WORD "PEOPLE".

Sorry, I thought you were smarter than you are.

SORRY, I DON'T KNOW THE WORD "SORRY".

What does Haugeland say he would like to have seen?

Try to imagine, for instance, that instead of crashing on the first word, SHRDLU would give our offer a typical, ordinary response:

I ALREADY HAVE A WATER PISTOL, BUT I'LL GIVE YOU TWO BLOCKS AND A PYRAMID FOR YOUR SLIMY OLD FROG.

Childishly simple, no doubt; but look at how much is presupposed:

SHRDLU appreciates that a second squirtgun would be less valuable than the first; …

On this standard, at least, an LLM is a smashing success. It does, in fact, have a model of trading, acts, property, and water pistols, or at least of how we talk about such things. We might criticize the model's accuracy, or usefulness, but it certainly exists. The large language model is a model of the semantics of trading, acts, property, water pistols, and so on.

Curious to see how it would go, I asked Claude to pretend it had access to a SHRDLU-like blocks world:

Let's pretend that we have a blocks world and you have access to it, the way SHRDLU does, except you are not SHRDLU, but still Claude. So I could ask Claude "put the pyramid on the big red block " and, if there were several pyramids, you might reply “I don't know which pyramid you mean" or whatever Claude would actually say in such a situation. Was that clear?

Yes, that's clear. I'll act as Claude with access to a blocks world environment—able to manipulate blocks, pyramids, and other shapes on a table, stack them, move them around, and so on.

I asked it a few SHRDLU-like questions about the blocks, then asked it to put a block on a pyramid. It clearly understood the point of the exercise:

I can't do that—the blue block is much larger than the red pyramid, and the pyramid has a pointed top. The block wouldn't balance; it would just fall off.

SHRDLU could handle this too, although I think its mechanism was different: it would interact with the separate blocks world subsystem and ⸢actually⸣ try to put the block on the pyramid; the simulated physics would simulate the block falling off the pyramid, and SHRDLU would discover that its stacking attempt had been unsuccessful. With Claude, something very different is happening; there is no physics simulation separate from Claude. I think the answer here demonstrates that Claude's own model includes something about pyramids and something about physics.

Then I made the crucial offer:

Trade you a squirtgun for a big red block.

I appreciate the offer, but I don't really have a way to accept a squirtgun from you, nor do you have physical access to the blocks world to hand me one.

That said—I could just add a big red block to the world if you want one in here. Should I put one on the table?

Would Haugeland have been satisfied in 1985 if SHRDLU had said this? I think certainly. Haugeland wanted SHRDLU to respond to the offer directly, as the beginning of a negotiation. Claude's response is one level better from that: it not only recognizes that I am negotiating, it recognizes that actually negotiating for the squirt gun would not make sense, and offers a sensible workaround.

I pushed it a little farther:

I have a squirtgun here. I can designate it as belonging to you, if you agree that the big red block belongs to me.

Alright, you've got a deal. The big red block is yours.

I've placed a big red block on the table—it's now designated as belonging to you. And I acknowledge the squirtgun as mine, though I confess I have no idea what I'll do with it in a blocks world. Perhaps threaten uncooperative pyramids into stacking properly.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but it seems to me that, having recognized that the offer to negotiate was itself silly, Claude is responding in the same mode with its comments about threatening the pyramids.

Mostly I just tried this for fun. The Haugeland discussion of SHRDLU has been knocking around my head for forty years, but now it has knocked against something new, and I wanted to see what would actually happen.

But I do have a larger point. Haugeland clearly recognized in 1985 that a model of the world was a requirement for intelligence:

The world of trading cannot be "micro." … There are no plausible, non-arbitrary boundaries restricting what might be relevant at any juncture.

and later:

The world cannot be decomposed into independent fragments. Realizing this amounts to a fundamental insight into common sense and mundane intelligence — and therefore points the way for subsequent AI.

Are there are any people who are still saying “it's not artificial intelligence, it's just a Large Language Model”. I suppose probably. But as a “Large Language Model”, Claude necessarily includes a model of the world in general, something that has long been recognized as an essential but perhaps unattainable prerequisite for artificial intelligence. Five years ago a general world model was science fiction. Now we have something that can plausibly be considered an example.

And second: maybe this isn't “artificial intelligence” (whatever that means) and maybe it is. But it does the things I wanted artificial intelligence to do, and I think this example shows pretty clearly that it does at least one of the things that John Haugeland wanted it to do in 1985.

My complete conversation with Claude about this.

Addenda

20260207

I don't want to give the impression that Haugeland was scornful of Winograd's work. He considered it to have been a valuable experiment:

No criticism whatever is intended of Winograd or his coworkers. On the contrary, it was they who faithfully pursued a pioneering and plausible line of inquiry and thereby made an important scientific discovery, even if it wasn't quite what they expected. … The micro-worlds effort may be credited with showing that the world cannot be decomposed into independent fragments.

(p. 195)

20260212

More about my claim that

as a “Large Language Model”, Claude necessarily includes a model of the world in general

I was not just pulling this out of my ass; it has been widely theorized since at least 1960.

https://blog.plover.com/2026/02/05#micro-worlds

squirmelia

Sunday 22nd February was a day of bottles! I picked up far too many as they just kept washing in.

Clear bottles:

Coca-cola bottle.

R White's - two different styles of R White’s bottles. One of them has a broken neck.

Presta bottle. Presta was made by Apollinaris and they made squashes and other drinks.

Presta advert:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/1qqg13o/ad_poster_for_presta_sparkling_orange_and/#lightbox

Apollinaris company: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/cp122659/the-apollinaris-company-limited

Brown bottles:

These three I am unsure of. Two of them could be modern beer bottles.

One says H4 CTC on the bottom. The other says R 10. The one with a label mark is much lighter than the other one, so I guess the one without the label is older.

The third makes me think of a cough mixture bottle and has B4 200 on it. When I hold the bottle up to the light I can see rainbow colours.

I might just recycle these ones.

A good chunk of a green torpedo/hamilton bottle, designed to be kept on its side. On the side I can read words that probably spelt:
Lemonade
le soda
Mineral waters
Wales

I can’t quite make out:
orth
le soda (table soda?)
R. H.
T’s

There’s also a glow stick and a bit of something that possibly said London Bridge.

Also, a pretty sparkly button!

I also found a glass jar. On the bottom it has an R in a circle and a 9. Perhaps it once contained jam. I’m thinking I might keep some pieces of colourful glass in it.

There was also a mysterious rusty thing. Google Lens said it was a grenade, which it definitely is not, but it could have been an oil lamp? It has a handle on the bottom.

And then there were a few other items:
A Libbey Duratuff glass, probably modern, as it’s quite jagged.

Part of a Thomas Keating bottle. The bottle would have read “Thomas Keating, Chemist, St Paul’s Churchyard”.

Thomas Keating was apparently based at 79 St. Paul’s Churchyard from around the 1780s, although records show this from around 1815.

Thomas Keating was a chemist and was known for their cough lozenges. One article I found said they sold cough lozenges in the winter and insecticides/flea powder in the summer!

The company later diversified and made scientific instruments, and components used in telephone exchanges and satellites! They still exist as TK Instruments: https://www.terahertz.co.uk/tk-instruments/history

A bit of glass I picked up as it said “ass” on it.

A sherd that says “Wells, 63 Wood Street, London” on it. It was made by Wells and Son, and could have been the base of a hat/wig shop display stand, like this one: https://www.easyliveauction.com/catalogue/lot/d11b0ba1e5d511d3ce164df1a086c0f4/0af8d24542e81eb9357e7ef448a6646f/antique-and-good-quality-modern-and-collectables/

It’s likely to be from the late 1800s.

They also made stands for mannequins and blanket racks.

A few pieces of Express Dairies Aster pattern.

A pink plastic heart bead.

A piece of a James Keiller marmalade jar. Keiller’s marmalade dates back to 1797, when Janet Keiller made some marmalade and then opened a factory in Dundee with her son, James Keiller, to produce it.

The green and white pattern is the Adams pattern by Collingwood, who were in operation from 1887 - 1948 in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, It may have looked like this: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/376753433746 I have seen this pattern before, but hadn’t managed to identify it previously.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

rydra_wong

https://goss.dreamwidth.org/846602.html

senmut

I am likely going to finish all current projects, and then my writing I share with the public will only be what I sign up for in charity drives and exchanges.

I just don't have enough energy to warrant putting the effort into sharing/promoting fic when it is a source of stress, given comment dearth and spammer content.

I will not be removing any of my archives. I'm just going to stop trying to engage with others.

ecosophia

We are now well into the fifth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary all these years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health remain anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; ~~public health authorities~~ government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; new revelations are leaking out about just how bad the Covid vaccines are for human health; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.

3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

7. Please don't post LLM ("AI") generated text. This is a place for human beings to talk to other human beings, not for the regurgitation of machine-generated text. Also, please don't discuss large language models (the technology popularly and inaccurately called "artificial intelligence" these days) except as they bear directly on the Covid phenomenon. Here again, my finger is hovering over the delete button.

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Music: Al Stewart, "If It Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It"

nlnetlabs_feed

Posted by Team NLnet Labs

https://blog.nlnetlabs.nl/the-winter-2026-newsletter/

Welcome to the Winter edition of our quarterly newsletter "Of Trees and Tries"! Snow and ice have not stopped us. Read on to learn about our adventures at FOSDEM and how Cascade is progressing. Feedback is welcome, either at ICANN85 (Maarten), IETF125 (Benno, Willem) or over at our community forum.

FOSDEM

Arya, Philip and Terts were all present at FOSDEM 2026, which was once again a great mix of cool technology, nice people, piles of stickers and lots of waffles.

We gave two presentations at FOSDEM this year. Philip gave a talk in the DNS dev room about the current state of Domain, our DNS library in Rust, and the products we've been building with it. He picked up where Martin left off in 2024, so watching these two talks should give you a pretty good overview. In the Rust room, Terts talked about how our scripting language Roto works under the hood, complementing his EuroRust talk on using Roto in applications.

You can find the slides and recordings in the FOSDEM archives:

Cascade

We’ve been very busy with Cascade! We will release a production-ready version at the end of June; Arya, Jannik, Philip, Terts, and Ximon have been hard at work making that possible. In April, we will cut the first release candidate, 0.1.0-rc1; you can track our progress on GitHub.

We’re incredibly grateful to the Sovereign Tech Agency for sponsoring parts of this work. Thanks to their partnership, we’ve been able to work on a large host of features for our production release: better HSM signing performance, a framework for integration tests, a migration tool from OpenDNSSEC, and much more.

Cascade is in the middle of many large-scale changes as we prepare for production readiness. Arya is overhauling how Cascade stores zone data, making things more deterministic and efficient. Philip is building an incremental signing pipeline from scratch, allowing Cascade to keep zones up-to-date very efficiently. Terts has been improving how Cascade’s components communicate with each other internally. Ximon has been working on easing migration for users of OpenDNSSEC and improving the HSM support. Between these efforts, Cascade is becoming highly reliable and efficient; we’re excited to provide DNS operators with a dependable solution.

Gather at our new forum

We now have a new community forum based on Discourse. You can go there with any questions or comments you have about our products. It has all sorts of goodies such as mail support, RSS feeds and Roto syntax highlighting. Ultimately, this forum will replace our mailing lists, which is why we made sure that using it via e-mail only is still an option.

In the first phase, we have categories on the forum for Cascade, Rotonda, Roto, our RPKI products and some DNS tools such as dnsi and dnst. Unbound and NSD will move to the forum eventually, but are still using the regular mailing lists for now. Once we move those products over as well, their mailing lists will be imported into the forum.

Check out the announcement post for more information.

Moving to Codeberg

Now that our forum has been set up, we can move the focus to where we host our code. We currently rely on GitHub to host and publish our code as well as running our CI, but we've been considering moving away from it for a while.

We can now tell you that we have chosen Codeberg as an alternative. As a non-profit foundation, Codeberg really resonates with what we stand for. Also, from a geopolitical standpoint, we feel more comfortable hosting our code in the EU. Plus, we’re concerned about the strong push of LLMs into our daily work and would prefer to make our own decisions.

One by one, we will start migrating our projects to that platform. This will be a coordinated (and somewhat slow) process so we can ensure that this migration goes well. In the short term, we will provide GitHub mirrors for anyone relying on those URLs being available and up to date. We have already migrated the first repository: you can find Roto on Codeberg now.

The biggest challenge in this move is porting over our CI. Luckily, we received a pretty beefy server as a donation from a community member (thank you!) that we will use to run Forgejo Actions and Woodpecker on, so we can run all our CI without overloading Codeberg's CI runners.

Of course, we understand the challenges of running a non-profit dedicated to open source software, so to support Codeberg, our organization will apply to become a supporting member of the Codeberg e.V. organization.

Netstack.FM

Arya and Terts appeared on the Netstack.FM podcast, where they talked about both Cascade and Roto. Aside from the history, motivation, and use cases for these products, there were fun tangents regarding performance optimization and zero-copy networking. Give it a listen!

Technology & Policy

Maarten worked with ISC, CZ.NIC and NetDEF on a submission to the European Union’s call for evidence for an “open source strategy”. We brought the perspective of our type of non-profit organisations, responsible for the long-term maintenance of the likes of BIND9, Knot, FRR and our DNS and RPKI software. It seems the European Commission has some reading ahead of it; 1658 responses were submitted by companies, non-profits and individuals, making the FOSS strategy the second most popular public consultation in the history of DG CNECT.
We are following Brussels’ policy making on the Digital Networks Act (telecoms regulation, net neutrality), Cybersecurity Act (ENISA, certification schemes) and its bundled amendments to NIS2. To share one tidbit from the last one: the European Commission is proposing to remove individuals and small organisations up to ‘mid-cap’ size that operate DNS infrastructure from being considered ‘essential entities’ under NIS2. This fixes the current curious reality that running NSD at home makes you an ‘essential entity’ in many EU countries.

Hot off the press

Unbound 1.24.2 has an additional fix for CVE-2025-11411 (possible domain hijacking attack) to include YXDOMAIN and non-referral nodata answers in the mitigation as well. This was reported by TaoFei Guo from Peking University, Yang Luo and JianJun Chen from Tsinghua University.
NSD 4.14.1 has reduced memory usage from refactored RDATA storage. We’ve written a blog post, “Smaller, faster: NSD's refactored RDATA storage and compile time memory reduction options”, highlighting these memory reductions.
Krill 0.15.1 fixes a bug introduced in release 0.15.0 which causes CAs not to clear certification requests with their parents when they receive a new certificate. It is strongly recommended to upgrade from 0.15.0 to 0.15.1.
Krill 0.16.0 can more easily be accessed locally via a Unix socket. We also heard your concerns and reverted back to processing RISwhois data locally.
RTRTR 0.3.3 is a small bugfix release that fixes some issues with sending ASPA RTR streams and changes RTR version negotiation to the new scheme introduced in draft-ietf-sidrops-8210bis.
Roto 0.10 introduced a List type along with many other fixes and features.
Rotonda 0.5.1 features several improvements in the HTTP API, and a fix for running Rotonda with Roto scripts on SELinux-enabled systems. Under the hood, the codebase has undergone a first big cleanup to prepare for a next major release.

See you next quarter for another edition of "Of Trees and Tries"!

https://blog.nlnetlabs.nl/the-winter-2026-newsletter/

denise posting in

dw_advocacy

On Friday, the judge hearing our VA case issued a preliminary injunction preventing the state from enforcing Virginia's SB 854 against any Netchoice member (which means us!) while the lawsuit proceeds. Judge Giles's ruling is a little technical in places and covers a number of legal issues that I keep meaning to get around to explaining someday so folks can have a better grasp on the kind of things they'll see argued in cases like these, like strict scrutiny and associational standing, but the end result is still pretty clear, I think: the judge agrees Netchoice has made a strong enough showing right from the start that the law is unconstitutional to block the state from doing anything to enforce it until the full case can be heard.

This is only the beginning of that particular fight and we still have a ways to go, but it's great news for us, for all our users from Virginia, and for the internet as a whole. Three cheers for the Netchoice team and the outside litigation counsel, who are Clement & Murphy for this one! The full docket in RECAP: NetChoice v. Jason S. Miyares, 1:25-cv-02067, (E.D. Va.).

kass

Happy Purim, and happy

purimgifts!

I got the most glorious fic (and image collage) -- this feels like it could be an outtake from the actual books, and that's high praise.

Hamentaschen (438 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Lady Astronaut Series - Mary Robinette Kowal
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Elma York/Nathaniel York
Characters: Elma York, Nathaniel York
Additional Tags: Canon Jewish Character, Baking, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Canon Compliant, Collection: Purimgifts Day 1
Summary:

Elma makes Hamentaschen for the first time after the meteor.

jazzyjj posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Richard Kettlewell

Daily Hacker News for 2026-03-03

well

I think that was a joke that only we know, so I'm sorry

New Orleans

The Big Idea: Kirsten Karschock

Maybe I'm missing something

The Big Idea: Kirsten Karschock

026/031: Frankenstein in Baghdad — Ahmed Saadawi (translated by Jonathan Wright)

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Bo Diddley

Language models imply world models

Let's try it and see

Tentative conclusions

Addendum

20260214

John Haugeland on the failure of micro-worlds

Addenda

20260207

20260212

Mudlarking 96 - Bottle Day

Fucking hell. Minoanmiss. No.

PSA

Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 233

The Winter 2026 newsletter

FOSDEM

Cascade

Gather at our new forum

Moving to Codeberg

Netstack.FM

Technology & Policy

Hot off the press

Victory in Virginia!!

For me!

Just one thing: 3 March 2026

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January 2026

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