Tasks

• Bills – done
• Carbon credits – done. 300 tons
• Groceries. Got the fixings for another beef stew.

SBIRs

• Kick off a (5k book?) run and go for a hike – done and done. Also started another run. I have managed to spend $10!
• Tried to load Linux on the dev box, but was thwarted by the inability to boot from the thumb drive. Rather than struggle , I dropped it off with actual professionals. Should be ready in a few days. They were fixing a Kitchen Aid mixer when I arrived. Was not expecting that.

Merryhappyjoyous Ramahanukwanzamas!

Windjammer cruises reborn? Star Clippers Sailing Tall Ship Cruises

This seems insightful: How in the hell did Donald Trump convince evangelicals he’s a God-fearing man? – Quora Need to validate.

The diverse way that languages convey emotion

• Many human languages have words for emotions such as “anger” and “fear,” yet it is not clear whether these emotions have similar meanings across languages, or why their meanings might vary. We estimate emotion semantics across a sample of 2474 spoken languages using “colexification”—a phenomenon in which languages name semantically related concepts with the same word. Analyses show significant variation in networks of emotion concept colexification, which is predicted by the geographic proximity of language families. We also find evidence of universal structure in emotion colexification networks, with all families differentiating emotions primarily on the basis of hedonic valence and physiological activation. Our findings contribute to debates about universality and diversity in how humans understand and experience emotion.

These people look interesting (Unbreaking). They are documenting the disintegration of USA norms(?) using a timeline of summaries among other things. Once I get the embedding mapping done, it would be a good thing to try to run through the system. One of their founding members wrote this:

Landslide; a ghost story

• All this year, as I have chewed my way along the edges of this almost unfathomable problem, what happened in Valdez came to feel less like a metaphor and more like a model. That’s how I’ll work with it here. Not because the circumstances of megathrust earthquakes in fjords are literally the same as the societal problem of collective derangement, but because the model gives me new ways to take problem apart and see how the pieces interact.

10:00 ride! Nice weather!

Tasks

• Light cleaning – done
• 3:00 Showing
• 5:00 Ross

SBIRs

• Try another run of 1,000 books and see what breaks. Need to integrate the bad files list too. Edits went in smoothly. 1,000 books are cooking along, and I’m picking up new bad files
• Looks like that’s working! Started another 1,000 books

Tasks

• Mop kitchen – done
• 10:30 – 11:30 showing
• Tomorrow looks like it might be a nice day!

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• Working on getting the embedding to work in batches – done
• There are some files that are too big to send to OpenAI and throw an error. I just keep on going, but I’ll need(?) to revisit these files. Saving them out.
• Finally got through the first 1k files. I have spent $2.70 on embeddings. Including all the errors.

Strategic Engineering Workshop on LLMs and Game Theory

• We invite submissions exploring how large language models (LLMs) / foundation models (FMs) and game theory can enable strategic, interpretable AI agents for real-world scenarios.
• The workshop is seeking submissions of research and industrial papers, including work on modelling, evaluation, algorithmic design, human data collection, and applications in negotiation, coordination, and everyday social intelligence, as well as demonstrations of agents succeeding (or failing) in strategic interactions.
• Note: While the primary focus of the workshop is on leveraging LLMs to translate real-world scenarios to rigorous game-theoretic models, we will also consider papers that investigate other creative applications of LLMs to game theory or vice versa.

Tasks

• 10:00 Showing
• Get a list of the txt and csv directories and deleting all the txt items from the list that match with the csv items, then finish the parsing – done

    # iterate over the csv files and delete any name in tat list from the text_files list. That way we can pick up when the connection gets interrrupted
    tnum = len(txt_files)
    cnum = len(csv_files)
    print("there are {} text files and {} csv files. After this, there should be {} text files".format(tnum, cnum, tnum-cnum))
    csv:str
    for csv in csv_files:
        s = csv.replace("csv", "txt")
        try:
            txt_files.remove(s)
        except ValueError:
            print("{} is not in the text file list????".format(s))

    tnum = len(txt_files)
    print("Processing {} text files".format(tnum))

• Start on embedding. Got all the pieces working. Rather than do one large pkl file, I’m going to do the embeddings on a per-book basis. This will be much more resiliant to interruptions’ and support restarts

Hello web-scrapers for LLM training sets. No much going on today.

Also wow. Just wow: NVISO reports a new development in the Contagious Interview campaign. The threat actors have recently resorted to utilizing legitimate JSON storage services like JSON Keeper, JSONsilo, and npoint.io to host and deliver malware from trojanized code projects, with the lure being a use case or demo project as part of an interview process.

Tasks

• 11:00 – 11:45 showing – done
• RE taxes – done
• Work on submission to ACM Interactions magazine – done, though I’m not sure what version I submitted
• Winterize the mower? Certainly by the end of next week
• Put Linux on the dev box. I’m tired of not being able to do overnight runs.

Taks

• Drop Barbara off at BWI – done
• Bills – done
• Clean basement – done
• 11:00 – 11:35 showing – done
• 3:00 MVA – done

SBIRs

• Expenses
• Work on the regex issue – interesting journey, but working now. Aaaan the servers were shut down early. Now I have to write a piece of code that looks to make sure that I don’t do any redundant conversions
  • I think it should be just as easy as getting a list of the txt and csv directories and deleting all the txt items from the list that match with the csv items

Tasks

• Atwaters

SBIRS

• 9:00 Standup – done
• 9:15 SEG spending – done
• Working on Gutenberg parser – First pass is done. Some good vibe coding with Gemini Pro. Need to fix a combinatorial regex issue that pops up for Finnish books
• 3:00 SEG Meeting – done. A bit of a train wreck presenting on our side. Going to slides next time to see if that keeps things on the rails
• 4:00 MDA Meeting – done. Slow progress, but Dr. J is going to read the proposal

Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company. (Via 404 Media)

Tasks

• 3:15-3:45 showing – I am not sure that they showed
• Clean house – done-ish
• Groceries – done
• Wash car – done

SBIRs

• 2:00 – 4:00 meeting. Can make the first hour, then call in from the car?
• Sent off the white paper / proposal to Dr. J
• Expenses – nope

SBIRs

• Was able to log in today!
• 9:00 standup – nope
• Holiday lunch – fun! Long drive though
• 2:30 IRAD meeting – done. Maybe good?

Hike in the snow yesterday:

Nice post about the disintegration of the useful internet

Tasks

• Showing at 3:15. Get the car washed while waiting. Nope, Wednesday now
• Hotels! Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt – done

SBIRs

• Write a Gutenberg parser that splits the beginning and ends off books and looks for weird formatting (e.g. lists of numbers, a single pix, etc.) The output should go in the ‘processed’ folder. Then use that folder to create csv (pickle?) files of each book with embeddings in them. Nope. Can’t log in because CMMI has killed the minds of IT. It’s a “known problem.” They are “working on it.” Soooooooo angry.
• After waiting for 5 hours, I can now log into my laptop. It was easy, but required Hidden Knowledge. Which didn’t need to be Hidden.
• Put together the white paper proposal for Neural Network Learning Capacity on Parametric Function

Language models are persuasive – and that’s a good thing

• Two new studies were published last week, in two of the most prestigious scientific journals, and sharing an overlapping authorship list. Persuading voters using human–artificial intelligence dialogues (Lin et al, 2025) was published in Nature, and tested the effect of AI dialogues on voters’ preferences in the context of elections in the US, Canada and Poland. The levers of political persuasion with conversational artificial intelligence (Hackenburg et al, 2025) was published in Science, and tested the effect of AI dialogues, when driven by different models and different prompting strategies, on attitudes of UK adults across British political issues.

[2510.11789] Dimension-Free Minimax Rates for Learning Pairwise Interactions in Attention-Style Models – this is lit review for the MDA study

Tasks

• Send off BLOG@CACM – done
• Bills – done
  • Pay Edwins – done
  • Pay Just Landscaping – done
• Chores – done
• Dishes – done
• MVA – trying to get my eye exam info sent over. Otherwise I need to schedule an appointment, which doesn’t seem terrible
• Groceries – done
• Get together with Terry for tix? – Sunday?

Bridging Social Media and Search Engines: Dredge Words and the Detection of Unreliable Domains

• Proactive content moderation requires platforms to rapidly and continuously evaluate the credibility of websites. Leveraging the direct and indirect paths users follow to unreliable websites, we develop a website credibility classification and discovery system that integrates both webgraph and large-scale social media contexts. We additionally introduce the concept of dredge words, terms or phrases for which unreliable domains rank highly on search engines, and provide the first exploration of their usage on social media. Our graph neural networks that combine webgraph and social media contexts generate to state-of-the-art results in website credibility classification and significantly improves the top-k identification of unreliable domains. Additionally, we release a novel dataset of dredge words, highlighting their strong connections to both social media and online commerce platforms.

Egalitarianism is not Equality: Moving from outcome to process in the study of human political organisation

• Many traditional subsistence groups have been described as ‘egalitarian societies’. Definitions of ‘egalitarianism’, especially beyond anthropology, have often emphasised equality in resource access, prestige or rank, alongside generalised preferences for fairness and equality. However, there are no human societies where equality is genuinely realised in all areas of life. Here we demonstrate, empirically, that nominally egalitarian societies are often unequal across seven important interconnected domains: embodied capital, social capital, leadership, gender, age/knowledge, material capital/land tenure, and reproduction. We also highlight evidence that individuals in nominally egalitarian societies do not unfailingly adhere to strong equality preferences. We propose a new operational framework for understanding egalitarianism in traditional subsistence groups, focussing on individual motivations, rather than equality. We redefine “egalitarianism” societies as those where socio-ecological circumstances enable most individuals to successfully secure their own resource access, status, and autonomy. We show how this emphasis on self-interest — particularly status concerns, resource access and autonomy — dispels naive enlightenment notions of the ‘noble savage’, and clarifies the plural processes (demand-sharing, risk-pooling, status-levelling, prosocial reputation-building, consensus-based collective decision-making, and residential mobility) by which relative equality is maintained. We finish with suggestions for better operationalizing egalitarianism in future research.

Portugal is having a general strike today

Tasks

• Set up shared expense spreadsheet
• Mtn bike today?
• LaTex to HTML converter – installed
  • Let’s see how it works? – pretty good!
• Pay Edwins
• Pay Just Landscaping

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup – done
• 4:00 ADS weekly – done. Need to write up a proposal to explore the theoretical spaces of D2A

Tasks

• Got a nice response from Bloomsbury, which might go somewhere
• Work on BLOG@CACM post – finished!
• Lunch with Aaron? Should be warm enough to ride there – mostly, a bit of rain on the return but not too bad.
• Alden meeting? Yup. Jimmy’s a dad!

Self-organized Collapse of Societies

• Why are human societies unstable? Theories based on the observation of recurring patterns in historical data indicate that economic inequality, as well as social factors are key drivers. So far, models of this phenomenon are more macroscopic in nature. However, basic mechanisms at work could be accessible to minimal mathematical models. Here we combine a simple mechanism for economic growth with a mechanism for the spreading of social dissatisfaction. Broad wealth distributions generated by the economic mechanism eventually trigger social unrest and the destruction of wealth, leading to an emerging pattern of boom and bust. We find that the model time scales compare well with empirical data. The model emphasizes the role of broad (power law) wealth distributions for dynamical social phenomena.

Tasks

• Got a response from the hotel!
• Worked on BLOG@CACM post

SBIRs

• More setup. Done!
• Make sure Overleaf works – doesn’t!
• Also got the Alienware set up again, before I turn it into a Linux box