From https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3lxclvdliks2p

npj Complexity is an open access, international, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing the highest quality research on complex systems and their emergent behavior at multiple scales. 

Tasks

• Profs and Pints tonight! Get there 45 minutes early and bring the laptop
• Start updating the calls section on the Cognitive Commons template. See what makes sense for the first submission
• New bushes today?

SBIRs

• 9:00 Sprint planning. Done
• Start on Q2 report. Started. The changed the template to the revised (and as yet not approved in writing) SOW, and created a Q2_text folder with the blanks
  • Reworking the tasking – done

Had an annoying morning trying to get VFS to work properly

Tasks

• Slides and timings for P&P talk – done? War Room takes 8 minutes to read, so I have about 22 minutes to talk. Good discussion with Jimmy to work out final details
• Dead shrubs? Shrubs are gone, but replacements are not in yet
• Powerwashing quote? Soon

SBIRs

• 9:00 Sprint demos – done
• 12:30 Survey review – I dunno.
• 3:00 Sprint planning – two stories: quarterly status report and the AW proposal ROI section – delayed

September is closing in fast

From Mastodon

Tasks

• Read this page on associationism
• Send Vanessa new vignette – done
• Bills – done
• Chores – done
• Mow – done
• Weed – done
• Laundry – mostly done
• Vacuum and organize shop – done for now
• Dishes – done
• Research storage
• Metal to Aaron – done
• Read through stories for P&P and time them – first pass and editing

SBIRs

• Write up notes from yesterday and see when the next report is due. It will have the new tasks and numbering – Done

Saw my first AI review today. Pretty sad:

Tasks

• Start proposal 14 review – done! I HAVE NO MORE REVIEWS TO DO!
• Submit No Starch Press proposal – DONE! Need to look for other possible publishers though. Still, it’s nice to get this far.
• Send Vanessa new vignette
• Research storage

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup. See if Ron needs some tag-teaming – not yet
• 4:00 SEG meeting – need to write up the notes. Basically, Ron and John are going to try and get interprocess communication going.
• Work on the A3IW proposal – finished! Well a first pass anyway. I thing a “potential market” section might help
• Circle around with Aaron to see if we should really write a WH/AI proposal – pinged

WtaF? ‘I Want to Try and Get to Heaven’: Trump Gets Reflective on ‘Fox & Friends’

Tasks

• There is some back and forth on the review of proposal 7. It may just be a no-cost extension, which is an easy “yes.” Ok, got some direction. I need to rewrite and submit – done
• Submit proposal 13 review – done
• Start proposal 14 review – tomorrow
• Work on No Starch Press proposal – done. I’ll send it in tomorrow
• Roll in KA edits – done!
• Research storage

SBIRs

• Nothing on the schedule today. See if Ron can get results to share on Thursday – not really. He didn’t look up solutions and wrote himself into a corner. Going to let him work himself out of it. He really needs to stop doing this
• Work on the A3IW proposal – nope
• Circle around with Aaron to see if we should really write a WH/AI proposal – pinged

Pinged Carlos back.

No Starch Press pinged back! I need to put together a proposal after finishing the reviews

Tasks

• Review proposal 13 – done. May need to revisit 7, but I’m confused for now
• Kyle today? Yup, the torch, the brake, and the endmill are gone. The lathe is going to take some more works – it’s a bit over 1,000 lbs

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup
• Work with Aaron on the white paper – started. It’s going to be more of a business proposal. I think I’m going to run it through Gemini to see if it can come up with a good framework because frankly, I just don’t want to do any more BD that won’t go anywhere.

President Trump’s War on “Woke AI” Is a Civil Liberties Nightmare | Electronic Frontier Foundation

• The White House’s recently-unveiled “AI Action Plan” wages war on so-called “woke AI”—including large language models (LLMs) that provide information inconsistent with the administration’s views on climate change, gender, and other issues. It also targets measures designed to mitigate the generation of racial and gender biased content and even hate speech. The reproduction of this bias is a pernicious problem that AI developers have struggled to solve for over a decade.
• A new executive order called “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” released alongside the AI Action Plan, seeks to strong-arm AI companies into modifying their models to conform with the Trump Administration’s ideological agenda.

Russia is quietly churning out fake content posing as US news – POLITICO

• According to misinformation tracker NewsGuard, the campaign — which has been tracked by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center as Storm-1679 since at least 2022 — takes advantage of high-profile events to pump out fabricated content from various publications, including ABC News, BBC and most recently POLITICO.
• “They are just throwing spaghetti, trying to see what’s going to stick on a wall,” said Ivana Stradner, a researcher on Russia at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank.

Build a Small Language Model (SLM) From Scratch

Tasks

• Write review for proposal 7 – done. That was a lift.
• Machine shop pickup? Tomorrow
• Work on rolling in edits. Finished the War Room story
• Put together a proposal for No Starch Press

SBIRS

• Work with Ron a bit?
• Overleaf doc A3IW

Great ride yesterday, even if we did get rained on in the middle

Tasks

• Switch UPS – done
• Bills – done
• Chores – done
• Dishes – done
• Schedule power wash – started
• Read Proposal 14 – done
• Ping Nathan – done
• Wash truck – done. Shiny!
• Picked up the recumbent
• Put Peter Turchin in P33 somewhere. Maybe simulation?
• Ping Carlos to see if there will be a recording of Trust in human-technology teams: from decision-support to Generative AI – done

Tasks

• Switch UPS
• Bills – done
• Chores
• Dishes
• Weed
• Mow
• Schedule power wash
• Read Proposal 14

Peter Turchin

• is a complexity scientist who works in the field of historical social science that he and his colleagues call: Cliodynamics
• His research interests lie at the intersection of social and cultural evolution, historical macrosociology, economic history, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases.
• How do human societies evolve? Why do we see such a staggering degree of inequality in effectiveness of governance and economic performance among nations?
• Currently he investigates a set of broad and interrelated questions: In particular, what processes explain the evolution of ultrasociality—our capacity to cooperate in huge anonymous societies of millions?
• Peter’s main research effort at the moment is directed at coordinating the Seshat Databank —a massive historical database of cultural evolution that is gathering and systematically organizing the vast amount of knowledge about past human societies, held collectively by thousands of historians and archaeologists.

[2507.21206] Agentic Web: Weaving the Next Web with AI Agents

• The emergence of AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) marks a pivotal shift toward the Agentic Web, a new phase of the internet defined by autonomous, goal-driven interactions. In this paradigm, agents interact directly with one another to plan, coordinate, and execute complex tasks on behalf of users. This transition from human-driven to machine-to-machine interaction allows intent to be delegated, relieving users from routine digital operations and enabling a more interactive, automated web experience. In this paper, we present a structured framework for understanding and building the Agentic Web. We trace its evolution from the PC and Mobile Web eras and identify the core technological foundations that support this shift. Central to our framework is a conceptual model consisting of three key dimensions: intelligence, interaction, and economics. These dimensions collectively enable the capabilities of AI agents, such as retrieval, recommendation, planning, and collaboration. We analyze the architectural and infrastructural challenges involved in creating scalable agentic systems, including communication protocols, orchestration strategies, and emerging paradigms such as the Agent Attention Economy. We conclude by discussing the potential applications, societal risks, and governance issues posed by agentic systems, and outline research directions for developing open, secure, and intelligent ecosystems shaped by both human intent and autonomous agent behavior. A continuously updated collection of relevant studies for agentic web is available at: this https URL.

Tasks

• Finish reading proposal 13 (Done! Better than 7. Much better detail) and read 14 before writing anything
• Remove lines from under the deck
• Start making a list of agents (Nomad Century, Gutenberg, Sentient Cell, Bomber Mafia, etc.)
• 10:30 and 3:00 for shop pickup – everything ran late, but the saw, the welder, the grinders, and a shop vac are gone

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup – done
• Work with Ron on socket code – done! Works!
• FedEx shipment today maybe? Managed to change the delivery options. They still didn’t leave it
• 4:00 SEG meeting – skipped for garage-emptying

I need husband: AI beauty standards, fascism and the proliferation of bot driven content

• Generative AI is proliferating on social media at an alarming rate. Images are generated and disseminated with political agendas, particularly in right-wing spheres. These AI-generated images often depict soldiers, sad children, or interior designs. Of particular note are the catfishing-style “I need husband” posts featuring women with impossible proportions, ostensibly seeking partners. These chimeric creations are bot-driven posts designed to farm engagement, but they also hint at something more sinister. These posts reflect a mechanical view of the male gaze. However, an AI cannot truly comprehend the male gaze, and in its attempt to mimic it, it creates beings beyond understanding. This research aims to analyze the patterns in these images, explore posting methods and engagement, and examine the meaning behind the images. It culminates in an artistic piece in progress critiquing both the images and their creation and dissemination methods. By rendering these AI-generated images as classical Greek statues through Gaussian splatting and 3D printing, I aim to create a visual commentary on the intersection of AI, the male gaze and fascism. This artistic approach not only highlights the absurdity of these digital constructs but also invites viewers to critically examine AI’s role in shaping contemporary perceptions of beauty and gender roles.

‘It’s a robot war’: eastern Ukraine faces onslaught of Russian glide bombs, rockets and kamikaze drones

• Over the past week, from 4 to 10 August, the Russian military deployed more than 1,000 aerial bombs and nearly 1,400 kamikaze drones against Ukraine. The current record is 728 drones and 13 missiles sent in a single night in July, most directed at the western city of Lutsk. By autumn, German experts predict Moscow could send 2,000 drones a day.
• Ukrainian manufacturers have been working on a solution, too: a cheap, scalable interceptor drone that can knock out incoming Shaheds. Last month Zelenskyy toured a factory where they are being made. “A clear task has been set for the manufacturers: Ukraine must be capable of deploying at least 1,000 interceptors per day within a defined timeframe,” he told engineers and officials, saying they “protected lives”.
• My thoughts on where this is going from 2023

Tasks

• Read proposals 13 and 14 before writing anything
• Remove lines from under the deck
• Start making a list of agents (Nomad Century, Gutenberg, Sentient Cell, Bomber Mafia, etc.)

SBIRs

• Laptop crap

GPT Agents

• 2:30 meeting
  • Talk about all the AI in the papers I reviewed, and how most of it was good, with one “slop” paper. What we need in many cases is just an AI slop detector, and there are particular patterns in slop – local repetition, drift, etc. Maybe trajectories over sentence-level embeddings?
  • Also, how the bot invasion of social media and the robot war for Ukraine are distorted reflections of each other/

Here’s another taxonomy paper: [2508.01781] A comprehensive taxonomy of hallucinations in Large Language Models

• Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet their propensity for ”hallucination”—generating plausible but factually incorrect or fabricated content—remains a critical challenge. This report provides a comprehensive taxonomy of LLM hallucinations, beginning with a formal definition and a theoretical framework that posits its inherent inevitability in computable LLMs, irrespective of architecture or training. It explores core distinctions, differentiating between intrinsic (contradicting input context) and extrinsic (inconsistent with training data or reality), as well as factuality (absolute correctness) and faithfulness (adherence to input). The report then details specific manifestations, including factual errors, contextual and logical inconsistencies, temporal disorientation, ethical violations, and task-specific hallucinations across domains like code generation and multimodal applications. It analyzes the underlying causes, categorizing them into data-related issues, model-related factors, and prompt-related influences. Furthermore, the report examines cognitive and human factors influencing hallucination perception, surveys evaluation benchmarks and metrics for detection, and outlines architectural and systemic mitigation strategies. Finally, it introduces web-based resources for monitoring LLM releases and performance. This report underscores the complex, multifaceted nature of LLM hallucinations and emphasizes that, given their theoretical inevitability, future efforts must focus on robust detection, mitigation, and continuous human oversight for responsible and reliable deployment in critical applications.

Tasks

• Read proposal 7 – done, but I think it’s thin. Going to read 13 and 14 before writing anything
• Remove lines from under the deck
• Lube stove switches – done
• Start making a list of agents (Nomad Century, Gutenberg, Sentient Cell, Bomber Mafia, etc.)
• No Starch Press Write for Us! 0 sent an email into the void
  • No Starch Press has long had a reputation for publishing unique books on technology, with a focus on open source, security, hacking, programming, alternative operating systems, LEGO^®, science, and math. Our titles have personality, our authors are passionate, and our books tackle topics that people care about.

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• Start on white paper for the gaming work. Include the Mirage paper, the Delusion Spiral paper, Cultural Fidelity in Large-Language Models, and the Generative Social Simulation paper – nope
• Pair programming ICT socket with Ron – nope

This seems like it might be important for the limits of what we want to do with LLMs. CoT doesn’t work outside of the training distribution. Which I thin is what we all thought, but I think there are some deep implications for models that are running in impossible to crawl environments (exploration, classified, proprietary) environments that they have not been trained on. Much more likely to be outside the training distribution 

Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens

• ⁠Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to improve Large Language Model (LLM) performance on various tasks. With this approach, LLMs appear to produce human-like reasoning steps before providing answers (a.k.a., CoT reasoning), which often leads to the perception that they engage in deliberate inferential processes. However, some initial findings suggest that CoT reasoning may be more superficial than it appears, motivating us to explore further. In this paper, we study CoT reasoning via a data distribution lens and investigate if CoT reasoning reflects a structured inductive bias learned from in-distribution data, allowing the model to conditionally

Tasks

• Finish review of paper 599 – DONE. That was hard
• Download ATHENE proposals – done
• More pix of trailer, then put it back in the driveway. Forgot to take the pix. I do think I’ll hang onto the trailer for a while longer though. I’ll need to move things into storage
• Remove lines from under the deck – nope
• Lube stove switches – nope
• Start making a list of agents (Nomad Century, Gutenberg, Sentient Cell, Bomber Mafia, etc) – nope

SBIRs

• Meeting with Aaron to rework stories – done
• Start on white paper for the gaming work. Include the Mirage paper, the Delusion Spiral paper, Cultural Fidelity in Large-Language Models, and the Generative Social Simulation paper – nope

For the Profs&Pints, I think I’m going to bookend the talk wiith a reading of Organizational Lobotomy at the beginning and War Room at the end. Need to figure out what the slides should be.

No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive

• I think a lot of the more genuine 10x AI hype is coming from people who are simply in the honeymoon phase or haven’t sat down to actually consider what 10x improvement means mathematically. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn AI helps many engineers do certain tasks 20-50% faster, but the nature of software bottlenecks mean this doesn’t translate to a 20% productivity increase and certainly not a 10x increase.

The Ordinal Society

• As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality. While we obsess over order and difference—and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds—what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.

Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here’s How It Happens.

• “The story line is building all the time,” Ms. Toner said. “At that point in the story, the whole vibe is: This is a groundbreaking, earth-shattering, transcendental new kind of math. And it would be pretty lame if the answer was, ‘You need to take a break and get some sleep and talk to a friend.’”

Tasks

• Send the updates back to Vanessa – done
• Send email about LLC to PPL
• Look for trade nonfiction agents – started
• Dishes – done
• Bills – done
• Chores – done
• Ride to Brookville for 1:00 lunch – leave at 11:00! – done! Fun!
• Read paper 599 – started

Watched Godzilla Minus One last night. Lots going on in that film, as opposed to nearly every other monster movie.

Temperature Scaling and Beam Search Text Generation in LLMs, for the ML-Adjacent | Towards Data Science

• What “temperature” is, how it works, its relationship to the beam search heuristic, and where LLM output generation can still fail

[2508.01552] Social Media Information Operations

• The battlefield of information warfare has moved to online social networks, where influence campaigns operate at unprecedented speed and scale. As with any strategic domain, success requires understanding the terrain, modeling adversaries, and executing interventions. This tutorial introduces a formal optimization framework for social media information operations (IO), where the objective is to shape opinions through targeted actions. This framework is parameterized by quantities such as network structure, user opinions, and activity levels – all of which must be estimated or inferred from data. We discuss analytic tools that support this process, including centrality measures for identifying influential users, clustering algorithms for detecting community structure, and sentiment analysis for gauging public opinion. These tools either feed directly into the optimization pipeline or help defense analysts interpret the information environment. With the landscape mapped, we highlight threats such as coordinated bot networks, extremist recruitment, and viral misinformation. Countermeasures range from content-level interventions to mathematically optimized influence strategies. Finally, the emergence of generative AI transforms both offense and defense, democratizing persuasive capabilities while enabling scalable defenses. This shift calls for algorithmic innovation, policy reform, and ethical vigilance to protect the integrity of our digital public sphere.

Tasks

• Send the updates back to Vanessa
• Send email about LLC to PPL
• Look for trade nonfiction agents –

SBIRS

• 9:00 Sprint demos – do slides
• 3:00 Sprint planning
• 4:00 SEG Meeting (cancelled)