Gödel's incompleteness: the truths no machine can reach
In 1931 a 25-year-old logician proved that no machine for proving truths can ever reach all of them. How the trap closes, why a system can never certify itself, and what it does — and does not — say about the mind.
From hands to intention: how an interface creeps closer to the thought
A sequel to steering a memory map by hand. Every fix I made was secretly the same move — shortening the distance between what I meant and what happened. Follow that line far enough and you arrive at reading the command before the muscle. With interactive diagrams.
A 30B model on an 8 GB GPU: a small win with Mixture-of-Experts
The sequel to moving my home AI stack onto llama.cpp. I wanted better reasoning without buying hardware, so I tried to run a 30-billion-parameter model on a single 8 GB card. With a Mixture-of-Experts model and CPU offload, it fits — and it's quick. The numbers, and the gotchas. With an interactive config explorer.
The free energy principle: why staying alive means refusing surprise
Karl Friston's free energy principle tries to derive perception, action, attention, and even the boundary of the self from a single imperative: keep surprise low. A walk up its steps, by images rather than equations.
The feedback loop: the science that blurred the line between machine and living thing
How a single idea — act, measure, correct — let one mathematician describe a thermostat, a missile, a reaching hand, and a living body in the same breath, and quietly dissolved the boundary between the mechanical and the alive.
Becoming lucid in a dream: the science of oneironautics
There is a state in which one knows one is dreaming, while dreaming, and can act on the dream without waking. How laboratories proved it, what the lucid brain is doing, and the techniques that reliably raise the odds.
Reaching into the cortex: steering a memory map with your bare hands
I gave the 3D memory map a webcam and a pair of hands. No mouse, no controller — you point, you grab, you pinch, and the galaxy of thoughts answers. Here's the build, and the small detour into decades-old HCI research that made it usable.
Inside the Mesh: a live map of a self-hosted lab
A neon control room for a home lab — every server, agent and memory store as a node, with health and events streamed live. What's real, what's just animation, and how it's built with zero dependencies.
From Ollama to llama.cpp on a single 8 GB GPU
A homelab migration off Ollama onto raw llama.cpp — why I did it, what it bought, and the eight landmines in the path: model files that don't transfer, a CUDA image that won't match your driver, an OOM-ing build, glibc, and a dependency graph that fights back.
What makes you 'you'? Personal identity and the problem of continuity
Almost nothing physical survives in a person from one decade to the next, yet we speak without hesitation of a single self that endures. A look at the philosophy of personal identity, from the Ship of Theseus to Parfit's claim that identity may not be what matters.
How a gesture becomes a reflex: motor learning and the ceiling that isn't there
An expert movement is not a thought performed faster — it is a movement that has left thought entirely. On the power law, myelin, sleep, and why the plateau is mostly an illusion.
Inside the Cortex: turning an AI's memory into a 3D star map
How a pile of numbers an AI uses to 'remember' becomes a galaxy you can fly through — starting from scratch, then all the way down to embeddings, UMAP and the rendering loop.
Wiring a brain to a machine: how a thought becomes a command
A brain-machine interface does not read minds. It taps the motor output line and reroutes it. A walk through the four stages, the decoder, and the mutual learning that makes the coupling work.
The factory of dreams: what your brain builds when no one is watching
Every night the brain runs roughly two hours of pure generative simulation. A look at why dreams are so vivid, why they vanish on waking, and what they might be for.
The attention mechanism: how a machine learned to choose what to look at
One idea flipped the whole field of AI in 2017 and now powers every large language model: letting each word look directly at every other and decide what matters. Here is how attention works, and why it convergently rediscovered something the brain already knew.
Augmenting human intellect: the idea Engelbart had 60 years too early
In 1968 Douglas Engelbart demoed the mouse, hypertext and live collaboration — but those were only the shavings. The real idea was to raise human intelligence, and the industry kept the tools while throwing away the philosophy.
The Chinese Room: is understanding the same as computing?
Searle's Chinese Room argued that running the right program is never enough for understanding. Forty-five years on, interpretability research is turning that armchair intuition into a measurable question.
Kolmogorov complexity: the true amount of information in an object
The information in a single object is the length of its shortest description — the smallest program that regenerates it. A definition that makes compression equal to understanding, declares randomness the rule rather than the exception, and turns out to be uncomputable.
The predictive brain: an organ that spends its life minimising surprise
Predictive processing flips perception on its head: the brain does not passively receive the world, it constantly predicts it and transmits only the error. A look at what that reframing explains — about attention, dreams, and the kinship between brains and machines.
Skills as an orientation map: how an agent loads expertise on demand
Agent Skills let a general-purpose model become a specialist without drowning in instructions. A look at how they work, the progressive-disclosure 'map' that keeps them cheap, where they help at home and at work, and the limits — characters, context, memory — worth knowing. Fully sourced.
Entropy: the measure of our ignorance
Entropy is usually mistaken for disorder. It is better understood as a measure of what we do not know about a system — the bridge that ties together thermodynamics, information, and the physical cost of forgetting.
