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Reposted by Daniel Farina

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 18h

This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads:

Abstract
A "
'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings.
This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.
CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind.
Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming
ACM Reference Format:
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B.
Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3759429.3762631

1 A Way of Knowing

From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves.
I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I?
What kind of person? What kind of mind?

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 9h

*Cerdà

Barcelona’s next major challenge is to better integrate the bicycle. They have made major progress, but there are still too many cars moving quickly, and unlike the much less dense Amsterdam, even too many people to get point to point cycling quickly.

Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 9h

Got back from Barcelona. Comparing to cities I’ve seen in the last two years, including Amsterdam and Seoul, I think its built environment is the most advanced. Cerdá, who designed the grid, was a bit of a visionary, genius, and martyr for his cause, dying penniless en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cer...

The Cerdá Plan - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Reposted by Daniel Farina

Next door in Silicon Valley @nextdoorsv.bsky.social · 1d

Remember Prop 36? Which promised to "help everyone come indoors" through longer prison sentences and drug treatments?

Guess how many people completed the drug treatment in the first 6 months!

Did you guess... 25?

calmatters.org/justice/2025...

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Reposted by Daniel Farina

Joseph Britt @zathras5.bsky.social · 4d

Timely interview with @govpritzker.illinois.gov on the front line of the Trump administration’s attack on Chicago. Pritzker clearly understands a big difference in Trump’s second term: people around Trump are driving federal policy. W/ @gregsargent.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Trump ICE Raids Take Scarier Turn as Pritzker Issues Bombshell Warning

Podcast Episode · THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent · 10/10/2025 · 26m

podcasts.apple.com

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 4d

At least they have HSR in the pipeline. My main issue with Bakersfield is … too hot and too polluted, and given its difficult geographic position, I wonder how fixable that is. A university can seed a community, but students and faculty are better to want to live there.

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 4d

Twenty years ago, way, way before edpol became such a dominant factor, I joked UC Merced was a liberal plot to gain a toehold in the interior, but now I think that’s actually true.

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 4d

I seem to remember that this is one speech he felt necessary to re-write himself as he didn’t feel the speechwriters could convey things as he wanted to. He felt it was difficult.

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 4d

I think second guessing with someone in particular can be construed as a bit presumptuous. Polite refusal of the prize may also make waves, but is safer. Ultimately he tried to split the difference in his speech, but everyone remembers he got the prize and nothing that he said

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 4d

Even Obama thought that was weird, if memory serves.

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 5d

It helps that they seem too self aware to claim it. All this make-believe fifties nostalgia, but reference to the war itself appears conspicuously absent.

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Reposted by Daniel Farina

Joseph Britt @zathras5.bsky.social · 6d

Practically the first thing Trump did upon taking office last January was unleash Elon Musk on US foreign aid programs. Many warned people would die as a result; the medical journal @thelancet.com projected some 14 million. Kristen Gelineau tells some of their stories. apnews.com/article/myan...

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

apnews.com

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Reposted by Daniel Farina

Joseph Britt @zathras5.bsky.social · 5d

Thread. There is a theory that the Supreme Court issues so many rulings without opinions to muzzle Thomas and Alito. But @mjsdc.bsky.social thinks the Court’s Republicans simply rule as Republicans - against Biden, for Trump. He suggests ideas as to how Democratic President can repair the damage.

Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 5d

It is pretty galling that the Supreme Court spent four years telling Biden "you can't do that without Congress" then allowed Trump to seize a once-unthinkable amount of power from Congress within nine months and concentrate law-making authority almost entirely in the executive branch.

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Reposted by Daniel Farina

Patrick De Klotz @patdeklotz.bsky.social · 6d

American citizen, read this. www.koin.com/news/portlan...

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 7d

What

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 11d

Well that’s some nightmare fuel.

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 11d

Like, it’s “not that hard” to get accepted to UCSC, have a fine education provided you can hack the housing costs while a student, and live a UMC life presuming you are not stricken. Endless purification of the child’s social environment is not necessary, but it does harm.

Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 11d

The thing is, becoming an accountant or engineer, even a doctor … mostly requires knowing how to do stuff. Some fields, like law, or academic economics have a commercial system fully rotted through by prestige. Putting those aside, I suppose these anxieties seem strange to me, and do public harm.

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 11d

Not to confuse normative and positive claims: I think this notion of a guarantee is illusory, even in the case of the most prestigious education. I think status, sometimes implicitly accepted, is the driver. For this there is a dampened material mooring.

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 11d

Is that true? I was pulling stats for people in the 80th percentile that are elderly. They’d have to go through quite a lot. And, the 80th percentile is the marginal UMC by a plausible definition, so it only gets richer from there.

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 11d

Is that how it works? I never thought sensitivity to spice went up with age. Maybe on the gastrointestinal tract, but not for flavor.

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 11d

In general, state or local police on the ground can do nothing good in this situation. But putting state & local resources behind identifying all federal personnel involved in unprofessional or illegal behavior and keeping the books for a future Democratic President is something they should do.

snarkops.bsky.social @snarkops.bsky.social · 13d

Protesters pleaded "be gentle, she's disabled."
One agent sneered: "She'll be disabled now."
State violence, cruelty, and silencing dissent.

Siebe, who uses a wheelchair, was filming in a bike lane when an agent body-checked her face-first into the pavement.

#portland #ice #dhs #news #resist

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 11d

I prefer to mutter my frustrations aloud. No need to burn joules typing out rants to a machine.

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Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 11d

People complain about California NIMBYs, and I am sympathetic to that, but it seems like *other than* good forms of path dependency that New York is in worse shape.

Daniel Farina @danfarina.bsky.social · 11d

well, however cynical we are on here about median voter, whatever, Democratic politicians have us roundly beat.

But just because appeal to continuity of the governing system didn't work, I'm not sure it indicates setting the red line around ACA subsidies is going to work, either.

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