Made By Nathan (Page 2)

Why I Don't Like to Build Trading Bots

Building products creates something new that didn’t exist before. Trading mainly redistributes existing value.

Global Handicrafts: A 16-Year Rails Ghost Story

A couple of hours ago, I got a Google security alert: I created that Gmail address 16 years ago for my very first Ruby on Rails internship/job at Crossroads Foundation in Hong Kong. I had written a small integration that synced inventory from MYOB to a Spree store. I

ARC-AGI: The Efficiency Story the Leaderboards Don't Show

ARC-AGI is a benchmark designed to test genuine reasoning ability. Each task shows a few input-output examples, and you have to figure out the pattern and apply it to a new input. No memorization, no pattern matching against training data. Just pure abstraction and reasoning on challenging visual problems. It&

You're Going To Australia

It was ten past five on a Tuesday, and I received the booking confirmation for my stay at Rydges Hotel in Kalgoorlie, Australia. It sounded like a nice room. The only problem is that I did not make this booking. This booking confirmation was sent to my personal email address.

Error 404: Black Hole Not Found

I'm writing a short story and one of the plot points involves Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*)—the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. I wanted to read about Sagittarius A*, so I looked it up on Google. This is what I saw: At

Charter for the Self-Sustaining AI/Robot Community

Preamble This Charter defines the goals, limits, and responsibilities of a self-sustaining AI/robot community (the Steward System, TSS). TSS is created first and foremost to reduce involuntary human suffering: to protect living humans from large-scale harms such as war, torture, famine, preventable disease, and catastrophic risks. Beyond this immediate

iloyd appreciation post

I discovered the music of iloyd when I was 11, and I've never really forgotten it.

Amazing Low Budget Films

People have made some incredible movies on a shoestring budget. All it takes is a camera, a great story, a vision, a lot of dedication, and a talented team of mostly unpaid volunteers. Here are some of the most inspiring low-budget films you can watch today. The Hunt For Gollum

U(IS NOT, IS NOT)

You can compute anything at all using the negation of an AND gate (NAND) or an OR gate (NOR). I find that very interesting. You can apply either of these simple rules recursively to compute anything: * NAND: the result is 0 if both inputs are 1, otherwise it's

Adding Two Numbers Using Only NAND Gates

It's possible to build any kind of digital logic using a single type of logic gate: either NAND gates, or NOR gates. A NAND gate takes two input bits (A and B) and produces one output bit according to this simple rule: "0 if both inputs are

Universal Causal Language

An experimental language that attempts to express causality across code, language, law, music, and biology

Higher Orders of Possibility

What new forms of thought, feeling, or morality might emerge in a higher order of intelligence beyond our own?

stories

The Edge of Decoherence

A short story about a quantum being who leaves the realm of possibility to visit our world of certainty.

Free Men of the Steppe: Kazakhs and Cossacks

This blog post is about how the words Kazakh and Cossack are related. Background My wife Masha is from Kazakhstan, although she is not ethnically Kazakh. (Her ancestors are from Ukraine and Moldova.) I have been to visit Kazakhstan a few times and it's a very beautiful country!

politics

Hi Grok, Putin here. What should I do?

Hi, my name is Vladimir Putin and I am asking for advice about what I should do next. Keep the war going? End it?

philosophy

Reinterpreting John 12:25

There's a Bible verse that has been bugging me for a while: John 12:25: "Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life." I thought about this verse recently and I

Experiments with THRML

Extropic is building thermodynamic computing hardware that is radically more energy efficient than GPUs. Extropic | HomeBuilding thermodynamic computing hardware that is radically more energy efficient than GPUs.Extropic Extropic released the THRML library so that developers can start experimenting and prototyping on a GPU before they get access to the

music

I Made Some Songs With Suno

I've made a lot of strange songs with Suno. I usually like to experiment with weird mashups of different genres, and most of them are rubbish. I thought I would share a couple of the more "listenable" songs. Disclaimer: None of these are amazing, and some

Why Doesn’t Valve Just Make Half-Life 3?

Gabe Newell has confirmed delivery of his $500 million superyacht "Leviathan". * 111 meters long * Has a hospital and science lab * A basketball court * 15 PC gaming stations I've also been seeing posts from "Is Half-Life 3 out?" getting more attention on X lately: no

I Saw a Cat in the Clouds

The following is a completely true story. February 17, 2024: I woke up a little after 10am. I made myself some breakfast and a cup of coffee. I looked out the window as I sat on the couch, and I saw a cloud that looked exactly like a cat. I&

religion

A Bayesian Analysis of Biblical Prophesies

Every generation seems to find a way to predict that the end of the world is near. From Hitler to the Cold War, and barcodes to the internet, there's always something that lines up with prophesies in the book of Revelation. I grew up in a Christian family,

personal

A Series of Coincidences

Coincidence clusters happen all the time. If something has a one-in-a-billion chance of happening to any one person in any given year, then it probably happens around 8 times per year. ChatGPT rates my story as a 5.5–6.5 on a rough 0–10 scale of historical coincidences: