Tom

Philosophy and AI Leadership @ UST.

[Tom @Irenaean]

@deepfates Essential, necessary, sine qua non, axiomatic, intrinsic, indispensable, key, crucial, vital.

[Tom @Irenaean]

Cryptography Opportunity: just write a letter, find it in the library already written, then only send the page and catalog reference #.

Then I realized there are not enough catalog reference #'s.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Fable's implementation of Borges's Library of Babel, finished posthumously by Opus 4.8. Quite accurate to the story.

It is multiplayer (others appear as ghosts). You can locate key volumes, like the weights of GPT-1 & the code to the Library sim itself: https://t.co/pXw6vrYO8U

[Tom @Irenaean]

'Hand-wavy' is hand-wavy. Just how precise do I need to be?

[Tom @Irenaean]

@zenahitz These preferences might be better modelled as virtues.

[Tom @Irenaean]

@begusgasper @mthvn @ninabegus Thank you! I should have said 'imagitation' exemplifies imagitation.

[Tom @Irenaean]

Richard Hamming, "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" (1997). Implications for AI work?

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

The Catholic University can form pioneers of a new humanism in the context of the digital revolution. This is a service to the truth and to all humanity. Without this demanding educational effort, passive adaptation to dominant paradigms will be mistaken for competence, and the loss of freedom for progress. #ApostolicJourney #Cameroon

[Tom @Irenaean]

@LedermanHarvey @dioscuri @davidchalmers42 Yes and yes to all this - I would just add that philosophy, as a discipline, is intrinsically well suited to grapple with machine implementations of intelligence, will, character, reasoning, etc. There's a lot of room for philosophy to get much more involved!

[Tom @Irenaean]

@johnschwenkler @IllinoisPhil @UTCivics @ND_EthicsCenter Congratulations, John - and enjoy your time back at ND!

[Tom @Irenaean]

@iamtrask @cosmos_inst Distilled spirits carry essences more effectively than oil. Consider Psalm 133, and imagine what they'd have done with refined ethanol.

[Tom @Irenaean]

@iamtrask move to Alexandria, open a glass shop, build hardware for distillery, sell world's best perfume. use revenue and cred to publish treatise introducing modern logic, implement logic in machine control devices (irrigation, etc). found academy for philosopher-builders. @cosmos_inst

[Tom @Irenaean]

@deanwball It's a community / movement with leaders, of course there is fall off in standards. Not all Marxists were as fastidious about the dialectic, but the followers enjoyed the reassurance their leaders had thought things through. Not all liberals were like Jefferson and Paine, etc.

[Tom @Irenaean]

@Dr_L_Strickland I'd always read Leibniz as less concerned with Descartes's own views. More like, some Cartesian views are a Trojan Horse for the spread of society deranging, happiness killing error -- in ways even Descartes himself may have grasped only partway.

[Tom @Irenaean]

@Dr_L_Strickland Do you think Leibniz thought Descartes thought through and (secretly) endorsed the full implications of his claim that 'matter successively assumes all the forms of which it is capable'?

[CalCo @calco_io]

today, we're releasing the first public research report from calcifer computing: A Model of the Language Process.

as of yesterday, it has been accepted to the @aclmeeting 2026 Main Conference. You can read the report as an interactive blog post here: https://t.co/ES9zuqpGjG

[Tom @Irenaean]

@calco_io @aclmeeting I was an enthusiastic user of Google's (discontinued?) ngram tool. Your work seems like a natural successor. A simple, public facing version that generated legible graphics would see strong uptake.

[Tom @Irenaean]

Note: 'racial' here means 'root-level'. In 1931 some did think race was root-level, but Olaf was not that shallow. He imagines communication with a distant future 'humanity' that is no longer our biological species.

[Tom @Irenaean]

This came out in 1931.