June ’25 Links

Why do LLM’s keep making the same mistakes? Why not ask them?

“It’s not that I ‘can’t do math’ – it’s that the mathematical interpretation is one pattern among many, and not always the dominant one … the ‘strawberry’ letter counting problem is even more interesting. My architecture doesn’t have a native character-level tokenization view….It’s like asking you to count the number of muscle movements in a smile while you are smiling. The smile happens as an integrated whole; decomposing it requires switching to a completely different mode of analysis that isn’t part of the natural flow.”

A question we’ve all asked — Are DC restaurants Lindy?

A Video Essay on the Prisoner (“It means what it is“). Also flashes “The McGoohan Order” — the seven key episodes as he saw it, in the order he imagines. Probably a good way to watch.

Who deserved the anime of the year? I watched this because the creator discusses Frieren (which I like and which did not win); his discussion about the purpose of awards shows and how they are meant to recognize a community’s growth instead of timeless greatness resonated. And I liked it even before he said “Personally, I think the best awards shows have predominantly panelist input….but as the panel gets bad, the show is even worse than [popularity contests]” (I did rewatch Frieren, even before he did his video “When a great show is better the second time around.”)

The Universal Tech Tree. “Did the bicycle, automobile, or motorcycle come first? Trick question: They are all from the same year, 1885”

Proving one of the last predictions of relativity by building a setup that slows down light (video). Also contains a videogame that accurately demonstrates various relativistic phenomena.

Some online fiction by Peter Watts (author of Blindsight, among others)– The 21 Second God.

An interview with the artist who made Sea Salt & Paper’s origami.

Judging from people’s comments over my entire lifetime, there will be a long line of people waiting to play the world’s smallest violin.

A discussion of Takeshi Kitano’s film directing. (video)

The Onion covers the new Japanese Yokozuna.

Inside the Secret Meeting Where Mathematicians Struggled to Outsmart AI.

Heavy Cardboards Top 50 of all time (this years voting).