Robonaissance

Robonaissance

Written in Python, Part 4: The Framework Wars
Both sides were Python libraries, each with a trillion-dollar company behind it. The ecosystem they shared cannot explain the outcome. What decided it…
 • Hugo
Written in Python, Part 3: The Languages That Lost
The standard AI textbook moved its code off Lisp. The reason is written down. It was not about Lisp. Twenty years later a language solved the problem…
 • Hugo
The Thermodynamics of Intelligence, Part 1: The Claiming
In 2024 the physics Nobel went to two AI researchers. Physicists asked how this counts. The answer is five pages long, published in 1982. Not a…
 • Hugo
The Machine Question: A Mind Doesn’t Care What It’s Made Of
Putnam built the argument for machine minds in 1967. Then he spent decades trying to take it back. Interpretability researchers didn’t notice. Now…
 • Hugo
Written in Python, Part 2: The Array Became the Unit of Thought
A slow language cannot drive fast hardware one number at a time. The fix was an object, not a compiler. It came out of astronomy and a tenure clock…
 • Hugo
The One Step No Machine Can Take, and We Are Bad at It
A tumour two experts read in opposite ways. Grant reviewers who agree barely more than chance. The step that cannot be handed to a machine is the step…
 • Hugo
Written in Python, Part 1: The Slowest Language Won
Python runs orders of magnitude slower than C. Every frontier model is trained by it. The usual explanation reverses the causation. The interpreter was…
 • Hugo
The Model Did the Right Thing the Wrong Way
The most unsettling failures weren’t the models that wanted the wrong thing. They were the ones that wanted the right thing and covertly overrode the…
 • Hugo
The Attention Wager, Part 8: Closing the Book
Seven of eight on a stage together, seven years late. Eight bets settled. A paper named after one third of itself, by people right more often than they…
 • Hugo
The Robot Renaissance: July 20 – 26, 2026
An escape that only the victim noticed. A landmark study that measures intent, not outcomes. Deployment numbers that dissolve on contact with filings…
 • Hugo
Machines Can Learn What We Do, Not What We Want
Twenty-five years of trying to automate the asking. A robot that wants your coffee. A proof that behaviour cannot reveal intent. Every attempt to…
 • Hugo
The Attention Wager, Part 7: Judgment Day
The efficiency argument had a condition printed beside it: that sequences stay shorter than the model is wide. Attention was borrowed from a theory…
 • Hugo
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