On Brains, Minds, And Their Possible Uses

The suspense budget

TL;DR. Why Max Harms' Red Heart fell a bit flat for me but might not for you, with a detour through Conservation of Expected Evidence and a martingale…

23 hrs ago • Jan Hendrik Kirchner

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Why the tails (sometimes) don’t come apart

I keep coming back to thinking about Arnold Schwarzenegger.

May 11 • Jan Hendrik Kirchner

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April 2026

On the digit game

A toy model where you estimate a number one decimal digit at a time. Obvious result: leading digits matter most. Less obvious: sometimes the seventh…

Apr 22 • Jan Hendrik Kirchner

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A permitted value of resting

This came to me as a flash of insight in the shower and I knew it had to exist, so I made Claude write it.

Apr 11 • Jan Hendrik Kirchner

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Elementary Condensation

Previously in this series: Elementary Infra-Bayesianism

Apr 8 • Jan Hendrik Kirchner

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On the unequal distribution of consumer surplus

TL;DR: Uniform pricing gives richer buyers better deals. Nash bargaining (split surplus 50/50) fixes this and under realistic conditions, sellers profit…

Apr 3 • Jan Hendrik Kirchner

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July 2025

Making of IAN v2

IAN v1 died expensive TPU death, IAN v2 rises from markdown ashes. Personal AI assistants, knowledge graphs, and the alignment problem when the AI is…

Jul 18, 2025 • Jan Hendrik Kirchner

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June 2025

Thoughts on AI Ontology

Nostalgebraist’s new essay on… many things?

Jun 15, 2025 • Jan Hendrik Kirchner

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January 2023

This week in fashion

TL;DR: A holiday obsession turns into a deep meditation on all things pretty. Albatrosses and reward *models* included. Also, check out…

Jan 23, 2023 • Jan Hendrik Kirchner

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Simulator Musings

TL;DR: a seminar series on simulator theory; a toy model, the semiotic coin flip, unpacks the strange physics of language models a tiny bit.

Jan 3, 2023 • Jan Hendrik Kirchner

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December 2022

TSPSIs and How I Write

TL;DR: Writing about writing and having written, and self-referentiality. Complementary musings on AI.

Dec 28, 2022 • Jan Hendrik Kirchner

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November 2022

Introduction to Hebbian Natural Abstractions

A neuroscientific-perspective on translating concepts between world-models as a way of solving value-learning.

Nov 22, 2022 • Jan Hendrik Kirchner and Samuel Nellessen

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