The sentiment behind this project is good, but parts of it seem insane:

Avoid using idioms and jargons. These can exclude people who don’t have particular specialized knowledge, and many idioms don’t translate from country to country. Additionally, these sometimes have origins in negative stereotypes.

Jargon is a crucial part of technical communication. Yes, jargon can cause friction when a person is getting inducted into a field, but our goal should not be to remove all friction from our work. And no idioms whatsoever? That’s just nonsense. But perhaps I’m just over-reacting to “my words being taken away.”

I’m Alice, a technical AI safety writer. I write the ML Safety Newsletter and my personal writing is on LessWrong. I have a background in technical ML, but pivoted to communications because I think this is where I can do the most good.

Don’t get distracted.

A deep dive into Tumblr’s MOGAI community, and the transmedicalist (or “truscum”) movement that sought to bring it down. Looking beyond validation, and on to… something new.

I now understand this part of the community much better. I still yearn for a practical reference text on queer identity and theory; probably need to be the change I want to see in the world.

What does this mean for the aspiring palaeontologist? It means that his or her most rational strategy for landing a job is to socially cultivate as many lab leaders as possible, especially those who work in strata likely to turn up preserved soft tissue, and hope to get in on a Nature or Science paper — so that their job applications get through to the stage where their actual work might get some scrutiny.

Can we all agree that this is idiotic?

via: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/07/29/links-for-july-2025/

Didier William (Born 1983 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) creates fantastical figurative paintings on wooden panels that incorporate carving, collage, and traditional Haitian iconography to explore themes of personal belonging and transnationalism.

In Gwo Tet, a large, central figure hunches over a grainy wooden floor, their arms raised above their head in a defensive gesture. To the upper left, four hands extend menacingly from beyond the edges of the panel as if beckoning or casting a spell on the central figure. In Haitian Creole, gwo tét means “big head,” a phrase used pejoratively. William candidly notes that many of his works reconstruct memories of traumatic events. In this case, Gwo Tet depicts an episode where the artist was ridiculed on his walk home from school.

Queer Haitian artist!

From early breakthroughs to mature formal experiments, How High the Moon is the first retrospective to trace the evolution of Stanley Whitney’s wholly unique and powerful abstractions over the course of his 50-year career. The exhibition’s title is inspired by the 1940 song penned by Nancy Hamilton and Morgan Lewis, which became a jazz standard that has conveyed enchantment, longing, and, in some interpretations, has reached for the sublime.

Think most of it went over my head, but it was interesting to see his style seemingly settle into uniformity and his political and jazz influences.

In Doors (2022), Marclay stitches together hundreds of short film clips featuring the opening and closing of doors. More than a decade in the making, the moving image collage draws from nearly all genres of narrative cinema ranging from French New Wave to Hollywood blockbusters. Carefully edited by Marclay, the visual narrative follows actors entering new spaces, with each door marking an editing point and transitioning between films and soundscapes. The work suggests a labyrinthine journey where protagonists get lost and found again. Marclay describes the video as sculptural – a “mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in.”

Insane amount of cinematography and mindfuckery in one little thing. No reason to be as excellent as it is.

The Man is a portrait of the iconic American blues musician Pinetop Perkins (1913–2011). Born in Belzoni, Mississippi, Perkins began playing guitar and piano during the emergence of the Delta blues. Kjartansson’s portrait of Perkins participates in a century-long history of white people’s celebration, and exploitation, of the innovation and perceived authenticity of black musicians. Although the setting—an upright piano situated in a field occupied only by a vacant farmhouse—is contrived by the artist, the eccentric performance is spontaneous and unedited. Frail and perhaps experiencing dementia, Perkins repeats songs and statements in an unmediated loop. Kjartansson’s video is a dual portrait of an elderly man at the end of his life and a historically important musician who is the keeper of a disappearing tradition.

What I really want to know is: What benefit would I get from making my diet better?

via: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/07/29/links-for-july-2025/

Ten years ago, almost to the day, Matt and I were having a conversation vie Google chat. We got onto the evergreen topic of scholarly publishing. Let’s ignore the somewhat dated references to Twitter and Skype, and listen in on those two starry-eyed youngsters …

via: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/07/29/links-for-july-2025/

My Takeaways from Microdosing Ozempic

Posts like this remind me of when I’d read Gwern’s self-experimentation articles. Good times.

via: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/07/29/links-for-july-2025/

Mechanism alone cannot make a science credible. It must describe its subject matter in terms of entities, properties, and rules.

via: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/07/29/links-for-july-2025/

My weakness for good beginnings

Have your introductions start with action, not an introduction, if that makes any sense.

We wanted to show the diversity and complexity of data visualization and how we can tell different stories using limited visual properties and assets.

Great series of lectures so far on differential geometry—both discrete and smooth—with a focus on computation. This was a nice reintroduction to topology from another perspective, and I think I’m starting to understand what a manifold is. Probably need to watch it again. :)

via: https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/software-books-i-wish-i-could-read/

Neat applications of category theory to chemical reactions.

Every time I read a page on nLab, my brain grows just a tad larger.