annex

A small story about the density of honey at airports. There I was standing in front of a stainless steel table, belongings strewn about, a sweater spilling out of my half-unzipped duffel bag. A stranger was rummaging through my stuff. I had no shoes on. I had arrived three hours early — probably too early — mostly out of anxiety surrounding the unpredictability of moments like this. Then the airport security agent pulled a small jar of honey from my bag, as if it were an emerald excavated from an ancient tomb in some long-forgotten jungle. ...

A new theory for why the Machines kept humans alive in The Matrix —inspired by recent discoveries in scaling large language models. One measure of a film’s quality is the diversity of fan theories it inspires. When a story has the right blend of depth, ambiguity, and cultural timing, the entertainment value extends past the credits—it compels audiences to dissect and reinterpret decades later. The Matrix is a great example of this: 25 years on, people are still following the white rabbit down Reddit threads. A quick internet search reveals a myriad of fan theories about the true nature of its characters and storylines. One even claims John Wick is actually a sequel to The Matrix. ...

My thoughts on how a meteorology paper published in 1963 explains the difference between two giants of science fiction, with some personal reflections on how they each influence my own work. Introduction My research began in the narrow field of reinforcement learning applied to constrained, optimal control. Solutions were well-structured, precise, and mathematically rigorous. This fit neatly into a deterministic view of the world - if I defined everything correctly and did the math, things would work out well. ...