15 March 2026

19 links · Sunday

Retrohacking Robotron: Inside 1982's Video Game Classic!

After teaching an AI to dominate Tempest, I pointed it at Robotron: 2084… and things got gloriously out of control. Robotron isn’t just another classic arcade game. It’s one of the most chaotic, punishing, brilliantly engineered games of the golden age—an all…

The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify’s AI DJ

Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal? And when an AI behaves stupidly, who’s to blame? The programmers or the AI entity itself? Is it even proper to make a distinction between …

Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all

I think I’ve finally pinpointed why it is that I have an allergic reaction when I’m confronted with a text that has me as the intended recipient, but that has been run through an LLM to change or “clean up” the wording - especially if it’s internal communicati…

Building my own cloud in 3 months

For many years now, I've been managing the backups for my family, phone data, laptop data, camera data, everything. While I kept all my personal data since I was 12 intact, that has not been the case for my family; broken external hard drives, photos stored in…

Living with (Jagged) Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)

A form of jagged artificial superintelligence is here. Models learned to think and use tools, crossing a threshold where agents are genuinely useful. But the human brain remains remarkably cost-effective for dynamic, judgment-heavy problems. Stop trying to be …

Why I Stopped Using Spotify | Yar Kravtsov's Blog

I thought streaming was the ethical upgrade from piracy. Turns out it just made music disposable. Now I buy CDs, pirate FLACs, and actually listen to albums …

Overlay Bar Chart · Anantha Kumaran

In this post, I will discuss the overlay bar chart. There is plenty of material on stacked and grouped bar charts, but relatively little written about overlay bar charts. This post attempts to address that gap.

Mathematics Distillation Challenge – Equational Theories

Mathematical research traditionally involves a small number of professional mathematicians working closely on difficult problems. However, I have long believed that there is a complementary way to …