Aether Mug

I don't know about you, but what awes me when I watch an artisan at work is their tools and how they use them.

As someone who writes often and at length about the relativity of boundaries and the complex interrelation of everything with everything else, I find most black-and-white opinions, most expressions of certainty, and most refusals to listen to differing po…

When I first set foot on Japanese land, in October 2011, it felt strange in an unexpected way.

I made a thing: the Foldable Tractatus, a free and open-source web app designed to make reading Wittgenstein's famous first book only hard (as opposed to really hard without it).

A long time ago, in what now feels like a galaxy far, far away, large language models were next-word predictors.

Words have always had a way with me.

There was, a long time ago, a small kingdom, and in that small kingdom was a prince who deemed himself just.

TL;DR: I've updated the Plankton Valhalla Bestiary.

People are using large language models more often and on more complex tasks than ever.

Following the success of the first installment (thanks for all the succulent comments!)

In this post I'm trying something different.

This post is part of my List of Introspective Descriptions.

1 If you descend onto the Marunouchi Line platform in Ikebukuro Station on any weekday morning, you will witness an unusual train-boarding ritual.

Aether Mug has just turned two years old.

Roughly three years and three months ago I executed what I call my Master-Switch Plan: I resigned from my stable, well-paid position at an excellent up-and-coming Japanese startup and hired myself.

This is the final episode in the series of curated quote collections "Darwin in His Own Words".

This is the fourth episode in the series of curated quote collections "Darwin in His Own Words".

This is the third episode in the series of curated quote collections "Darwin in His Own Words".

This is the second episode in the series of curated quote collections "Darwin in His Own Words".

This is the first episode in the series of curated quote collections "Darwin in His Own Words.

Overcast.

Wow.

Disclaimer: these are little more than reading notes.

You're looking for the Place.

A part of me still hasn't recovered from learning that some people believe there is no such thing as an untranslatable word.

Edit 2025-11-18: I did some more research after first publishing this, and learned that the non-teleological treatise of Chapter 14 was actually adapted from an earlier essay by Ed Ricketts.

A couple of weeks ago I shared an attempt at visualizing framings and models, the basic tools of all human reasoning.

Apparently people find it hard not to ogle the glassy sides of their smartphones.

Your brain is a tool very much like your hands are tools.

The eyeball'll never see the color of its iris.

The way we think is entirely based on mentally chopping up the world into discrete entities—things and concepts—pretending they are less connected with everything else than they really are, and forgetting, at least for a while, the details inside them.

Note: This is a short conversation I had with Claude Sonnet (Anthropic's AI bot) about the late philosopher Daniel Dennett's opinions on generative AI.

Touch Stone, Touch Wood One of the luxuries of living in Rome is getting to visit incredibly ancient ruins any time you want.

Once upon a time I published my English mistakes for the whole world to see.

The computer-science-adjacent forum Hacker News had a very interesting conversation going on last month titled A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs.

TL;DR is the part in bold below.

I recently came across a short essay about kanji—Japanese logographic characters—by a certain James W.

You read a book and love it, you highlight several of its most brilliant passages, and you feel that this process has changed you in some way.

A recurring theme on this blog is the idea that we use "framings" and "(mental) models" to make sense of the world.

A quick update: Nautilus Magazine has just published a new short article written by yours truly.

I often have reason to lie down in a noisy box for entire mornings, engaging my brain in various activities.

Termites and ants have no central planning.

The approach I describe below is very simple yet extremely general.

Note: This long-form essay I wrote last year goes more in-depth on the same topic.

You might have heard this argument before: "The world we live in is more complex, fast-changing, and interconnected than ever, and to avoid losing control in this harsh new world, we urgently need new solutions."

We are all creatures of habit, but there are some things we never seem to get used to.

This post is part of the List of Introspective Descriptions.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

I used to go to the movies often.

If you've been following Aether Mug for more than seven days, you might have read the blog post I wrote last week.