Linked is a fun short story I wrote recently that grew from my interest in the strange coincidence that both Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism were born within a few decades of one another. The question the story explores is: what if it wasn’t a coincidence?

awjuliani.substack.com/p/the-dragon...

I spent some time last week vibe-coding "The Beginner's RL Playground" a simple web tool for exploring many basic concepts in reinforcement learning. Users can adjust all sorts of parameters of the algorithm and environment and see the effects of those changes in realtime.

Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation is everywhere, but focusing solely on dopamine doesn't tell the full story... I wrote a short article exploring why: medium.com/@awjuliani/b...

In a new essay I explore how the "Nobodies" in KH2 can serve as a useful thought experiment for considering the future of human-like non-sentient AI in our own world

awjuliani.substack.com/p/what-kingd...

Congrats to Adam Safron (&co) for finally getting 'ALBUS' published! The phenomenological effects of psychedelics are extremely multi-faceted, and they deserve appropriately complex treatments, even if those have to sometimes be partially speculative. academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

"The possibility of constructing ever more complex and ever more efficient perceptrons thus sounds very promising" - Stanislaw Lem (1964)

Reading Summa Technologiae for the first time and it often feels like a book of prophecy...

I wrote a commentary on the "gradual disempowerment" paper making the rounds. The two big points I try to make are 1) individual agency has already been on the decline since the industrial revolution; and 2) there is a case for AI actually reversing that trend!
awjuliani.substack.com/p/gradual-di...

my recent headspace

After finishing my post-doc at MSR last summer, I wanted to get more hands on with LLMs, Flux, etc. So I spent some free time building a simple procedurally-generated JRPG. You tell it what kind of world, hero, and story that you want, and it makes it!

awjuliani.medium.com/one-trillion...

My academic degrees are in Psych, but I actually started undergrad as a CS student. I decided to transfer out my first year because I had a vague intuition that programming ability was a commodity. I couldn't justify it at the time (back in 2010), but it is now very clear that I made the right call.

A little late, but here is my list of books read in 2024. I am going to *try* to get back into more fiction this year, but it could just as easily tip the other direction and end up being all obscure psychoanalytic texts instead...

Wow, I was not expecting this rate of progress for LLMs on ARC-AGI. From effectively 0% to greater than human level in less than a year...

A new essay:

Sorry e/acc, Accelerationism is Anti-Capitalist to its Core

open.substack.com/pub/awjulian...

The FDA advisory committee met last month to evaluate MDMA as a legal treatment of PTSD. They voted to not recommend, citing safety as one concern.

To help explain that concern, I put wrote a primer on the ways that MDMA can exhibit neurotoxicity and what can be done to mitigate those effects.

I was thinking this morning about how amazed I was a couple years ago to realize that the classical 'elements' (earth, water, wind, fire) map directly onto the states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma). The ancients had grasped a fundamental truth, they were just wrong about what it meant.