m-hodges

Remember that "Where's the Shovelware?"¹ post?

¹ https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

Yeah, I didn’t read a lot of books in high school (do read a lot more books as an adult!), but I did read a lot of information while sitting at a desktop computer.

Oh hey I just wrote about Hofstadter's deployment of Bongard problems to make may of these points in GEB: https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-08-19-bongard-problems/

> We discovered that Moonshot AI, the company that produces the Kimi family of models, silently forwarded customer requests to Claude, instead of processing them using Kimi. Moonshot then displayed Claude’s responses to users. These users thought they were using a Kimi model, but received responses from Claude instead.

> DeepSeek also silently relayed exchanges to Claude without informing DeepSeek customers.

> MiniMax built its own proxy network service through a shell company. This shell company has no obvious links to MiniMax and does not disclose its relationship to its parent company. This shell proxy network service only offers access to models developed by Anthropic and OpenAI. The service does not offer access to any Chinese models, including Minimax’s own.

A few quotes towards the end of GEB:

> I see no barrier imposed by Gödel’s Theorem to the implementation on computers (or their successors) of types of symbol manipulation that achieve roughly the same results as brains do.

And a distinction between intelligence and consciousness:

> It is entirely another question to try and duplicate in a program some particular human’s mind—but to produce an intelligent program at all is a more limited goal.

And then:

> Gödel’s Theorem doesn’t ban our reproducing our own level of intelligence via programs

That is pretty hard to square with "GEB argued that AI couldn’t achieve intelligence without first mastering Gödelian self-reference."

A bit more introspective:

> I think that the process of coming to understand Gödel’s proof, with its construction involving arbitrary codes, complex isomorphisms, high and low levels of interpretation, and the capacity for self-mirroring, may inject some rich undercurrents and flavors into one’s set of images about symbols and symbol processing, which may deepen one’s intuition for the relationship between mental structures on different levels.

I've used concepts from GEB a lot in my thinking about how LLMs.

On self-referentiality and the MU Puzzle: https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-04-21-openai-o4-mini-high-...

On Gödelian limits of prompt-safe AI : https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-26-music-to-break-model...

On the blurry line between pattern matching and reasoning: https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-08-19-bongard-problems/

I'm glad that the author of this post ends with:

> What’s left? Consciousness

because when I've read (and re-read) GEB, I find the book to be much deeper than just a threshold for conversational intelligence.

An Aristotelian Critique of “The Lazy Song”

I would thoroughly enjoy an entire podcast of this genre.

...

A Cartesian Critique of "Fireflies" by Owl City

...

A Humean Critique of "I Gotta Feeling" by The Black Eyed Peas

Brown

https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU

Extremely agree. The extraneous stuff is what makes the book magical.

I read GEB cover to cover and haven’t stopped thinking about it for years. Not a brag, a nudge that it’s not impenetrable and more people should read it.

A few years ago I published BIDEN: Binary Inference Dictionaries for Electoral NLP, based on this idea - https://matthodges.com/posts/2023-10-01-BIDEN-binary-inferen...

They don’t. They aren’t faking the BLS numbers as an electoral strategy. No one at WH or NRCC or CLF are rubbing their hands together as if this is all according to plan.

No. Very bad economic numbers in August before a midterm is not a cunning political optics move.

Do humans not have access? https://dl.acm.org/openaccess

I absolutely love the photo of the computer at the top of the article. Not at all what I thought I was going to see from this headline.

I wrote about the Gödelian limits of prompt-safe AI: https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-26-music-to-break-model...

> But what if the power company needs to upgrade the substation to handle the increased needs of the data center? Or secure additional sources of electricity? In these cases, the investments are part of the electricity grid that everyone uses. These costs will likely be shared among all customers.

Okay but this is a policy choice. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Everything is a scam now. You can’t exchange money for products or services anymore. We just exchange money for scams.

> This reality demands a new model: usage-based pricing for everything.

Oh boy!

> although something people are aware of and they can judge the content themselves

Based on how arXiv papers get boosted around on social media, I don't believe this to be the case.

Of course some blog posts are worth citing. Then cite them as blog posts.

My point is that a LaTeX PDF can launder epistemic status. An unreviewed argument starts to look like established research merely because it adopts the visual grammar of a paper.

I always struggle to figure out what role arXiv should play in my information diet. On the one hand I support Open Access research. On the other hand, peer review is vital, and a substantial quantity of “papers” on arXiv are just blog posts in a LaTeX trench coat.

Knoppix LiveCD in 2004 was my very first try at Linux. The fear of HDD partitioning my parents' PC delayed me from installing Ubuntu Warty by a few months.

They also could have been much more interesting in the approach. LLMs can use their token distributions to generate stegotext that read like plausible prose but decode to payloads.¹

¹ https://github.com/hodgesmr/calgacus-mlx

Roughly 9 years ago: https://neveragain.tech/

My favorite go-to-sleep move is to load up Ben Eater on YouTube. I actually love Ben Eater’s content, but his voice and his lack of dopamine-chasing production make for perfect go-to-sleep encouragement. And then I have a genuinely interesting video to pick up when I’m not tired.

That's silly. I appreciate RSS as much as the next Hacker Newser, but, no. You could be throwing up hand-typed txt files with nothing else and that's still allowed to be a blog.

I was looking at Jack White tickets (on my phone) last week and Ticketmaster popped up that it was a phone free concert and everyone was required to deposit their phones into locked bags upon entry.

I have a mirror feeling about Chicago: very good city, but I wouldn’t want to live there due to the winters.

Geographic negative polarization has become far too entrenched in online discourse.