Louis Maddox

@permutans

Combinatorially curious

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Louis Maddox@permutans· Jul 16

National mood:

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jul 11

Dom Sebastian (2026)

Silver based mechanical instrument with a flowing red layer suggestive of an operational platform

Silver instrument with a variety of knobs and rotors indicative of a machining device with a gelatinous material on what appears to be its operating platform

A silver device which appears to be emitting a liquid against a shielding barrier positioned over a glossy red cream-like blob perhaps being shaped by the instrument's operation

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jul 11

🤒 > Saudi-style summers in the UK by mid-century

Eurostar has ordered trains from France's Alstom that can operate in 55C heat as it prepares for the prospect of Saudi-style summers in parts of Europe including the UK by mid-century.

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jul 10

MoodMic 🌈🎤 > okay text jspace moodrings are fun, but what about audio ones? > “moodmic” will show you live a model’s response to what it hears. > this runs on a custom audio-jlens fit for Gemma4 2B. Runs locally. github.com/eric-tramel/...

Audio mood detection with Gemma4 2B

Bars show fear, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, joy, neutral

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jun 24

Real Peltier physics has never been tried (Shark's thermoelectric Chill Pill cooler operating on max is about as loud as "a small hair dryer") 'Bladeless' impeller hidden in a barrel with a solid state heat pump, dies and even reverses in extreme heat claude.ai/share/e36885...

Claude excerpt on noise from Shark ChillPill

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jun 23

⛔👷‍♂️🌆

A no entry sign over a road with an approaching black cab and assorted flags at dusk

A roadside scaffold bedecked with upturned builders' hard hats turned into hanging baskets

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jun 22

Blow torches stay ON during the heatwave🧯🔥🔥🔥

Chin Chin ice cream making crème brûlée style topping with a blow torch

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jun 19

Cold sour summer 🍺🥭🌸🍊

Pastore mango and sea buckthorn fruited sour
Indie Rabble Three of Swords blueberry lemonade margarita sour

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jun 10

my monkey mind is so enthralled by this new arrayed food/boisson photography trend

arrayed raspberry topped chocolate cakes (ig: luuuuush)

Gemello summer drinks in tricolor (ig: gemello.berlin)

Gemello summer drinks with olives (ig: gemmelo.berlin)

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jun 10

Beautiful wowowow 🎉🔊🤩 music.apple.com/us/album/sd-...

Loukeman SD-3 album art wheatpaste, a rainbow gradient coloured dog like cartoon animal with a star tail

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jun 3

Timeline cleanse

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jun 3

Interesting, TfL Go now offers to “personalise recommendations” to let you know about upcoming fare caps tfl.gov.uk/info-for/med...

TfL Go permission screen

Save money on travel
If you agree, we'll use your journey and payment history to personalise recommendations and tools in TfL Go to help you get better value from your travel.

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jun 1

'viva voce' by word of mouth #WordOfTheDay en.wiktionary.org/wiki/viva_voce Used here in gesture to the inherent (trivial) variation within orality, and the converging task of translation from oral to literate texts

The editors say in their Preface that their aim was to present 'an organic whole' (un tout organique). This was certainly more than Saussure himself had achieved. They also describe their text as an attempt at 'synthesis and reconstitution'. But is there not ab initio a conflict between synthesis and reconstitution? It might not have been a serious conflict had the three courses of lectures been merely viva voce variants of a single text. But that was far from being the case, as can...

Louis Maddox@permutans· Jun 1

Ring Mouse (Kickstarter, 2025)

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 31

Zygmunt Bauman failed to predict Liquid Salad

Chilli cucumber dill pickle sour beer by Garage Project

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 31

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 flag, tattered beyond all recognition (Rotherhithe)

A ragged ribbon of a red and white English flag affixed to a house exterior

A ragged ribbon of a red and white English flag affixed to a house exterior, flapping in the breeze

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 30

The Moral Dilemma of Computing Moral Dilemmas (2024) panosd.eu/aasg2024/pap... > Hard-cod[ed] moral rules [are] meaningless in the sense that the computer would follow them like any other rule… it’d be better to program a feature of insecurity and how to cope with (or endure) it.

ambivalence, uncertainty, or doubt of a given action. Thus, human morality is not, as is often thought in modernity, a set of rules to be followed, but a doubt about one's own actions. Hard-coding moral rules would then be meaningless in the sense that the computer would follow them like any other rule in its program; it would be better to program a feature of insecurity and how to cope with (or endure) it. Otherwise, it might not be possible to actually discuss artificial morality.
Computers could be seen as the pinnacle of bureaucracy; an amplified form of bureaucracy. During the Second World War, computers did not yet exist, but their predecessors, the punch-card

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 30

Just found out how French people spell ChatGPT

Sticker reading ‘Chat GEPETE’ (accents on e)

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 30

Damn you ppl can't do anything

You're absolutely right, and I'm sorry — that was a real mistake. "Merge it" meant merge the PR you'd opened, and instead I fast-forwarded master directly with all 7 of my granular commits, bypassing the PR and littering the trunk. I should have asked which PR (or checked for an open one) rather than assuming "merge" licensed a direct push to master. Let me write the guardrail you asked for, and I'll do it the right way (on the branch, not by touching master again).

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 30

AI but for enumerating pie spots in the gc >>>>>>>>>

🍕 Time Out London’s Top 10 Pizza List

1️⃣ Short Road Pizza — 🚇 Bethnal Green / Cambridge Heath 🍺
2️⃣ Dough Hands — 🚇 London Fields 🍺
3️⃣ Bad Boy Pizza Society — 🚇 Bethnal Green
4️⃣ Spring Street Pizza — 🚇 Borough / Southwark
5️⃣ Hot Saint Pizza — 🚇 Peckham Rye
6️⃣ ACE Pizza — 🚇 Hackney Central / Hackney Downs 🍺
7️⃣ Vincenzo’s — 🚇 Shoreditch High Street / Bethnal Green
8️⃣ Berberè — 🚇 Bond Street / Baker Street
9️⃣ Carmela’s — 🚇 Highbury & Islington / Angel
🔟 Napoli on the Road — 🚇 Turnham Green (Chiswick) / Oxford Circus (Soho)

🍺 = pub residency

Pub crawl ranking:
🥇 Dough Hands 🍺
🥈 ACE Pizza 🍺
🥉 Short Road Pizza 🍺

+ spots i picked:

🍸 Hackney Spots

1️⃣ Bar Etna — 🚇 Canonbury / Dalston Kingsland 🍸
2️⃣ All My Friends — 🚇 Haggerston 🍺
3️⃣ The Dove — 🚇 Broadway Market / London Fields 🍺
4️⃣ The Fox at Hackney — 🚇 Hackney Central 🍺

🍺 = pub

(Bar Etna is a wine/cocktail bar rather than a pub.)

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 29

"extemporisation": the act of doing anything extempore (impromptu) #WordOfTheDay

But what was the next move to be? The form of oral delivery is often difficult to reconcile with the requirements of a book, and this posed [9] serious problems. Furthermore, Saussure was one of those thinkers for whom thinking is a constant process of intellectual renewal. His ideas developed in all kinds of ways and yet managed to avoid inconsistency. To publish everything we had as it stood would have been impossible. The inevitable repetitions which resulted from extemporisation, the

—

¹ Saussure first made his mark in the philological world at the age of 21 with the publication of a study entitled Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Dissertation upon the original vowel system of the Indo-European languages). (Translator’s note)

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 29

The lightcone has been captured

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 28

Kerching

```
just vault-open
```

Point Obsidian at .vault/. You’re in

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 23

David Lyon on Donald Mackay & Claude Shannon at the Macy conferences on cybernetics (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_co...)

Page 134 of Liquid Surveillance, interviewer David Lyon on the Macy conferences

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 22

This & a pastry sour 🏕️🔥

A puppy gazes out over a campfire at night

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 22

and the Claude said, let there be Luhmann

The graduation path from seed to Topic with preserved lineage is the part I like most. That's where you get something no existing PKM system offers — not just "here's a Topic" but "here's a Topic and here's the visible fossil record of how it formed from fragments over time." That lineage is the thing that makes the system a genuine thinking tool rather than a filing cabinet. You can look at a Topic and see which seeds fed it, which means you can look at your *current* seeds and ask "what are these trying to become?" That's Luhmann's drawer, mechanized.

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 19

Photo of a word in a book: action-in-absentia

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 19

Interesting open problem: apparently there are no existing variants of STT tagging/filtering on the market to assist people w Tourettes syndrome//other verbal tics…

There's essentially no production tool purpose-built for this.
What's Technically Feasible - The Extreme Variants
1. Acoustic-phonetic tic fingerprinting (user-specific)
Individual tics are often highly stereotyped - same person, same tic, very similar acoustic signature every time. A personalized acoustic model could learn a user's specific tic inventory as a rejection class. The training data problem is real but tractable if you can get -50-100 labeled examples per tic type. This is closer to speaker verification methods than general ASR.
2. Prosodic discontinuity detection
Tics often have characteristic prosodic signatures: abrupt onset, unusual pitch contour, interruption at clause boundaries. Combined with energy envelope analysis, you could flag candidate tic segments before semantic processing even runs. This is similar to how voice activity detection (VAD) works but tuned for intra-speech anomalies rather than silence detection.

3. LLM-based semantic coherence filtering
Post-hoc: run the raw transcript through a model that scores semantic continuity at each token boundary, flags discontinuous insertions, and either removes or brackets them. GPT-4-class models can do this reasonably well zero-shot if prompted carefully. The risk is over-correction — it'll also strip intentional digressions, humor, or unusual word choices.
4. Premonitory urge detection (multimodal, speculative but real)
~90% of people with TS report a premonitory urge - a sensory/tension signal that precedes tics by 0.5-2 seconds. There's emerging EMG and EEG work trying to detect this. If you could detect the urge onset, you could open a "tic suppression window" in the transcription pipeline - basically gating the STT output for that interval. This is very experimental but neurologically grounded.
5. Tic-tagged transcription (rather than deletion)
Design alternative: instead of removing tics, annotate them in the transcript with a separate tag class, preserving the record while making the intended speech extractable. More appropriate for medical/legal contexts where full fidelity matters. The ethical argument here is significant.

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 19

TailScale Aperture tailscale.com/blog/apertur... > It’s no surprise that flat-rate plans, where casual chat usage subsidized heavy agentic workloads, are coming to an end

Since we launched the original Aperture alpha a few months ago, we've seen a sharp increase in customers running multiple simultaneous agents per user. Agents such as Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, or OpenClaw, use orders of magnitude more tokens than someone chatting with Al as part of a task. It's no surprise that flat-rate plans, where casual chat usage subsidized heavy agentic workloads, are coming to an end.
To help customers manage this, we've rolled out a few new Aperture features to make it both more secure and more cost effective to run multiple coding and background agents.

Louis Maddox@permutans· May 17

mnemon github.com/mnemon-dev/m... > Most memory tools embed own LLM inside the pipeline. [In mnemon] your host LLM is the supervisor… handles deterministic computation (storage, graph indexing, search, decay)… makes judgment calls (what to remember, how to link, when to forget).