# Journal: September 2025

> ## Retrospective

## Retrospective

A project I worked on over the past few months officially launched its commercial service, gained paying users, and appeared in newspapers and on TV. I hope it does well.

I found much inspiration in <Dwarkesh Patel>'s conversation with <Richard S. Sutton> (<Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end>) and <Blaise Agüera y Arcas>'s lecture on [What Is Intelligence](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/What%20Is%20Intelligence.txt).

Claude Sonnet 4.5 and OpenAI Sora 2.0 were announced.

I wrote a few short articles:

- [The big world hypothesis and the bounded rationality](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/The%20big%20world%20hypothesis%20and%20the%20bounded%20rationality.txt)
- [Intersection of Antikythera and Sutton](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Intersection%20of%20Antikythera%20and%20Sutton.txt)
- [Conceptual Inflation](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Conceptual%20Inflation.txt)
- [What makes eugenics bad](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/What%20makes%20eugenics%20bad.txt)
- [Capacity of consciousness in the AI era](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Capacity%20of%20consciousness%20in%20the%20AI%20era.txt)

Joining a small online group of good people has influenced me positively in many ways. I have been talking with LLMs more often than usual, probably because the group has made me more curious. I am grateful.

I played <Assassin's Creed: Mirage>, set in <ninth-century> <Baghdad>.

## Journal

### 2025-09-29

I read [The Big World Hypothesis and its Ramifications for Artificial Intelligence](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/The%20Big%20World%20Hypothesis%20and%20its%20Ramifications%20for%20Artificial%20Intelligence.txt). According to its argument, some problems in the world cannot be solved perfectly no matter how far an agent's computational abilities advance (or finding and executing a perfect solution is not the ideal strategy). To me, [the big world hypothesis](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/The%20big%20world%20hypothesis.txt) seems to restate <Herbert A. Simon>'s <bounded rationality> in an [AI](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Artificial%20intelligence.txt) context. Agents acquire and exercise <ecological rationality> through experience.

I organized these thoughts a little: [The big world hypothesis and the bounded rationality](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/The%20big%20world%20hypothesis%20and%20the%20bounded%20rationality.txt).

---

[Intersection of Antikythera and Sutton](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Intersection%20of%20Antikythera%20and%20Sutton.txt).

### 2025-09-25

<Google> released a Chrome DevTools [MCP](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Model%20context%20protocol.txt). So far, I have mostly used [s4](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Semi-structured%20software%20spec.txt) for backend or CLI work. Now it might be good to try web frontends too.

### 2025-09-24

I am studying <time series forecasting> out of necessity, and it is fun. Learning driven by need is usually efficient, especially for someone like me with relatively low conscientiousness.

---

I visited a company where some acquaintances work and did a little <pair programming>.

---

I am still reading [Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that will Change the World](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Supremacy%20-%20AI,%20ChatGPT,%20and%20the%20Race%20that%20will%20Change%20the%20World.txt). Apparently, <Nick Beckstead> wrote:

> …saving a life a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country because richer countries have more innovation, and their workers are more economically productive.

I like <effective altruism>, but this claim does not resonate with me. I should think about why.

### 2025-09-21

Early this morning I watched <Blaise Agüera y Arcas>'s <September 4, 2025> lecture, [What is Intelligence?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs38tMxZseA). It tied together the origins of life, evolution, intelligence, and consciousness through the single perspective of "computation." Fascinating. The explanation was so neat (so economical) that it actually made me wary. A <book of the same title> is available online. I haven't read it yet, but it will probably be my book of the year.

---

I studied [geological time](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Eons.txt) in broad outline, organizing eons (roughly hundreds of millions to billions of years) and eras (roughly tens to hundreds of millions of years), and updated [human evolutionary history](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Human%20evolutionary%20history.txt) accordingly. Recording that the hominid lineage branched from great apes only near the end of the Cenozoic gave me a feeling of futility(?). Darwin felt grandeur.

In the process, I learned that an <International Commission on Stratigraphy> exists.

Next I will tackle periods (roughly millions to tens of millions of years). The familiar [Jurassic](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Jurassic%20period.txt) is a period. My goal is to reach epochs (roughly hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of years). That will bring me to the <Pleistocene>, so often mentioned in [evolutionary psychology](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Evolutionary%20psychology.txt).

### 2025-09-18

I fed in two textbooks from opposing fields ([feminism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Feminism.txt) and [evolutionary psychology](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Evolutionary%20psychology.txt)) and ran [GraphRAG](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/GraphRAG.txt) indexing. The bill was 100,000 won😇 [LazyGraphRAG](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/LazyGraphRAG.txt) has only been published as research, not yet integrated into the code. Queries were slower than expected too (`--method=DRIFT`), which was a little disappointing.

Still, the approach seems good: extract a <knowledge graph> from text (ordinary enough so far), perform <community detection>, and then create summaries at the community level (this is the excellent part).

---

I need it for something, so I am studying <Google Analytics> again for the first time in years.

### 2025-09-17

I read [How People Use ChatGPT](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/How%20People%20Use%20ChatGPT.txt). More than anything else, I am interested in the "privacy-preserving automated pipeline." Having an LLM read instead of a human and classify within predefined categories (<controlled vocabulary>) is almost identical to a method I devised for a recent project.

### 2025-09-15

I met acquaintances near <Euljiro 3-ga Station> and chatted about [LLMs](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Large%20language%20model.txt).

### 2025-09-13

I thought about [conceptual inflation](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Conceptual%20Inflation.txt) in words such as "automatic," "intelligence," and "agent."

---

I skimmed [On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/On%20the%20Theoretical%20Limitations%20of%20Embedding-Based%20Retrieval.txt), published in August. It reminded me of [contextual retrieval](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Contextual%20retrieval.txt), which <Anthropic> released last year, so I read about that in more detail. It combines [BM25](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Okapi%20BM25.txt) with <embeddings>. This also helped me understand [BM25](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Okapi%20BM25.txt) a little better; previously I had only a rough idea.

### 2025-09-08

I thought about [What makes eugenics bad](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/What%20makes%20eugenics%20bad.txt).

### 2025-09-07

I read [Why Language Models Hallucinate](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Why%20Language%20Models%20Hallucinate.txt).

While reading [Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that will Change the World](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Supremacy%20-%20AI,%20ChatGPT,%20and%20the%20Race%20that%20will%20Change%20the%20World.txt), I learned that <transhumanism> grew out of [eugenics](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Eugenics.txt). See [Transhumanism and eugenics](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Transhumanism%20and%20eugenics.txt).

### 2025-09-05

I read [Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET): Endlessly Generating Increasingly Complex and Diverse Learning Environments and Their Solutions](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Paired%20Open-Ended%20Trailblazer%20(POET.txt)%20-%20Endlessly%20Generating%20Increasingly%20Complex%20and%20Diverse%20Learning%20Environments%20and%20Their%20Solutions), a paper <Uber AI Labs> published in 2019.

### 2025-09-04

I thought about [Capacity of consciousness in the AI era](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Capacity%20of%20consciousness%20in%20the%20AI%20era.txt).

### 2025-09-01

The project I have been working on for several months officially launched its commercial service.