Observe the unknown.

• MandelbrotMathematicsFractals, higher-order structure, and the proofs that feel inevitable once you see them. Self-similarity as a way of thinking.3 pieces
• DescentOptimizationGradients, search, equilibria, and what a system is really minimising when it looks like it is learning.1 piece
• PhyllotaxisBeautyWhy some structures feel right before they are proven. Murmurations, metre, proofs, mountains.1 piece
• SocietyAI and agentsEmergence, alignment as architecture, and what happens when the players are no longer human.3 pieces
• A treePhilosophyDominant thoughts and curiosities of life and mind in India.6 pieces
• StillnessYoga and the mindThe oldest engineering manual for awareness, read by someone who builds minds for a living.4 pieces
• InterferenceScience and technologyNotes from building infrastructure for machines that see, and from the papers that change how I think.3 pieces
• Knight's tourChitrakāvyaComputation as poetry. Sanskrit verses that are also diagrams and algorithms, and the side research around them.1 piece
• A walkThe human experienceWhat it is like to be a person learning in public, one moment at a time.2 pieces

Six illustrated explainers on the Indian philosophical schools, written as a compiler's notes: Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, with original diagrams and a few things to try.

• Sāṃkhya1 of 6 · 18 minThe clay before the pot

  The oldest of the six and the one most often called scientific. Its first move is the question every creation story skips: a maker can shape a pot, but where did the clay come from?

• Yoga2 of 6 · 22 minA road out of the clay

  Sāṃkhya explained how consciousness gets caught in matter, and admitted it had no way out. Patañjali's Yoga is that way: a discipline rather than a theory, and the word does not mean what the studios think it means.

• Nyāya3 of 6 · 24 minWhere there is smoke

  The school of how we know and how we argue: four roads to knowledge, one shape for every inference, and a complete catalogue of the ways a losing opponent cheats.

• Vaiśeṣika4 of 6 · 18 minAn inventory of everything

  Nyāya's partner: the realist's list of what there is, down to the atom, with space and time counted as things rather than gaps.

• Mīmāṃsā5 of 6 · 28 minThe act keeps its own books

  The school that defended the Vedic rite when the Buddhists had all but buried it: the word is older than the god, a text with no author cannot be wrong, and nobody is needed to pay out the fruit of an act.

• Vedānta6 of 6 · 42 minThe seer who saw both

  The end of the Veda and, its teachers insist, the end of thought. One set of texts read four ways: the world as appearance, as God's body, as God's dependent, as God himself.

The six, in order

• EssayOct 17, 2026Every mind has a material cause

  Samkhya says the effect pre-exists in the cause, the substrate is inert, and discernment comes before the self. Read as a design note for AGI, it says most of our alignment vocabulary is pointed at the potter and the clay decides more.

  AI and agentsYoga and the mindScience and technology
• EssayOct 10, 2026Simple rules, whole societies

  Three local rules give you a murmuration. Slightly different rules give you a stampede. The rules between agents deserve the same care as the capabilities inside them.

  AI and agentsMathematicsOptimization
• ResearchApr 1, 2026Chitrakāvya: poems that are programs

  Sanskrit poets encoded knight's tours, magic squares and palindromic surfaces into verse, a thousand years before Euler. The archive, with the tour you can step through.

  ChitrakāvyaMathematics

All writing