Tweak styles to make things work nicely with "page-looking things"

Signed-off-by: Danila Fedorin <danila.fedorin@gmail.com>

content/blog/comments_not_for_you.md

@@ -1,113 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "The LLM Comments Are Not For You"
-date: 2026-09-14T20:49:21-05:00
-tags: ["LLMs"]
----
-
-I've heard a lot of talk about LLMs recently, and among the most common topics
-of discussion have been the comments. LLM comments generally seem to suck: they are verbose,
-regardless of surrounding context, they seem to encode conversation decisions
-(like {{< sidenote "right" "hysteresis-note" "\"do it this way, not that way\"" >}}
-In my head, I've been calling this "comment hysteresis", because the comments
-are not a function of the final design, but of the path taken to get there.
-{{< /sidenote >}}), and they tend to use made-up vocabulary or terms. Engineers
-have been working on ways to reduce the pain, by carefully crafting their
-prompts or even separately running "desloppifier" agents to clean up PRs.
-In my experience, these techniques are only mildly successful.
-
-So why do LLMs keep writing comments like these, even as their software benchmark
-scores climb ever higher with new model releases? I'd like to argue that they
-remain bad _precisely_ because the scores in benchmarks are getting
-better. And very likely they will degrade, in the same way that
-[model tool calling has gotten worse over time](https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/7/4/better-models-worse-tools).
-
-**These comments are not for you, my (hopefully human) reader.**
-
-Fundamentally, as many in the coding agent space have pointed out (like,
-say, Mario Zechner in his [talk about `pi`](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjfbvDXpFls)),
-most modern models have been [RL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning)'ed
-to fit into agentic harnesses. These workflows are part of their training.
-And the way that RL works is that it is outcome-based. A model takes steps,
-edits files, does whatever it does in its agentic framework, and either
-arrives at a solution or doesn't. Behaviors that contributed to successful
-outcomes are encouraged, and become more common.
-
-The difficulty is that as benchmarks get harder and as models are asked
-to take on larger and larger chunks of the software development workflow,
-their ability to keep information "just" within their context is
-pushed closer to its limit. Session compaction can accidentally destroy
-design decisions or rationale, forcing the model to eventually re-discover
-previous decisions or even switch directions. I suspect that in addition
-to this --- given the techniques used by OpenAI in
-{{< sidenote "right" "theft-note" "its formalization" -9 >}}
-Whether this was really OpenAI's formalization or plagiarism remains open
-to debate, and I do not know enough to claim one way or the other.
-The possessive form here is just for convenience.
-{{< /sidenote >}}
-of [the Navier-Stokes singularity](https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/) --- models are also trained to operate in
-swarms, which don't share context but must find ways to coordinate with
-{{< sidenote "right" "fable-note" "each other." >}}
-I don't know how agents talk to each other, but we've already seen that the
-way they talk to themselves is 
-<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ul1396/fable_5_leaked_chainofthought_in_web_interface/">very different</a>
-from humans.
-{{< /sidenote >}}
-
-Comments are a hugely useful persistent store of contextual information.
-If a model edits a file, chances are it will read it as well, discover
-the comments, and re-load the given information into context. If
-one agent makes a change to a file with some design rationale --- "array,
-not a linked list" --- another agent that might want to change it back will
-spot that and
-{{< sidenote "right" "obedient-note" "tread carefully." 0.1 >}}
-I suspect, though with less certainty, that agents are very deferential
-to pre-existing comments for this exact reason. Claude Code, for instance,
-will be very insistent that when code says to do X, the new code written
-should fit the "X model".
-{{< /sidenote >}}
-It should come as no surprise that agents that make use of verbose,
-{{< sidenote "left" "verbose-note" "decision-making-included" >}}
-Interestingly, this turn of phrase is uncommon in pre-existing human comments,
-which would make up the majority of the model's training data set. In
-my opinion, this points towards this being something more than a reflection
-of the "human style".
-{{< /sidenote >}}
-comments succeed more frequently, and get
-rewarded. The result: +50/-1 comment blocks in your diff. It is irrelevant
-whether these comments concisely describe the codebase; their intended
-audience can read and parse them instantly. The comments are not for you.
-
-It's very hard to prompt this behavior out, and there's a pretty good chance
-that you don't want to, by the simple evolutionary argument: these things
-have helped the model do well in evaluations. By removing them, you are likely
-undermining part of whatever mechanism makes it tick. On top of that, you
-are fighting the wiring it has developed to do exactly this. It's like trying
-to get humans to stop liking [hyperpalatable foods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpalatable_food).
-
-So then, the natural conclusion is that we should be leaving these comments as
-they are, right? As long as they've been known to improve agents' performance,
-the more the better? Some, who have
-[leaned _heavily_ on models for self-regulating via persistent state](https://yegge.ai/essays/fences-not-sandboxes/), 
-have found fascinating emergent behaviors, including whole organizational
-structures with
-{{< sidenote "right" "yegge-note" "agent-invented-names" >}}
-Did I mention that LLM comments tend to invent novel vocabulary?
-{{< /sidenote >}}. They believe that to be the future.
-However, in my opinion, it may not be that simple. As we've seen with human
-evolutionary adaptations, they don't always do well outside of the environment
-in which they arose. For instance --- to hammer the point --- humans _love_
-hyperpalatable foods. They will eat them in excess, which can lead to
-obesity and a variety of other conditions. These too are emergent behaviors,
-and likely quite interesting from a medical perspective. That does not
-make them desirable.
-
-In the same way that scarcity of sugars and fats in nature balanced (and
-motivated) human enjoyment of them, it's possible that the ephemeral nature
-of software engineering "tasks" is counteracting the accumulation of LLM-generated
-commentary. In real-world contexts, human attention and editing may be doing
-the same thing. We are yet to see what codebases maintained entirely
-with RL'ed agentic behaviors over years look like, and whether there are
-limitations.
-
-Regardless of whether this new style holds up in the extreme,
-it's that way for a reason --- and you are no longer its sole intended audience.

content/writing/pynchon/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,144 @@
+---
+title: "Everything's Touch"
+date: 2026-05-14T18:01:27-07:00
+draft: true
+custom_css:
+- style.scss
+---
+
+{{< halfpage >}}
+
+## Everything's Touch
+
+"Do you guys have any deuterium water?", he said to a baffled lab manager.
+"You know, heavy water?"
+
+"No... We don't have that...". She didn't recognize him as a student.
+
+"Do you know where I can get some?", continued his barrage of questions,
+"What's a good chemical company? How do I go about ordering heavy water from them?"
+
+What could this guy possibly have to do with heavy water? Why is he so determined?
+When he finally turned and left empty-handed, she breathed a sigh of relief.
+
+Until, that is, another man arrived and made the same request: he wanted heavy water.
+Again, the lab manager refused him. For the rest of the day, she had
+a knot in her stomach. Having failed once, in order to remain under the radar,
+had some shadowy cabal switched representatives, and tried again to attain
+their goal?
+
+Uneasy still the lab manager had dinner, opening YouTube™ on her phone to pass
+the time. On the front page, a video was waiting for her: "the ice cube
+is too heavy!". When frozen, you see, heavy water sinks instead of floating.
+
+There was no plot. Two men, having both seen this video, had independently
+decided to replicate the trick. On the same day, believing it was their
+free will, they visited the same lab and spoke to the same lab manager.
+They felt the touch.
+
+---
+
+> Roland too became conscious of the wind, as his mortality had never allowed him.
+> Discovered it so. ...so joyful, that the arrow must veer into it.
+>
+> -- Thomas Pynchon, *Gravity's Rainbow*
+
+Today, we live amidst an invisible ocean, but not in a physical sense;
+its tides don't pull us out to sea or push us towards the shore; no
+warm undercurrents alternate with cool water as we bob in the waves.
+Standing on a hiking trail and looking out at the path ahead, the world
+might look exactly as it had forty years ago. However, the ocean is
+there, mediated by
+
+{{< /halfpage >}}
+{{< halfpage >}}
+
+electromagnetism instead of fluid. Looking up at the sky,
+nowadays we are reminded of this by the numerous hurtling dots delivering
+the internet to practically every corner of the planet.
+
+Reminded are we of its existence, too, when we hear it speak; when people talk
+about Geese and Velvet Underground; when friends repeat nearly verbatim the
+top post on /r/bald; when men show up to a teaching lab and ask for deuterium.
+Sometimes, these ideas are deliberately planted. Sometimes, they are analogous
+to your classic trends™. Sometimes, they just appear. An enormous behemoth
+stirs deep beneath the waves, and we sway with the current.
+
+---
+
+> If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers
+> who built it . . . never knew there were any further steps to be taken.
+> Their design was "finalized", and they could forget it.
+>
+> -- Thomas Pynchon, *Gravity's Rainbow*
+
+In _The Age of Surveillance Capitalism_, Shoshana Zuboff
+powerfully reframes the actions of tech giants like Google
+from the perspective of _behavioral surplus_. Google
+and Meta's gluttony for traffic patterns, written sentiment, satellite data,
+identified faces seen by smart glasses, all of it is the endless hunger of an
+influence-machine. Zuboff decries the "priests of the shadow texts",
+Skinnerian manipulators bent on seizing human agency for utopian or,
+more likely, capitalistic ends.
+
+I don't think that's the whole picture.
+
+The surveillance-manipulation machine, running at incredible scale and
+nudging us every moment we search or share or scroll, is ultimately
+unconcerned with truth. Truth is secondary to human behavior. While it
+reaches and connects a double-digit percentage of the world's population,
+the machine lacks any constraint or fundamental purpose beyond engagement.
+It's driven by unfathomably large probabilistic models entangled through
+several orders of interactions with other models.
+
+This enormous amalgamation, joined nowadays by (probably) well-intentioned
+and only-moderately-grounded-in-reality AI™ agents™, is armed with state-of-the-art
+tools and unprecedented influence. With "engagement" its only loose target,
+it ceaselessly perturbs our daily thoughts like Maxwell's demon. Whole
+cliques of people revisit old shows, "discover" a new band, and try Science™.
+
+{{< /halfpage >}}
+{{< halfpage >}}
+
+---
+
+Among _Gravity's Rainbow_'s
+numerous subjects and themes is an intricate and densely
+connected network of markets, influences, and hidden agendas that overlays
+the political conflicts of World War 2. Individuals pursued their own economic
+gains; dealers replaced cocaine with powdered milk; Phoebus intentionally limited
+the lifetimes of lightbulbs; a man dressed like a Rocket smuggled hash past
+an international gathering on behalf of one Sour Bummer. All of this, though, the whole system, took
+on the life of its own: it was the Rocket-state. It acted in ways that were
+inscrutable, mysterious, and yet behind which, in moments of panic or paranoia,
+one could suspect intent. 
+
+The Rocket-state, as Pynchon described it, may or may not have existed.
+It certainly does not exist today. However, beyond Zuboff's cycle of
+dispossession, beyond the powerful surveillance state exposed by Snowden,
+today lies the Attention-state. It is the entity stirring occasionally under
+the surface of the internet's ocean.
+
+I think this is the missing piece. Yes, Google and Meta are selling your
+Gmail inbox's contents to the highest bidder. Yes, the US government is
+in on this. Yeah, Meta's Ray-Bans™ are going to be cataloguing every face
+you encounter on the street, and yeah, the age verification laws are probably
+going to be used to further associate your identity with the rest of
+your data point-cloud. But these are just glimpses of the larger system.
+Those "priests of the shadow texts" are like GR's Freemasons: they perform
+the rituals, but the magic is elsewhere.
+
+This is the closest we've ever been to a truly "unified consciousness".
+We've built ourselves a noosphere, but it's not what we thought it would
+be. It's not _just_ the "world at our fingertips".
+It's not entirely a reflection of human minds. There is an impurity,
+an additional active force that decides which whispers are carried across
+the ocean and which shouts succumb to the inverse-square law.
+
+There it sits, this impurity, mixed in with most human knowledge, with the
+immediate awareness of nearly every event as it occurs in most of the developed
+world. It coats our facts like film, and when an acquaintance hands you
+his packaged opinion, it remains in his handprints, and your heart sinks
+like deuterium ice.
+
+{{< /halfpage >}}

content/writing/pynchon/style.scss

@@ -0,0 +1,93 @@
+@import "variables.scss";
+@import "margin.scss";
+
+body {
+  text-align: left;
+  background-color: white;
+  color: black;
+
+  /* reset to light mode */
+  @each $varName, $varDefault in $css-vars {
+      --#{$varName}: #{$varDefault};
+  }
+}
+
+h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
+  font-family: "Times New Roman"
+}
+
+h2 {
+  font-size: 18pt;
+  margin-bottom: 0.2in;
+}
+
+.warning {
+  max-width: $container-width;
+}
+
+.halfpage {
+  width: 5.5in;
+  height: 8.5in;
+  padding: 0.25in;
+  box-sizing: border-box;
+  border: $standard-border;
+  flex-shrink: 0;
+  margin: 0.25in;
+
+  h2 {
+    display: block;
+  }
+
+  @media screen and (max-width: 5.5in) {
+    width: auto;
+    height: auto;
+    margin: 0;
+    border-left: none;
+    border-right: none;
+  }
+}
+
+p {
+  margin-top: 0;
+  margin-bottom: 0.1in;
+}
+
+html .container {
+  max-width: 12in;
+  position: static;
+
+  &:not(main) {
+    @include below-two-margins {
+      padding: 0 $container-min-padding 0 $container-min-padding;
+    }
+  }
+}
+
+main.container {
+  font-family: "Times New Roman";
+  font-size: 12pt;
+  line-height: 14pt;
+
+  display: flex;
+  box-sizing: border-box;
+  flex-wrap: wrap;
+  justify-content: left;
+
+  & > h2 {
+    display: none; /* copied title is on the page */
+  }
+
+  @media screen and (max-width: 5.5in) {
+    display: block;
+  }
+
+  @media screen and (max-width: 12in) {
+    justify-content: center;
+  }
+}
+
+hr {
+  padding-top: 0.1in;
+  padding-bottom: 0.1in;
+  line-height: 0.1in;
+}

layouts/_shortcodes/halfpage.html

@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+<div class="halfpage">
+    {{ .Inner | markdownify }}
+</div>