#foxoftindalos

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

Previously: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]

Today's commute brain noises from a magic fox having a beach episode:

Going to be compressed for yesterday and today both - this post is about Monday.

Family quite like the chocolate I brought. Different people liked different chocolates but the hazelnut was a bigger winner than I expected and the honeycomb toffee was indeed nostalgic.

They are being surprisingly cool about the hat. Not completely, but at all.

Lots of writing to do. Oh goodness far too much writing to do.

Also biking. So much biking.

Also arranging early move-in, and responding to research manager, and getting thoughts about research topic written down.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

@twocubes @loving-n0t-heyting The links etc I promised:

The main guy's writeups:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03780

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XHtygebvHoJSSeNPP/some-rules-for-an-algebra-of-bayes-nets

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWQWzGCSFj6GTZHz7/natural-latents-the-math

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RTiuLzusJWyepFpbN/why-care-about-natural-latents

My partial writeups:

https://www.overleaf.com/read/wfpkyjhmmwvy#5441d9

https://www.lesswrong.com/collaborateOnPost?postId=TsFaJnxrPx6LWTWSC&key=f7d71ecf3e5b3e9f7354ebce03b521

https://www.lesswrong.com/editPost?postId=nAaLSq5izGn7kZheu&key=9e4531fcb6e0659a4d1bf16e59d9ea

My general plan: Finish up notating the rules for the algebra of Bayes nets in terms of blackbox rewriting rules for monoidal category string diagrams. Use category theory to find any rules JSW might have missed. Use even more category theory to figure out where any useful universal properties fall out, like his sense of isomorphism. Use yet more category theory to talk about this stuff in full generality, not just for Bayes nets, and probably even get cleaner or stronger proofs.

Some keywords that came up: Morita equivalence, Petri net, virtual double category, formal category theory, Lawvere metric spaces

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

Previously: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8/B], [9]

Today's commute brain noises from a magic fox zooming beneath an inland sea:

So that sure was a week of depression. Kinda wish it hadn't been but that's life.

Got a fair amount of writing done for my paper. That's probably good.

Badly frustrated with my own lack of social skills and anxiety and rootlessness. On my own head again, badly.

Feeling a little better later in the day about social woes.

Feeling both excited and dreading about all this flatpack furniture I now need to get home. At least I'll have a bed?

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

ok ok hear me out here:

the rule of leftovers (that you generally shouldn't remix or reheat already remixed or reheated leftovers if you care about food coming out good) is a lot like chain complexes (the image of successive morphisms when composed must be exactly 0/the identity object)

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

the sex I have not had, am not having, and will continue not to have is astoundingly and essentially gay and there's nothing any of you can do about it.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

Previously: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]

Today's commute brain noises from a magic fox zooming beneath an inland sea:

Hanging out with CRW for the long weekend. He's still here. Good to have him here.

I'm fancy today for no reason.

Docket today: finish writing the objective function piece, write up midpoint report, write a blog post. Maybe also visit an art museum.

Farewell to Tom Lehrer. I'm not a fan of "We Will All Go Together When We Go", however good I find the music she the irreverence. Black comedy just doesn't do that much for me; it just upsets me past a point.

OK OK OK OK thank you XP for having a good research convo with me today. You are excellent.

I feel way better about my research now. I have A Theorem to be pointed at and like half a map to it. Time to light lantern and head off into the woods in search of it.

I dressed kinda fancy today for what felt like no reason but maybe there was in a fact effectively a reason? I sure act kinda differently. Better, sharper, more excitable.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

something ive wondered about hydrogen drilling is transport. Do you have to build a pipeline from the well to the haber-bosch plant, or do you put it on a truck, or do you build a new haber-bosch plant at the well? Or can you just drill a well at the haber-bosch plant, like with the method where you inject water to react with the rock idk how restricted it is about the site

I actually don't know, but I'd strongly expect that you'd want to build a new ammonia plant on-site. The idea I'd had was to inject carbonated water - CO2 also gets sequestered geochemically in the same class of reactions, turning hydroxides into carbonates - and then also use more CO2 pulled out of the air to turn raw hydrogen into useful hydrocarbons. The reason here for using the hydrogen instead of shipping it is twofold: you could use some of the hydrogen as both power source and fuel for hot flames to run the release half of a calcium carbonate/calcium oxide-based CO2 capture setup, and because IIRC hydrogen is a right fucker to pipe around between tiny molecules escaping easily and hydrogen embrittlement of steel. So you'd want to use most of it very quickly and close to source, and you could pull off the nitrogen fraction out of the air alongside the CO2.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

Previously: [1], [2], [3], [4]

Today's commute brain noises from a magic fox zooming beneath an inland sea:

Thinking about... kind of a lot today? Hard to put it in words though.

Something about social nutrition? About spiritual nutrition?

Something about my damaged sense of research-drive which fact is super scary to me. Mesopredator with an injured leg or digestive issue type of scary.

Something about my p(doom) (ugh) being anywhere from 65% to 87% on any given day, between all the roads to ruin? Most of the probability is even in pretty boring prosaic ones like "hypercapitalist hellscape" or "great power conflict blows up" and not weird "brain in a box in the basement" type shit!

"Cross-Fit Power Grid" I'm sorry what the fuck. (On looking it up: not a literal power grid. Probably.)

Now playing: Neutral Paradise. Love me some reasonably natural-sounding untwelvish music.

Forgot my meds at home. Ended up leaving early. Going to try to get anything done at home after catboy times.

Feeling slightly better about the fact that I should have doubted myself less on how good of a capabilities advancement tool RL is?

I didn't realize how much of a crush I still had on people from the pre-plague times. I look better now, am more agentic now, am more mature now, am better positioned now. I think. I hope.

I underestimated how vital lack of certainty in receiving identical reward between principal and agent was.

Forgot to think much about meeting up with EG over the weekend at the abortive math party. E (different person) actually seems worth hanging around, even if fairly flaky.

Something broken or warped in me around dating and sex, probably? Something else sprained or bruised around research drive and confidence? Worth fixing up, for sure, in both cases. They even feel related.

The motif of tiny kit Lorxus being totally correct in what we want and why we do things, and frequently wrong about what the risks are and how bad missing out is and how best to get the things we want. Over and over again.