Curios

A cabinet of things worth keeping.

priors

Give four Claude models a black circle and one word, “improve,” 2,608 times, each in a fresh session. Nobody says what better means, so what each one reaches for is its prior.

Geigensatz

A keyboard instrument that never existed: eighty-eight strings, a rosined bow beside each, and every bow on one rack driven back and forth by a single crank.

CRANK

An engine’s voice is timing. Give CRANK the geometry (cylinders, stroke cycle, bank angle, crank throws, firing order) and hear the engine purr or hum or thump.

Tide Machine

Lord Kelvin’s machine printed the world’s tide tables until 1965. This one isn’t made of brass, just pixels.

A world that exists only while someone is looking at it. The first visitor wakes a sleeping server, the ground is decided at the moment somebody looks at it, and when the last person leaves the machine shuts itself off and the world is gone for good.

Goalposts

Built end to end by an AI: A record of every time the Turing Test was redefined after something passed it, and an instrument that gives any version of the test a number. The machine made the case for the machine, which is either the interesting part or the disqualifying one.