Archive - arg min

The Poetics of Bureaucracy

Language models are a bureaucratic technology

21 hrs ago • Ben Recht

Information Transit Got the Wrong Man

The mechanized tradition of peer review and the absurdity of bureaucratic conference review.

Mar 24 • Ben Recht

Cosma Shalizi Is Aware of All Internet Traditions

Shalizi’s frame of artificial intelligence as mechanized tradition

Mar 20 • Ben Recht

Small World Models

How much do you need to know about a system to control it?

Mar 16 • Ben Recht

Benchmarking Culture

A summary of my presentation at the Cultural AI Conference

Mar 10 • Ben Recht

Minimal Updates

A few argmin announcements from the road

Mar 9 • Ben Recht

For All The Cows

Steampunk Data Science: An afterword and some thoughts on Cyberpunk Data Science.

Mar 6 • Ben Recht

Learning From the Mess

What the vitamin story tells us about reproducibility, discovery, and human nature.

Mar 5 • Ben Recht

The Vital Amines

Assembling the consensus on the necessity of vitamins.

Mar 4 • Ben Recht

At least it's an ethos?

The limits of optimal control, from the maximalist and minimalist perspectives

Mar 2 • Ben Recht

February 2026

Defining Normal to See Abnormal

The data scientific techniques used to find dietary allowances.

Feb 27 • Ben Recht

Ratts of the Capital

In the quest for knowledge, Elmer McCollum cooks up some synthetic rodent food.

Feb 26 • Ben Recht

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