Aether Mug
aethermug.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2024
An author writes essays on thinking, language, culture, and cognitive science, including framings, mental models, and aphantasia.
What HN saysCommenters find the topics interesting and cite its culture and framings essay, but one says many posts read like undeclared LLM output.
16HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
57stories submitted
1.6Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2024people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language3 people · 351 points · first shared 2024 · 237 comments on HN
- 2Process World, Object-Oriented Mind2 people · 12 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 3Famous Cognitive Psychology Experiments That Failed to Replicate2 people · 10 points · first shared 2025 · 2 comments on HN
- 4There Is Thinking and There Is Thinking and There Is Thinking2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 5"None of it is important or all of it is" – Steinbeck on teleology2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 6An Aphantasic's Observations on the Imagination of Shapes2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 7Think of AI as a lens, not a person2 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 8Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings2 people · 2 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 9A Framing and Model About Framings and Models2 people · 1 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 10I do not remember my life and it's fine1 people · 301 points · first shared 2025 · 223 comments on HN
- 11I used to know how to write in Japanese1 people · 227 points · first shared 2025 · 272 comments on HN
- 12Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable1 people · 171 points · first shared 2025 · 124 comments on HN
- 13Boxed – Things I learned after lying in an MRI machine for 30 hours1 people · 142 points · first shared 2024 · 112 comments on HN
- 14Borges on Chaos Theory1 people · 132 points · first shared 2024 · 26 comments on HN
- 15Human Stigmergy: The world is my task list1 people · 65 points · first shared 2025 · 19 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
PaulHoule · 2026-03-05
Part of it is that Democrats think Republicans are bad and that Republicans think Democrats are bad.
I've been chewing on this a lot:
https://aethermug.com/posts/culture-is-the-mass-synchronization-of-fra…
and thinking how "increasing social cohesion" seems entirely out of reach in the US although the fact is that we can't afford to go on the way we are going. It's particularly funny to me that people in Canada, next door, economically almost part of the United States (don't tell the President!) is the country with the lowest level of people saying their countrymen were bad.
adolph · 2026-02-12
Are those terms substantially different from the article's claims?
THe wikipedia definition of meme is "memes: ideas, behaviors, beliefs, and expressions." The author discusses frames and mental models as a topic [0]. "[A] framing is a choice of boundaries" and "A model is an analogy. It is a simplified simulation of something else." These seem to map to meme-concepts ideas and beliefs respectively and loosely. ("Frame" is probably a meta-meme or ontology that expands or contracts what memes can exist at all or what can be discerned at all.)
0. https://aethermug.com/posts/a-framing-and-model-about-framings-and-mod…
lloeki · 2025-12-08
> But "chs" is just nonsensical. The idea that it would sound like "sh" is baffling
In the word "french" C H is pronounced sh and nobody bats an eye, I don't think it's that outlandish that someone once read it as fuch-sia, incorrectly splitting it compared to the original.
In the language French, fuchsia is unequivocally read something more like few-shia, and I'd bet that even though it comes from German Fuchs-ia (fooks-ia) English has picked it up from the French side.
If you find such a loanword weird, don't you dare try reading Japanese.
https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-the-japanese…
pazimzadeh · 2025-08-15
Interesting topic but a lot of the articles on this blog reads like undeclared LLM slop:
> This is also why I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought. Most of what you remember is nothing like an approximate copy of the things you experienced in real life—even in the specific case of text, memory is not even remotely like a paraphrase of previously read words. Many of our thoughts happen in a highly abstracted and distilled form, interacting and connecting with each other as a network that simply cannot be faithfully converted into a sequence of words, however long. The fact that people can fail even at something as basic as sketching a kanji or a vehicle they've seen hundreds of times before is just another example of the same phenomenon.
A pet peeve of mine is when someone uses their personal datapoints to generalize for humanity. Every sentence here should say “for me”.
What they said doesn’t even support the idea that language is a bottle-neck for thought, it actually argues against it. If language can’t capture the complexities of thought, then that’s the opposite point as language is a bottle-neck for thought.
I read the linked article https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-the-japanese… and it clearly is comprised of a lot of LLM slop.
“In techie terms, the Chinese script doesn't support the structure of languages like English and Japanese. It doesn't have what it takes.”
That’s not techie that LLM slop
“Sometimes, instead…