The Notebook

Author

Chris von Csefalvay

 

Between the motion and the act

AI
philosophy
LLMs
ABMs
agentic AI

What if agents can do more than act?

20 Jul 2025
Chris von Csefalvay

The Snowmobile Symptom

AI
LLMs
context engineering

AI’s latest buzzword is more confession than innovation.

6 Jul 2025
Chris von Csefalvay

Just noise in the neurons

AI
agents
neuroscience
philosophy

Your language model isn’t experiencing a cognitive defect. It’s just wrong.

27 Jun 2025
Chris von Csefalvay

After agents, part 2 – Agents and the Agora

LLMs
AI
agents

Why agents are the least interesting part of agentic AI.

10 Feb 2025
Chris von Csefalvay

Seatbelts and straitjackets

AI
LLMs
alignment
ethics

What happens when a despotic regime turns alignment into control, open source into propaganda and guardrails into straitjackets.

25 Jan 2025
Chris von Csefalvay

Deja Vu, All Over Again.

AI
governance

The UK now has an AI Action Plan. The problem is, innovation does not grow from plans.

16 Jan 2025
Chris von Csefalvay

After agents

LLMs
AI
agents

2024 was the year of agents. 2025 will be about figuring out how we orchestrate their interactions. Welcome to the year of ecosystems.

4 Jan 2025
Chris von Csefalvay

Five unconventional predictions

LLMs
AI
tech predictions

Or, the GenAI årsgång, 2025 edition

31 Dec 2024
Chris von Csefalvay

LAIR - Language As Intermediate Representation

LLMs
AI
style transfer

Language As Intermediate Representation - a new paradigm for transformation using multimodal LLMs

6 Jan 2024
Chris von Csefalvay

The 95% myth

fitness
science
bad science

How a study from 1959 on 100 patients created one of the most enduring myths about human weight and nutrition.

27 Dec 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

What I learned from getting bodied by a robot.

AI
disability
human-computer interaction

I’m fine, the robot’s fine, society on the other hand has some questions to tackle.

12 Dec 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

Stochastic parrots, cap and gown edition

AI
academia
writing
LLMs

Academic AI is a hot mess. Here’s why.

6 Dec 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

Auto-DOI for Quarto posts via Rogue Scholar

Quarto

Oh, that’s mint. We can finally use Rogue Scholar to mint DOIs for Quarto posts and append them automagically.

13 Nov 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

The skeuomorphic fallacy

AI
philosophy

What something is isn’t the same as what it uses to manifest that being. Also, robot CEOs are nonsense.

6 Nov 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

Teams of Rivals

AI
LLMs
agents

Finally, some discussion on LLM connectionism, and what LLMs could usefully become.

30 Oct 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

Prompt Engineering: The Art of Yesterday

AI
LLMs
prompt engineering

Why prompt engineering has been obsolete before it even took off.

29 Oct 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

The Moral Pulse of the Machine

AI
storytelling
sensemaking
ethics
philosophy

On bedtime stories, and what making machines tell them tells us about their moral make-up.

26 Oct 2023
Chris von Csefalvay
 

Quarto project scripts are awesomeness

Quarto
Python

Project scripts help you integrate just about every possible hare-brained scheme into your Quarto rendering pipeline. Go on, build that page from that YAML file. You know you want to.

22 Oct 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

The Lyre of Hephaestus

AI
art
philosophy

AI, art, language, and what makes us truly what we are.

16 Oct 2023
Chris von Csefalvay
 

Beyond Broca

AI
LLMs
philosophy
language

What if we’ve got one of the most important things in our understanding of who we are, and what makes us intelligent, utterly wrong?

15 Oct 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

How to do a SkiErg marathon entirely the wrong way (but still finish)

fitness
SkiErg

How to eat the wrong way, rest the wrong way (i.e. not), half-ass all relevant parts of preparation for a marathon and still finish with an okay time.

13 Oct 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

The knowledge dividend of large language models

AI
LLMs
Cross-post: Starschema

Crosspost from the work blog: a pragmatic perspective on the knowledge dividend in large language models (and what it may, or may not, mean for knowledge in models, and what this can do for you).

2 Oct 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

Asemantic Induction of Hallucinations in LLMs

AI
LLMs
Cross-post: Starschema

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with asemantic information: the more we stray outside the confines of language, the worse it gets. Here’s how we’ll use this for fun and profit.

23 Mar 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

Data for the next pandemic

computational epidemiology
epidemics
Cross-post: Starschema

If there’s one thing that emerged with any clarity from COVID-19, it’s that where data played a decisive role in guiding policy interventions, outcomes were better. We need better data for the next pandemic.

7 Mar 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

The hardest AI problem you’ve never heard of.

AI
games
ABMs

Dwarves. Elephants. AI. Let the games begin.

7 Mar 2023
Chris von Csefalvay

A different shade of grey

AI
computational chemistry
ethics

A response to Urbina et al. (2022) and the unreasonable spectre of AI coming up with chemical warfare agents (as if we didn’t already have enough of them).

13 Apr 2022
Chris von Csefalvay

Five non-data-science books for data scientists

literature
data science
ethics

Read stuff outside your field. It’ll be good for you.

13 Apr 2022
Chris von Csefalvay

My favourite Quora answers

Quora
history
technology

I’m no longer on Quora, but I used to be. Here are some of my favourite answers.

13 Apr 2022
Chris von Csefalvay

As we may see: the world after dashboards

dashboards
data visualization
data science
Cross-post: Starschema

Dashboards are over – if you want it.

1 Apr 2022
Chris von Csefalvay

Peace, love, Paxlovid and ‘Pfizermectin’

COVID-19
pharmacology

Debunking a remarkably popular and persistent misconception about the relationship between Paxlovid and ivermectin.

27 Nov 2021
Chris von Csefalvay

Why the COVID-19 vaccines are not gene therapy

public health
vaccines

Reflections on some definitional issues.

9 Nov 2021
Chris von Csefalvay

Ransomware attacks as n-person prisoner’s dilemmas

cybersecurity
econometrics
game theory

A game theoretical perspective on ransomware attacks as n-person prisoner’s dilemmas, and why forced cooperation isn’t the answer.

14 May 2021
Chris von Csefalvay

Julia: A post-mortem

AI
Julia
programming

Why I no longer believe my favourite programming language will save the world.

7 Mar 2021
Chris von Csefalvay
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Citation

BibTeX citation:
@misc{csefalvay,
  author = {{Chris von Csefalvay}},
  title = {The {Notebook}},
  url = {https://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/posts/},
  langid = {en-GB}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Chris von Csefalvay. n.d. “The Notebook.” https://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/posts/.