Put some records on while I pour
The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, Dec 16, 2025
I really can’t stay
But baby it’s cold outside
Got to go away
But baby it’s cold outside
This evening has been
Been hoping you’d drop in
So very nice
I’ll hold your hands they’re just like ice
My mother will start to worry
Beautiful watch you’re wearing
My father will be pacing the floor
Listen to the fireplace roar
So really I’d better scurry
Beautiful please don’t hurry
Well maybe just a half a drink more
Put some records on while I pour
The neighbors might think
Baby it’s bad out there
Say what’s in this drink
No cabs to be had out there
I wish I knew how
Your eyes are like starlight now
To break this spell
I’ll take your hat your hair looks swell
I ought to say no no sir -
Mind if I move in closer
At least I’m going to say that I tried
What’s the sense of hurting my pride
I really can’t stay-
Baby don’t hold out
Baby it’s cold outside
ah, but it’s cold outside
Editor’s Note: Well 2025 has wound down into the year-end holidays, and so we’re shutting the PerfectingEquilibrium shutters and taking a break. Here’s hoping a happy and healthy and blessed season for you and your family. And may whatever holidays you celebrate be joyous. Unless it’s Festivus, natch. See you Jan. 9!
Comments of the Week
David Yates commented on your post No AI will ever compose Good Vibrations: And there is no need to fear we will program a creative AI because we have no idea how creativity works. Heck, we still have no idea how consciousness works, never mind advanced functions like creativity. I agree very much with the overall thesis of this piece, but I’m not sure this is a very strong argument, considering that LLMs are not so much the result of deliberate programming as a surprising accident of scale. The transformer architecture, which modern LLMs are based on, was originally developed for machine translation. LLMs arose from feeding way more data than ever before into this transformer architecture, and the results surprised everyone. We don’t really understand how or why these things work as well as they do. So understanding how something works is does not seem to be a necessary ingredient to creating it in this realm.
I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing here. I’ve had dogs that did things that surprised everyone; there was little danger of them taking over the world and putting everyone out of work. Likewise LLMs have interesting uses, but there’s zero reason to believe they are going to achieve consciousness and wipe out humanity.
Helen Camba on Winter Fogs the Christmas Capital of Texas: Chris, in your first photo above of the Grapevine station, is that an operational 1950’s stream line locomotive? Or is it a static display? Those use to be all that pulled passenger cars for all the lines. Very Art Deco.
Good eye! Yes, that’s an operational stream line locomotive; in fact I rode that train to the North Pole last week! That’s the Grapevine Vintage Railroad; we took the Santa North Pole Express with the grandsons last week. Wonderful! Here’s a bit about the GVVR’s engines from their website: There’s an 1896 steam locomotive named Puffy (currently under restoration), a 1953 GP-7 diesel known as Vinny and a pair of classic 1957 FL9 EMD locomotives. And the cars are restored vintage railcars. Highly recommended if you’re into trains; you can just come up to Grapevine and wander around Main Street to see a lot of it, or buy a ticket and take a ride!
Neural Foundry of Neural Foundry Substack on The Addictive Amusement of Scaring Ourselves to Death: This piece nails something I’ve been thinking about for years. The idea that panic follows a predictable arc from first stories to “Idiot Plot” territory is spot-on. Back during the fentanyl-touching-overdose scare I tried explaining to folks that it was physically impossible, but fear spreads way faster than facts. The stat about 118,000 people escaping extreme poverty daily is wild though, and kinda proves the whole thesis.
Thanks for the kind words; glad you enjoyed it. I will say the one fun thing to come from the fentanyl-touching-overdose scare is to catch cop shows from that era: the cops are in the creepy warehouse crack den when suddenly one shouts oh my god its FENTANYL!!!! And they all start screaming and running and hiding until the guys with the hazmat suits arrive.
Perfecting Equilibrium Stories
Easter Eggs
My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.