Independent research by E. M. Freeburg. Research, Essays, and thought on questions that recur across culture, character, and public life. Free to read in full.
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Every corpus decision the field records is about which text to train on: domain, language, quality, recency, deduplication. None is about how the text's arrangement is notated. A Markdown heading is a two-token cue present at every discourse boundary and absent everywhere else; it never lies, and conversion pipelines now attach it to essentially everything long enough to have structure. Where the cue is present, a boundary does not have to be inferred. It can be read. The situation is measured three ways. A census of ten public pre-training corpora shows that the supply of long, coherent, low-
A novel enters a modern training corpus through a scan, an OCR pass, and a linearizer. It comes out with headings the novelist never wrote, breaks where the thought did not break, and a chapter that ran forty pages cut into eleven sections. Every word survives. The domain label survives. What does not survive is the arrangement — and the arrangement is what the model trains on. The substitution happens upstream of every control the field exercises over training data. Mixture weights choose how often to sample the converted document; filters choose whether to keep it. Both take the corpus as gi
The em dash is the most discussed tell of machine-written text, and no mechanistic account of it existed. Separately, everyone had noticed that language models default to markdown. Nobody had connected the two. The argument here is that they are one phenomenon: the em dash is markdown leaking into prose — the smallest surviving unit of a structural orientation acquired from markdown-saturated training data, and amplified afterwards by fine-tuning. The paper lays out that genealogy in five steps, from corpus composition through the dash's dual status as both punctuation and structural joint. Th
There is something our brains cannot do that every computer can. We cannot touch a memory, think a thought, or feel a feeling without the thing transforming under our attention. Every act of consciousness is an act of modification. We cannot read only. Between 2022 and 2025 the same requirement surfaced independently across five research programs in machine learning, mathematics, neuroscience, and psychology — not an account of what consciousness is, but of what it needs. Hinton's mortal computation and Hoel's disproof arrive at it from opposite directions; reconsolidation work in memory scien
An aesthetic essay that asks to be read alongside its pictures. The claim is that the part is not a part: she is a fractal of it and it is a fractal of her, and the resemblance holds at every level rather than at one. The lily is the way in. Study one and what registers is that every part of it, at every scale, is opening — as though opening were its entire purpose. From there the essay turns to what a fractal actually is, which is not a self-repeating pattern but a shape with a non-integer dimension, and finds in the Julia set at 1.2683 dimensions the family that sits where the lily sits: in
There is a meme about the aristocratic elegance of the small-breasted woman. It contains several half-kernels of truth and has proven simplistic enough to reach escape velocity, which is not the same as being right. Size is personal preference and, isolated from the whole, a meaningless vector for aesthetic analysis. If one factor has to carry the argument, it is not size but the hang: big, small, asymmetric, tuberous, plump, flat — these are variables that combine into the composition, and the composition is what is being responded to. The essay argues the case through movement. A body with e
