Existence Before Essence: What the Slogan Actually Means 1. Introduction “Existence is prior to essence” is a common slogan of existentialists1. What it means differs from philosopher to philosopher, but I want to try to give one interpretation of this frame and to show why getting clear on it resolves a deeper confusion running through much of my own recent writing. In my last few articles, I identified various problems with contemporary analytic philosophical debate. I think I was correct in identifying these problems, but I now think I was identifying symptoms rather than the root cause or at best, second-order causes. What I want to do here is push deeper.

Compact Functional Test Pattern Generation for DNNs Using Evolution Strategies Paper Title: Compact Functional Test Pattern Generation for DNNs Using Evolution Strategies Link to Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/VTS69484.2026.11563375 (VTS 2026) Date: 2026 Paper Type: Automatic Test Pattern Generation, Deep Neural Networks, Evolution Strategies, Black-Box Testing Short Abstract: This paper proposes a black-box functional testing framework that detects hardware faults in DNNs exclusively through their observable effects on network outputs. Instead of the typical two-phase pipeline (generate patterns first, compact them second), the method uses Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) to jointly optimize fault coverage and test-set size in a single step. This is important because the compactness criterion makes the objective non-differentiable, ruling out gradient-based approaches. Across five architectures including CNNs, ResNets, a Vision Transformer, and a segmentation network, the method achieves on average 98.7% fault coverage while using 9× fewer test patterns than a gradient-based baseline, with up to 16.3× compaction in the best case.

A Beginners Guide to Aquinas Well-written introduction to Aquinas. I liked the recurring comparisons to contemporary Western philosophers, they really helped put his ideas into context and highlight the different assumptions each philosopher makes. Although I don’t agree with his metaphysics (eww, essentialism), it’s a very elegant system. Basically, everything follows coherently from his metaphysical framework. Also, I finally read something about the four causes.