What happened
arXiv:2609.19448v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In both cognitive science and computer science, goals are conceptualized as cognitive states that flexibly combine with world knowledge to organize and specify purposeful behavior. In this way, goals are compositional representations whose content relates to rational behavior. We here draw attention to goals as representations and their content because it highlights a parallel with other areas in cognitive science - in particular, the syntax-semantics interface in linguistics and logic - while also foregrounding foundational questions about the expressivity, design, and efficiency of different goal representations. For example, goals are typically taken as fixed and imposing constraints on desirable behaviors, but we can also identify constraints on goal representations themselves, such as whether a particular goal language is sufficiently expressive to capture behaviors of interest, or whether different goal representations capture the same behavior. Here, we synthesize work that aims to characterize the properties of different goal representations and suggest these are points of a broader design space. We close by discussing how distinguishing the form and meaning of goals can elucidate the implicit assumptions we make about goals, inform the study of interactions between higher-level cognition and motivation, and isolate axes of variation for different conceptions of goals. Update (2026-09-22): Show HN: Drop – a rootless Linux sandbox with gVisor support. I created Drop because I always felt uneasy installing and running third-party programs using my main user account. A single compromised dependency means a full compromise of the system. What is even worse, because I ship software from my computer, a single compromised dependency can lead to compromise of all the users of my software. Containers and VMs are one solution, but for local work, they are often detrimental to productivity. It takes effort to configure a machine with all the tools and configs needed for productive work, but a container or a VM will be stripped of all these tools. This is great for production deployments, where the aim is a reproducible system with minimal dependencies, but can get in the way of productive local work. Drop is language independent, but the workflow is inspired by Python's virtualenv. With virtualenv the environment isolation is only a convention that relies on installed dependencies being good citizens. With Drop the isolation is enforced. Each Drop environment gets its own writable and easily disposable home dir, with only selected config files and dirs fr