Kyle

Fall.

Here's Ryan Peterman interviewing Ryan Williams talking about the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis. Particularly timely given today's news about the ETH. x.com/ryanlpeterma...

"If we wish to reduce the phenomenon of AI slop flag planting, the main thing we need is for the alternative strategy (publishing lots of low-effort papers) to further lose out for young people." sophie.huiberts.me/blog/2026/me... by @sophie.huiberts.me on the "top 3-paper-only" hiring policy.

pretty gorgeous up around san luis obispo

yeah, so true

Do I really? This blog post is so low info. I barely learned anything, and if people on x consider this a breakthrough, then that's a signal their discourse is not worth my energy.

I have no idea if this one is true, but all this result proves is the absurdity of big-O notation.

I really dislike how everything is framed as people underestimating AI. I really believe this is more of a case of overestimating things humans do. Because we are resource constrained we don't consider the unconstrained setting.

Wow this is an insightful perspective on the current state

Most objectives don’t require maximal power. Yud thinks intelligence automatically implies power-seeking because he enjoys power. He’s an outlier among humans and has chosen to attribute his tendency to intelligence vs megalomania.

Very excited to share our new paper led with Will de Cothi and @caswell.bsky.social! 🐭🧠 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1. The subiculum has spatial representations which broadly align to environmental features (boundary cells, corner cells) or patterns of behaviour (axis of travel cells).

The Navier-Stokes fight is a perfect encapsulation of where AI development is right now: this should be really cool and exciting, and instead because of Silicon Valley egos it's become a fight over cheating, surveillance, and companies trying to get one up over the other

If - as now seems likely - LLM companies are mining their logs for juicy problems, then that means that it's very likely that "secret" test sets don't stay secret for long. When looking at new models' performance on benchmarks that date from before that model, we shouldn't take results at face value

Can't wait for A\ and OAI to have their IPOs and get done with it. They tend to optimize for a certain style of attention that works well in an online status / gossip market (rumours, vague stuff, saying crazy things), but is fundamentally incompatible with being publicly listed.

I wrote a super dynamic AI/LLM explainer webpage. Not public yet (don't yet know if it would bankrupt me and having some other constraints). Anyone willing to give it a try and give me some feedback? Mostly looking for feedback from the non-experts. Chat me if interested.

One thing I've noticed following this super important benchmark is that models are perennially confused about which direction a pelicans knees should bend while riding a bike. I don't think there's a "correct" answer! But clearly a notion of consistency that they don't enforce.

the “astra can now leave notes for itself” feature makes “they keep finding message boards to leave notes for each other” a lot less surprising doesn’t it

This was amazingly useful to hear at this moment. If you're in my subfield, you should stop what you're doing and listen to it.

This is what confuses me. Once this info came to light, then entire saga became wholly uninteresting. The only bits worth discussing are a) why isn't OpenAI being sued, and b) it's clear we are going to have a major cybersecurity crisis regardless of the so-called intelligence of the models.

I think a reasonable position on the OpenAI huggingface thing is: * executing untrusted code is a bad idea * sandboxes frequently aren't, even with the best intentions * novel combinations of untrusted code are being generated at scale and being executed * consequences probably bad

TMLR has refocused its acceptance criteria to place more emphasis on clear writing. Read more in this blog post: medium.com/@TmlrOrg/inc...

Hey @1password.bsky.social, time to change course.

Literally what are we doing as a species. The world is under our control. And yet we are forcing ourselves to live more and more boring myopic yet simultaneously high-pressure lives. For zero reason. It's incredibly frustrating.

I wonder if there's a phenomenon where after you accept LLMs into your workflow, then you become increasingly tolerant of long responses. You're honing your skill of parsing in this context. Much like we became used to crappy search results over the years.

Iceland is *incredible* and also a non-stop reminder of climate change. Had to take a much longer trek because a glacier receded so fast in two weeks that the old path was gone.

Playing with the P, I, and D weights in a PID controller. P = Proportional: push in proportion to how far the ball is off I = Integral: accumulate historical error to fix slow drift D = Derivative: respond to how fast the error is changing, to damp it

joinreboot.org/p/alignment “All of the AI x-risk scenarios involve a world where we have decided to abdicate responsibility to an algorithm…. There are technical challenges, to be sure, but focusing at the scale of technical decisions elides these higher-level questions.

The benchmarkpocalypse: danluu.com/benchpocalyp...

yes please, more glacier

So much academic writing is bland and uninspiring. And LLMs will make it worse. What your favorite examples of *good* writing?

How do you build a brain from a genome? We know a lot about the mechanisms and molecules Here we revisit the algorithmic problem: What kinds of programs can specify a brain within the genome’s information budget and the finite time available for development? stankerstjens.github.io/could-a-comp...

TIL that everyone's favorite algorithmic feed is a "classic" network-based algorithm. 🤔

Thinking fast ("wtf?"), then thinking slow ("oh")

Let's talk about AOC as a young scientist & her award winning research on antioxidants & C. elegans, a standard roundworm model. She grew up in the Bronx. Ethnically Puerto Rican, her dad Sergio, an architect, died when she was 19. Her mother cleaned houses, drove a school bus. Working class.

The first few AI proving theorems announcements were exciting, maybe disconcerting and anxiety-inducing for some. But now…it's just depressing. Some dude who never thought about the problem before just types "believe in yourself" to a box until it makes progress on the Riemann hypothesis?

I’m in my mum’s office and there are old people here and they discuss about the new digital age, one of them saying “Look what we’ve come too. They forced us having an email” 😂😂😂

I'm burnt out of discussing "AI". I don't care for the press releases from big companies. I hate having to comment immediately. I dislike "hot takes". I'm worried we, as scientists, are losing touch with scientific values. We've become customers, salivating at ads marketed to investors. 1/15

Some initial thoughts, and a complicated mix of feelings. Wow. I mean, Erdos problems are cool (I genuinely mean that), I didn't know about the Jacobian conjecture before it got disproved. But this newest batch from OpenAI hits home in a way the previous announcements did not.

How do you "see" with electric eyes? How does collective behavior emerge from individual interactions? Nocturnal weakly electric fish evolved to do this, but studying naturalistic social behavior is very hard. Our solution? Virtual 'fish' 🤖🐟⚡ 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2511.08436

Great read! Also lines up with an evolutionary perspective: I imagine symbols (for lang) developed to externalize internal processes to others. Eventually this becomes a self-feedback loop but the origins are still external!

As a US citizen and academic, I strongly believe that I have a duty to not self-censor in response to perceived political pressure. Paying the mafia and bowing to bullies is not how I choose to live my life, especially when the cost is "not receiving a grant," not "prison/torture/death."

A huge part of effective communication is having a good theory of mind for the people you are trying to communicate to. This seems like it will be one of the last skills to fall to the machines; we've got an enormous advantage by being people from the same community ourselves.

dying

roads.cee.wtf draw a line and see what US road most matches your line

China and Xi Jinping seen more favourably than the US and Trump in poll of major countries

The Guardian Building (built 1929) in Detroit might just be the closest thing to a truly American cathedral.

Never seen a rainbow inside of a cloud before.

They have an opportunity to reverse the outcome *at its core.* They will not aim to miss.