Jonathan Cheng

A little too sobering… 🤣

aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1....

Poll 😂:

The phrase “I’ll finally get a break after <mask> is done” needs to be removed from my training data. It really shouldn’t pass any factuality or quality filter.

Which all just reeks of what happens when a status order gets upended by some new technique. Basically everyone who is under threat runs around shouting “Never mind what I appeared to value before, what I *really* value is this incredibly intangible thing I possess that also preserves my status”.

New from our lab! #COLM2026 When people generate stories, they don't just write one prompt. Instead, they explore narrative space via branching edits 🌱 We reconstruct 24k of these edit trees 🌳 from chat logs and map edit types, story formats, how they relate to tree depth, and more!

My facial expression when I wake up to wandb graphs that *do not* match my expectations.

This paper and its predecessor have just been a joy to read.

I just happened upon Babymetal and the song Ratatata. And the people in my life are not ready for this to become my whole personality.

It’s been a long week, but my god. Silent hill returning to its New England-Rust Belt Gothic roots. Still not sure why Japanese renderings of Centralia was such a thrill for my pre-teen self 😂 youtu.be/df9v2l1kEx8?...

Someone asked me what my ideal work environment looks like. And all I can imagine is me swiveling my chair, with a valley girl accent, saying “you already tried to increase the batch size, don’t do it, girlfriend!🌸”

Claude just now: “the file you remember exists — as a tombstone.” …Jesus, Claude. Surely my files are not *so* dire?

TIL that my dad, who wasn’t close with biological parents, was wrong about his genealogy. He always thought he was 1/2 Spanish, 1/2 Chinese. TIL I learned that I’m 1/4 Peruvian! And I have a bunch of cousins in Peru and *Wales* 😂

The passage describing the wall of contorted, angry statues was foreshadowing…of bsky’s displeasure towards someone not liking Piranesi. So it’s more like a Hall. In the southwest wing, in the year the albatrosses arrived.

Something, something rl gym environments.

Oh sure, if *I* watch videos in bed for 30 mins, it’s a “bad habit.” But if a model watches pedabytes of videos it’s “sft?” Life is so unfair.

About to pose the classic weeb dilemma to my partner, would you rather watch: * a deeply serious and beautifully animated film about an aging Japanese actress * or… an anime about an idiosyncratic teenager using his power to usurp an American empire — also, robot fights!

TIL Stonington Burrow contains one of TSwift’s homes and, perhaps more importantly, a nautical art museum! I’ve learned that “haunted galley” is generally what I’m looking for.

if you think students will be routinely collaborating with LLMs after graduation, #1 priority is to study rhetoric because you need to recognize BS and critique the rigor of an argument that *looks* good. the elite users are going to be like, philosophy, classics, and english majors.

Just watched Six the musical, and I’ve discovered: 1) the closer a musical is to a concert, the more I prefer it 2) Kirstin Maldonado from Pentatonix is one of the cast members right now!!! I think my favorite musical experience I’ve ever had?

Tonight marks the first night my partner and I are cheering for very different teams tonight. Lord save this household 😂

😄

Upsides of heatwave, sneaking into usually busy restaurant, staring into David Bowie’s eyes. Downsides, *faints*

Got some Liminal Space Dim Sum. The Lim Sum.

New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜

oh my god finally a job for me

The confluence of surviving gargantuan deadlines, catching up on research I wanted to do, and bingeing the new Olivia Rodrigo album is really, really hitting the right way. Oh, what’s that? Sun is shining, iced coffee in hand, and all my training jobs are emitting healthy logs? *skips*

Toby Fox does it again

The Pudding's early history of U.S. restaurant dining: don't miss the interactive map of 5,000 historical menus pulled from the NYPL's Buttolph collection https://pudding.cool/2026/06/m...

Apparently, there is a cafe in Shenzen’s biotech hub that gives you free coffee for a month if you publish in @nature.com or @science.org. ;-)

Through my partner’s wish for aesthetic explore > exploit. We watched Felidae. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felidae... I would describe this German film as: made by an unhappy man who likes zdzisław beksiński paintings and decided Lion King would be better with more commentary on eugenics. Meow/10

Everyone should read this, just to see how they implemented a perceptron (a very basic neural network) in Age of Empires II arxiv.org/abs/2605.31514 The artificial neurons pass activation energy in the form of goats.