Dan Roy

Tian and Karolina and team are at ICLR. Come say hi.

So who’s read the 2027 article? What do you think?

Someone has suggested I check out bsky again. So I'm back looking around here. Notification list is kinda boring. So any good conversations going on? Perhaps about LLM/AI reasoning?

Anyone else have the worry that a lot of LLM research is .... just bad psychology?

I got to ski Revelstoke this winter break. Couple observations: the price of receiving 600 cm of snow by Jan 8 is that it is constantly snowing. Saw almost no sun the whole time and the peak was often in whiteout conditions (though North Bowl was always clear…). See image for more.

Multiple friends have likely lost their homes in Los Angeles. Can’t imagine how disorienting this would be. They had only minutes to flee and grab belongings.

OK. Practical question times. How are you adjusting your research given progress in reasoning style models? Also how are you adjusting the way you work?

Pretraining is not done. It's just that theorists haven't told the hackers how to do it better.

Now that I've had a taste of X without post length limitations, I've got to say that it is quite annoying have to fit tweets into 256 characters here on bsky. On X, when they get to long, they go below the fold, and so you're still incentivized to make it short. Can't we have that here?

I've now read this paper carefully if anyone wants to discuss it.

I've never understood people who block people on Twitter, outside of cases of harassment. Such weak sauce.

*AI for Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science*, a workshop hosted jointly by the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute, will be held in Berkeley at April 7-11, 2025. simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/si...

Huge community response to this. Much appreciated.

My 9 yo has finished all the Harry Potters. Any suggestion on where to go from here? Maybe age appropriate sci fi?

Poem by Joseph Fasano

Congrats to Antonio Lijoi on being elected President of the International Society of Bayesian Analysis!

As the semester is coming to an end, I've been able to steal some time to do research on my own. Such a buzz.

School’s out for summer. School’s out for ever!

“Next week we will derive [something awesome],” bragged Prof Roy. “This is our last class, Professor!”, said the brave student.

Late Sunday music.

Waterloo is facing a 75 million CAD deficit and so they are implementing a hiring freeze. As one of the world’s top universities, it is ridiculous that Ontario is not funding it fully. It has generated so much SV wealth, I suggest a SV billionaire solve this deficit and then some.

Hot take: Working another weekend this semester, I am left wondering: Why does the #NLProc publication process have so much artificial urgency baked into it? Requiring responses within 24h, emergency reviewers, everything urgent. Like, why? Slow science can also be a community goal.

Has anyone asked whether scaling laws are surprising or not? (Not only to meat puppets, but surprising in the real sense of "it could have been different".) Universal learning rates look like scaling laws in the non-extreme case, where the class isn't trivial or impossible. No compute there though.

Hey... anyone know w.t.f. runs BlueSky? Does this sit on top of mastodon? Can we edit the software? How do we tweak our feeds? E.g., if I'm in the mood for ML or for politics or whatever?

Demis talks about AlphaGo choosing the optimal on a board with 10^170 positions but we already know that AlphaGo was very suboptimal. Which raises the question of how we might ever know how good AlphaGo is in any absolute sense.

By demand, I've created the final starter pack in my ML Personality Starter Pack Series. I'm uncertain who belongs in this starter pack and so if you think you better fit in the Grumpy ML or Unreasonably Upbeat ML starter packs, let me know. (Self) nominations welcome go.bsky.app/5Suyk58

For those who don’t feel like they fit into my Grumpy Machine Learners list (which I still need to update based on 100+ requests) I’ve created another starter pack: go.bsky.app/Js7ka12 (Self) nominations welcome.

This is exactly what I need. Thank you so much.🙏

These seem like some very common (statistical) sense recommendations for eval. Still the title of the paper is somewhat confusing as if these ideas are new. I would’ve suggested “Bringing a statistical approach…” www.anthropic.com/research/sta...

Any lighting nerds out there? I'm curious about the possibility of replacing (some of) my kitchen--dining room lights with (something like) "full spectrum" lights to fight lack of sun / winter blues. I have a lightbox from back in my days in Boston. Looking to exploit physiological effects.

Curious what people think about DeepSeek. Also.... who is DeepSeek? From website, seems to be a Chinese company but almost zero details otherwise.

DARPA STORM. Who's going to this meeting? Need to decide whether to go. Anyone want to talk about it?

Just realized that there are no polls on bsky. We need polls and please allow them to have factorial design.

Stay up to date with machine learners whose name contains an S. go.bsky.app/cMAq64

Some machine learners were once children. Here’s where you can find them: go.bsky.app/F6mM37U