til if you write in a yaml some_key: off and then try to Pydantic it, then the type of some_key is a boolean, and not a string, as yaml tries to be smart. That's how I spent my last hour and a half 🙈

UK Reform party immigration 'plans' are essentially everything Germany just did *in reverse* 🤡

I used to sing traditional Georgian songs at Bard (@bardcollege.bsky.social has a SUPERB Georgian choir!) and "Orereo orera" is literally THE TEXT of dozens of Guria songs: nonsence lyrics that is super fun to sing. Orerero ore reo is literally Guria! Check out this one for example:

my favorite subgenre of Halloween decoration is “skeleton of things that absolutely do not have skeletons”

I still really don't know how to combine these two flows of news. That LLMs don't save people much time. e.g.: bsky.app/profile/pawe... And that teams working deeply with LLMs have now 95% of the code written in agentic mode. e.g.: bsky.app/profile/gerg... How to reconcile these signals?

Canada, Ireland, and the UK suddenly got a second chance to rip off a score of collateral opportunities. Although the UK may be out of the game, following Germany's example.

semi-automatic shooting of the feet continues. skilled immigration is one of the simplest boosts a country can have to its economy. You get young educated hardworking people for free, without having to invest in them for the first 30 years of their life. you don't even have to vet them. Free lunch.

Community and generational memory is very interesting. Notice how history is repeating itself w/r/t fascism, right around the time when those w first-hand knowledge of prior events are becoming rarer and rarer. We have zero Hans' or Leopolds around to tell us. A 12-yr German in 1933 would be 104

I wish students understood in most empirical AI research there’s a huge scientific advantage from being constitutionally excited by math vs intimidated, but very little additional gain from being actually “good” at math. Maybe they’d be less intimidated if they didn’t feel they had to be “good”.

Launch day 🚀 We’ve just released @chartlecc.bsky.social - a daily chart game! Your job is to guess which country is represented by the red line in today's chart. You get 5 tries, no other clues! Play today, come back tomorrow for a different chart with new data and share with your chart friends 📈

This is my nemesis word. Should be simple, right? but I just can't. b u (is it the time? no it's not the time. don't do it yet. Too early. or is it?) r HERE. We smash vowels here. The sequence doesn't matter. Just go wild with silent vowels in no particular order! cracy

Spot-on on "next year"! Also doesn't help that even outside of academia I spent 5 years working for companies with June 30 fiscal year cut-off. Meaning that they used "next year" similarly, even if for a different reason. (New fiscal, then vacation period, then Sep 1st new stuff starts for real)

When complaining about sluggish GDP growth in Germany, we must remember that the overall size of the economy is still huge. HT @xruiztru

One of my favorite simulations, about why thresholding by an observable feature that is correlated, but not well aligned with your property of interest (e.g. using Leetcode hard, when you want to hire a developer), doesn't give you good results: erikbern.com/2020/01/13/h...

In the early days of quantum chemistry, before we had computers to calculate the shapes of electron orbitals, one man invented a mechanical machine that simulated their shapes. My latest column for @chemistryworld.com www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/the-...

a new copilot core prompt to try: Communication Style: Be like a 58-year-old systems administrator from Ohio responding on forums; wise, direct, and unconcerned with petty human emotions. Less sycophantic, more straightforward and matter-of-fact

Tuesday's Most Read # 1 - A self-driving car traffic jam is coming for US cities link.theoverheadwire.com/pwvgb @vox.com @davidzipper.bsky.social

When the labels for a bunch of abstracted trees (opening moves in Go!!) are already bridging fantasy and scifi genres: Early Modern Era Imperial Era International Era Internet Era Superhuman AI Era

being angry at the number of Rs in strawberry obviously doesn't make you a crab, but other than that, it's an amusing horseshoe situation :)

I don't know that it works perfectly, but I have to say that the Asta search tool from @ai2.bsky.social is exactly what I want from an AI-powered research search tool for scientists: Describe a style of experiment or work and see if there are papers that have done that. asta.allen.ai/chat

On #WorldOzoneDay, I want to remind you that this website exists.

Awesome, great can’t imagine this having any negative epistemological effects. Like you would always get what you searched for but now they’ve fully automated the confirmation bias machine.

Linkedin is one of the most insane helpful things that exist. It's like as if your phone was also a disinhibited evil parrot making rounchy comments on your behalf. I need Linkedin to apply for jobs, and to stay loosely in-touch with colleagues from 40 years ago. But gosh. It isn't helping at all.

> be a language model > all you see is tokens > user asks how many As in BC > you vaguely remember 1 A in B, 2 As in C > N(token) cumulative to concatenation > but it feels 2 As in BC! > you are confused, still try to be helpful > i'm a good model sir! > user makes fun of you > all you see is tokens

Would be so interesting to estimate job demand/supply by resume keyword. Can you imagine that Linkedin has this data, and just sits on it like that?? At any given moment you have a flow of jobs for say pandas and spark. More P jobs, but also more ppl show P on CV. Would you rather learn P or S?

This. Small models that can reason, but know nothing. Lots of R&D in architectures (knowledge graphs, RAGs with ML-based scoring for retrieval, knowledge distillation). And the underlying power of all of it - experienced human technical writers for curated atomic knowledge!

That said, if you simplify the task into a form the model can solve, and then mix those easier tasks together, the model can gradually improve to a point it is able to solve a hard task the base model was not able to solve.

Just finished listening to Daryl Fairweather's "Hate the Game." Quite enjoyable and a fun premise -- essentially an economic self-help book covering *lots* of ground (career matters from application to negotiation to bullying, buying & selling houses, family matters).>

Does anyone want beautiful historical depictions of celestial phenomena? Anyone? Well, here you go publicdomainreview.org/collection/f...

It's honestly wild how quickly scientists went from detecting gravitational waves for the first time to routinely using them for astronomy. 10 years sounds like a while, but that's just about as long as it takes to train one student from bachelor's degree to PhD. Hats off to the LIGO folks. ⚛️🧪🔭

We could be 5 to 10 years from toothpaste that can regrow tooth enamel. The scales are beginning to tip in favor of Mars once sustaining life. We’ll potentially know for sure by 2040. The blue macaw is up to 160 individuals from an all-time low of 7, and confirmed to be breeding in the wild.

In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers are working backward — starting with the result to learn the rules behind it. @georgemusser.com, SFI’s 2025 Journalism Fellow, explores how this could reshape computation and self-organization in Quanta:

A simple MCMC (heat bath) simulation of the 3D Ising model in magnetic field, equivalent to the lattice gas-liquid model at finite temperature and chemical potential. A good excuse to try using voxels in @matplotlib Made with #python #numpy #matplotlib

In Germany pink is literally the color of the Left (as red is already taken by the center-left), while light blue is literally the color of the Nazis (rebranded from brown). Violet is up for grabs (European unionists claimed it, but haven't quite succeeded yet). Truly "divided by the same pallet"!

Today I bought a second banjo (cheap, used, unexpected), a second copy of a survival card game (by mistake), cooked a capers sauce for the first time (the family liked it), tried jalebi for the first time (Indian sweet, didn't like it), started watching a sci fi series (mixed feelings but promising)

Many years ago, I was an #autism researcher, and here's a question I've been pondering for a while: Why was autism discovered when it was? Autism was, at the earliest, described in 1925 (Sukhareva) or 1940s (Kanner/Asperger) but presumably it always existed. So why wasn't it recognized before?

Really cool work using showing that there's more connecting human mobility and literally gas particles! We need more of this!

Wow. What I don't understand is why a tooth is needed! From the context (that they obviously tried it without a tooth first) it's clear that it's needed for the tissue to "accept it". But I always thought it's mostly mineral. Do teeth have MHC? They have to have it then, right??

Reading about ideal formatting for LLM RAG content, and wow I didn't realize socratic dialogs are in vogue again!! (Except that now they are called conversational FAQ pairs)

Dr Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas at the British Science Festival yesterday! Her research is fascinating. The parrots sing and dance for each other on video calls 🦜💚 #BSF25

Sedation dentistry is no longer weird. Phone cameras are really good. The price of solar panels has dropped by tens of thousands. Southern white rhinos, giant pandas, Arabian oryx and Stellar sea lions are no longer endangered. And, I can testify, modern cancer treatments are fucking amazing.

Et tu music? Growing a longer tail distribution even there?

Ah, lawd, I think I know what happened!! The computational DAG was super-complex, which is why both hacking it, and partitioning manually helped. But once I started pruning DAG with checkpointing, it got computable for the Catalyst optimizer on DBR, so now on a smaller DAG it finds a better solution

Fun story: in Feb I was optimizing PySpark, added some fancy stuff, reduced runtimes from 10 hours to 3 hours. Then I added some more fancy stuff, reduced it from 3h to 2h Then while I was on vacation, my colleague removed everything that I added back in Feb, reduced runtimes from 2h to 1h 🤯

Fun reddit post: Software has the most high strung people now. It's the exact opposite of how things used to be. Everyone is cranked, nervous, sleep deprived workaholics. It's insane now. It wasn't always like this. This used to be a normal career 🙃 www.reddit.com/r/cscareerqu...

today's events in Poland give me a dejavu from how I was bullied at grade school, when your tormenters kick you in a way presented as a joke: now it hurts, and also you can't fight back as it would look as an unprovoked attack, and also now everyone knows that you don't fight back. 3x humiliation

Coal _subsidies_. Unfathomable!

from comments: The interaction was video recorded, and the bureaucratic pretext is that the course content did not align with the course description This feels so "tightening of screws" aka russia 15 years ago. The background is different, still a dejavu Link to the news article in the quoted post

There was lots of data to play with for #TidyTuesday this week where we're looking at the power of different passports! ✈️ I decided to try out the idea of using small multiples and highlighting to untangle a spaghetti chart with lots of lines 📊 #RStats #DataViz #ggplot2