Come speak at our recurring "research jam" — the "lab meeting" equivalent of an independent and distributed research community this Wednesday, if you are working on a fun project and seeking feedback, collaboration, and/or compute resources! mlcollective.org/events/resea...

Over the past year, I grew linearly in age, exponentially in size, stubbornly in wisdom, inversely in AI knowledge, and fluctuatingly in my outlook for the future. Entering a new decade is scary, but slightly less so if you have somewhere to place hope. Happy birthday to me 😛

We just finished Fargo Season 5 and my partner is searching twitter for what people he follows say about the show and found a slew of posts of mine before he met me, all about my dog — whose name is, unmistakably, Fargo.

There are numerous types of experiences in the world; each moves and shapes us in its own way. But reading Murakami has to be its own category. I can't think of anything else even close to it. Not claiming it's good or bad, just a disjoint node in the graph that's distant from all the other nodes.

Join us tomorrow morning for the first research jam of the year! mlcollective.org/events/resea...

Last year, we funded 250 authors and other contributors to attend #ICLR2024 in Vienna as part of this program. If you or your organization want to directly support contributors this year, please get in touch! Hope to see you in Singapore at #ICLR2025!

if you would like to attend #ICLR2025 but have financial barriers, apply for financial assistance! our priority categories are student authors, and contributors from underrepresented demographic groups & geographic regions. deadline is march 2nd. iclr.cc/Conferences/...

Now out in @NatureNeuro! Animals can do Transitive Inference (TI): quickly learn, and reconfigure, global order from partial info (learn A>B, B>C,C>D, immediately know A>D). But currently no neural model explains the observed features of TI. So we asked the machine to find one for us -and it did!

Probably pregnancy hormones, but this drew tears from me today: A new mom was describing how she found it hard to connect her newborn to the one in the womb that used to kick her every day, "the kicking baby feels like a totally different person, who stayed behind in 2024 with that pregnant woman."

I'm sick of being so sick 🤢 I've had like a total of 4 healthy days in the whole past month. And the worst days were Christmas day and New Year's day. Life is grey.

It's never fun getting sick, but especially not if it spans the whole holiday season, with back to back virus infections (first parainfluenza and then RSV), and while 6-month pregnant 🥲 I hope you all are beating this New Year's baseline at least. Happy New Year!

My most special winter ever. Can't wait for 2025. Happy holidays!

There's always this guy...

About to send my last DLCT email of the year today (in 2 hours). Join the 7-year-old mailing list if you haven't heard of it. (And if you have heard of it but haven't joined, I trust that it's a well thought decision that suits you the best.) groups.google.com/g/deep-learn...

Aww so many familiar faces! Couldn't be at NeurIPS this year sadly, but our conference-ly lunches and meetups continue!

A momentary IRL convergence at lunch before MLC diffuses once again to the remotest geographies. Lovely to see all you badass researchers ❤️

Currently (or maybe have always been) in a mental state where an incoming email with title "Appreciation for Your..." paralyzes me and gives me fear. I keep thinking about this comic someone once sent to me: "Why it breaks your brain to take a compliment" theoatmeal.com/comics/brain...

The hardest thing to do in Bangkok is to *cross the street*

C++ code coverage reports are now available in Doxide v0.8.0! This was quite a journey, improving the test suite for a machine learning library that makes heavy use of templates and catching a few bugs. I hope others can find it useful too! #cplusplus #cpp #SoftwareEngineering #OpenSource

I'm on a 3-week personal vacation, which means I spent the whole time writing and submitting recommendation letters for grad school applicants, and managing ICLR reviews. #AcademicCalendarHasNoBreak

Funny signs in southeast Asia

This elephant loved me 😍

📣 I wanted to share some exciting career news -- I have joined Distributional as the Chief Scientist! My role includes a mix of scientific leadership and product strategy. Follow me and @dbnlai.bsky.social if you want more updates about the world of #AITesting! #MLSky #StatSky

Hello a million new people on bluesky and mostly the 50+ that just followed me!

On no-agenda weekends, which is what I thought I'd want, I usually get little done and feel anxious by the end of it. This Sunday I have a 2h Town Hall meeting, a party to host, and guests to receive from out of town. I ended up doing way more than what's required. And felt good.

Having been an AC from before the ChatGPT onset, I gotta say, LLMs are getting better at reviews.

I always thought I'm an OK writer, not an extraordinary one, because every ML researcher around me is also a writer! It sort of comes with the job. But today someone came to me and said "I like your latest post! Do you have a professional editor?" Maybe I'm getting somewhere 😳

Black pudding is nothing like what I expected. But I like it.

Is everything about politics when you dig deep enough or look close enough? Is politics the ultimate pursuit of humanity?

So glad I watched Ted Lasso before coming to London for the first time. Adds so much warmth to the experience.

As cyber harassers started to go through my online media to take screenshots to attack me, Marcus the optimist: They're getting to your talk now! Maybe they will listen to it and love it and realize how wrong they are. Me: 🙄😂🙄😂🙄😂

Hard work.

Thanks for all the support, public and private. I still log onto 🐦 because for every 1000 ounces of toxicity that make my heart sink 1nm, I get to see 1 love action that fills all my heart! A good trade right? And also because if I changed any way I behaved, then they win.

It's like I broke the sewage pipe of the Internet

@probablymarcus.com : "You are not 'trending' yet, so it's all good." (For those who don't know the context, don't waste your time finding out 🫠)

"In Bruges" is a great movie. Even greater is when you watch it *after* "Banshees" (same cast, 14 years apart)

Anyone having problems on this site? It keeps logging me out, and when I finally log in, shows an empty feed. I really wish bluesky is faster and less buggy 😥

Well, COVID positive for the first time

三twi

the three-Twitter problem

Happy 4th of July!

Not enough dog pics on bluesky. Fixing it with my own hands 😬

😂

5 years ago today I filmed a thing that gave me my first Internet fame. Has anyone not seen CoordConv yet? 🙃

You can only read 600 posts per day on Bluesky because that’s how many there are

Taking a trip around Europe — and running into Americans everywhere.

Getting invitation to speak by some large-scale ("6500 attendees") conference with words like "Open" "Science" "AI" all over its name, hundreds of C-some-Os and esteemed researchers as confirmed speakers, which charges up to $4000 to attend, and I'm guessing not paying speakers a dime. Hype economy?

It's a great world to be in having watched Cloud Atlas. It was a fine world before. It was not so good during.