My comment on Fillipo Torresan & @manuelbaltieri.bsky.social's "Disentangled representations for causal cognition" in Physics of Life Reviews: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... I argue that there is little meaningful analogy between learning from "pixels" vs "experience," but I praise

Shocking

Igor, you legend. Don't stop being you. There are ten more of these unreadable hypercube diagrams on the following pages.... Souce: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00682

My experience applying for retractions at Elsevier. I've looked at paper mills since 2019 and drafted a preprint on a paper mill from an international publisher in 2021. I started contacting journals or research integrity teams to raise concerns about papers. Publishers react differently. 1/n

Great talk by @manuelbaltieri.bsky.social!

"We discuss the problem of running today’s software decades, centuries, or even millennia into the future" tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/t...

Preprint time: “AI in a vat: Fundamental limits of efficient world modelling for agent sandboxing and interpretability” arxiv.org/abs/2504.04608 Exploring the fundamental limits that shape the design space of world modelling for agent sandboxing and interpretability

GOL in GOL in HOL: Verified circuits in Conway's game of life. ~ Magnus O. Myreen, Mario Carneiro. arxiv.org/abs/2504.00263 #ITP #HOL4

Great to see a colleague speaking up, sad to think about the state of affairs.

I don't want to delete anything. I simply agree with Barbieri's distinction and claim that for a successful syntactic relationship, there is no need for anticipation or computation. On that level, the cell is a simple reliable #state machine (transducer) with no place for interpretation of meaning.

One of the most controversial corollaries of relational biology is the impossibility of simulating life. But what if I tell you that this claim is simply the result of misinterpreting Robert Rosen's ideas? #complexitycat 🐈‍⬛👇🧵1/3 amahury.github.io/posts/trilog...

Re the Tononi paper: Both Tononi’s IIT (phi) and Friston’s FEP start from fundamental, axiomatic, and debatable assumptions. These assumptions are generally made without any humility. This logic allows them to make exceptionally broad claims. Which contributes to my unease about them.

Directed wiring diagrams for Mealy machines!

Only just learning about this now -- I guess for a while people have predicted that the AI doomer rationalist crowd would go violent, so its not surprising in some sense. Still though, odd times! www.theguardian.com/global/ng-in...

After a multi-year collaboration with Martin Biehl, @mattecapu.bsky.social and @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social, I’m stoked to share the first of (hopefully) many outputs: “A Bayesian Interpretation of the Internal Model Principle” arxiv.org/abs/2503.00511. 1/

This looks fantastic, and goes to the must read pile for 2025

This looks really interesting!

Elon Musk is making wild claims that #DOGE has found evidence of massive Social Security fraud.... The reality is that Musk's young engineers don't seem to be able to understand COBOL databases while Musk is misrepresenting the Social Security data www.wired.com/story/elon-m...

More on process theories arxiv.org/abs/2502.10368

Generalising Laplacians in a categorical setup

Too many things to read already for this year arxiv.org/abs/2404.14423

Review of "Haskell in depth" by Vitaly Bragilevsky. ~ Brent Yorgey. www.cambridge.org/core/service... #Haskell #FunctionalProgramming

This review paper by @guillaume-garrigos.com on SGD-related algorithms is a fantastic resource, offering elegant, self-contained, and concise proofs in a single, accessible reference. arxiv.org/pdf/2301.11235

2025 already clearly not disappointing for categorical systems theory arxiv.org/abs/2410.10627

Oh gosh. Found on the web. Anthropic (producer of Claude LLMs) asking job applicants to not use AI systems when filling in their application. simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/2/a...

😱 Banger after banger in 2025

This looks 🔥🔥

AI benchmarking organization criticized for waiting to disclose funding from OpenAI

And to nobody’s surprise..

What are some known/published *active* applications of RL in production (i.e. are actually providing some financial utility)? Note that this excludes games, simulations, and in-lab robotics.

Save the date! The annual #Conference on #ArtificialLife - #ALIFE2025 will take place in the heart of Kyoto, Japan, from 6-10 October 2025. The conference logo, official website launch, and more details coming soon!

💡 Making slides, giving talks, and looking for illustrations for Alice, Bob, and the whole crew? Simón Oya (UBC) has drawn fresh, beautiful ones and releasing them under CC BY-SA 4.0 license: simonoya.com/drawings/ (discovered through the #EnCOREPrivacy25 workshop)

Saw a discussion on metaphor-based metaheuristics. It's funny how I initially got into #AI / #ALife, through bio-inspired #optimisation, and now it turns out that the entire field has barely moved for decades, and most of the "results" in the last two decades are part of various running jokes. 1/

Italians and their (our) mozzarella phase arxiv.org/abs/2501.005...

Gemini remains an absolute mystery to me: so far behind all its competitors, and it’s not even close. (I’m not using any other LLM for work, but I can say other models are at least fun to play with here and there, when I got access to Gemini on Google workspace, it was just rubbish.)

Ants Solving A Puzzle Credit: "Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans" (scientific paper, doi.org/10.1073/pnas..., Tabea Dreyer, Amir Haluts Amos Korman and Ofer Feinerman) When ants work in groups, their performances rise significantly.

#categorytheoryillustrated got a design makeover, plus there is some new content, at the ending of the second and fifth chapters. I also started distributing a epub and pdf version of my books which are available for my Ko-fi and Patreon supporters […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Knowing only the building blocks of our own biosphere, can we predict how life may exist on other planets? A paper in Interface Focus takes questions like this out of science fiction and into scientific laws. santafe.edu/news-center/...

So, they set up the ARC prize specifically to have limits on how much compute you can use, required the submissions to be open-sourced, and then OpenAI just went ahead and crushed it with >$1m of compute from a closed model with no idea how it works anyway? Do I have that right?

For years, former Black Panthers have feared that the FBI is still keeping tabs on them decades after its notorious COINTELPRO program. Malik Rahim had never been able to prove he was targeted. Now, government docs show he was correct.

As a Systems Engineer back in the 90's I was "sold" on the MIL-STD 499B definition of #system: "An integrated composite of people, products and processes that provide a capability to satisfy a stated need or objective" The result is this nice bean people picture used as a favicon on kihbernetics.org

Question for conference organizers: what review platform do you have *good experiences* with? EasyChair and OpenReview are really hard to use. Ideally the platform would make it easy to manage different types of submissions (like: long paper, short paper, poster)

As promised: formal verification of numerical methods. See also: verinum.org

🚨 New Paper! Can neuroscience localizers uncover brain-like functional specializations in LLMs? 🧠🤖 Yes! We analyzed 18 LLMs and found units mirroring the brain's language, theory of mind, and multiple demand networks! w/ @gretatuckute.bsky.social, @abosselut.bsky.social, @mschrimpf.bsky.social 🧵👇

Now that's a good start!