Had an idea last week to make a tool that shows what answers a model can give for a given prompt. Used this downtime day to explore the idea and the results are fun. This isn't sampling, it deterministically enumerates the search space. Prompt was: "In what year was Barack Obama born?"

In March 2025, I continued creating designs with octagons around a central star, but this time using two different block arrangements. #21CenturyPB #iTeachMath

My colleague points out here that possibly one in seven requests to our library now may be assisted by LLMs. When those point to fictional documents, that's a huge staff time drain. There's often no quick way to check if an undigitized primary source doc exists beyond physically pulling some boxes.

Smugglers, money launderers and sanctioned people once relied on diamonds, gold and artwork. Now, criminals have a far more practical alternative: stablecoins, a cryptocurrency tied to the U.S. dollar that exists largely beyond traditional financial oversight. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/t...

The birth of our solar system - at last, closing up the penultimate page of this mammoth chapter exploring the origin of the universe in all its swirls of different sorts... It's been a long trip. And there is, to be sure, a lot going on on this page :) Onward! #Nostos #Unflattening 2

An Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform | Discussion

A series of tricks and techniques I learned doing tiny GLSL demos | Discussion

Godot Tutorials Update 2025! I updated my tutorial pages and added a lot of new stuff. I hope you find it usefull. I think there are almost 100 tutorials in there ^^ And only the good ones :) #Godot #GodotEngine #GameDev #IndieDev #IndieGameDev #Tutorials

Wish I knew someone who liked Battlestar Galactica as much as I do

New sculpture! (Actually a study for a bigger version) Icosaskeliohedron, with embedded planar faces Translucent green PLA #mathart #ArtAdventCalendar

An old experiment with new coloring. An interlaced knot pattern with ribbon width that diminishes towards center. #MathArt

Reminder! Never attribute to Malice that which should be attributed to Malice et al. (2007).

Two development snapshots in one week? Such speed! 🚀 #GodotEngine 4.6 dev 6 has arrived, and with it comes the feature freeze. Join us for one last round-up before beta: godotengine.org/article/dev-...

Four #procgen snowflakes from the past 24 hours

Sam Altman's Dirty DRAM Deal | Discussion

Recently had the chance to hear @carlbergstrom.com on information foraging in the current space of LLMs. He and @jevinwest.bsky.social have crafted a course that touches various facets of LLMs. Just finished reading through its 18 modules. Absolutely loved it! thebullshitmachines.com

I finally got around to reading this. You should read it too. "We are exporting the very labor of teaching and learning—the slow work of wrestling with ideas, the enduring of discomfort, doubt and confusion, the struggle of finding one’s own voice." www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9

Active Droplet System Lifecycle Analysis Quantifies Behaviour of 50 Self-Propelled Oil Droplets for Artificial Life Design Read more: https://quantumzeitgeist.com/analysis-artificial-active-droplet-system-lifecycle-quantifies-behaviour-self-propelled/

More evidence that WebGPU will replace Vulkan as the cross-platform graphics API of choice. (This probably uses a Vulkan backend so it's not like Vulkan is going anywhere, but from a developer perspective WebGPU is far simpler/nicer to work with).

1. Some good news at last. This week’s column is about the amazing thing a couple of us stumbled into three years ago, which we’ve now developed into a global research programme. It doesn’t change everything, of course, but it could help change quite a lot. + 🧵 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Some of the phrasing doesn't sit well with me but this was super interesting www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-...

At IT School with Apple Lisa | Discussion

1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long | Discussion

Zed's most requested feature (rainbow brackets 🌈 ) has been merged into stable! The issue had over *1,000* upvotes on GitHub and we're excited for you to try it. zed.dev/blog/rainbow...

🚀 We just shipped v0.215.0! After 3 years and more than 1100 requests, it's finally here. Rainbow brackets! 🌈 Enable it with the `colorize_brackets` language setting.

The one upside of generative AI is that it made me value human-made art more. Art that didn't really impress me before feels way more meaningful now. Thanks slop, you made me appreciate human creativity more than ever.

It’s that time of year: what was the piece of writing about AI that stuck with you the most this year, pop press or academic? A few of mine in the thread. ⬇️

From @benjedwards.com in @arstechnica.com, this piece on Anthropic’s “blackmail” story and the company’s habit of presenting totally expected behaviors as totally unexpected behaviors: arstechnica.com/information-...

🔔 Exciting News from the ALIFE Community 🔔 We are pleased to share that the proceedings of ALIFE 2025, the 2025 edition of the premier conference on artificial life, held in Kyoto are now published and accessible - direct.mit.edu/isal/proceed...

Programming Peaked | Discussion

Why does every decade promise a method, a language, or now #AI that will “fix” #software #complexity? Software never behaved like an engineered artifact. Our research shows it evolves like an #ecosystem. A thread ↓

Steam Deck lead reveals Valve is funding ARM compatibility of Windows games | Discussion

How to Synthesize a House Loop | Discussion

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 418 - November 30th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

This has been a great year for the engine, but there are still a lot of things we would love to do. If each person visiting our website donated €5, we could hire 5 more developers to work on Godot full-time. 👉 fund.godotengine.org

Nominations for the 3rd annual Thinky Awards are now open (for just one week)!

Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern" | Discussion

Combustion vec2 p=FC.xy*6./r.y; for(float i;i++<1e1;i) p+=sin(p.yx*i+i*i+t*i+r)/i; o=tanh(.2/tan(p.y+vec4(0,.1,.3,0))); o*=o;

Look around. The case for more, not less, liberal arts education - actual, real education in reading, writing, thinking, arguing, analyzing, & synthesizing by doing the actual hard work for which there is no substitute - is stronger than it’s ever been at any point in human history.

I wish all figures of authority cared about moms and babies. But some don’t. Some even want you to hurt. And those are the people who cast doubt on the vaccination miracle that has allowed so many of us to live longer and better. kentuckylantern.com/2025/11/25/t...

Bricklink suspends Marketplace operations in 35 countries (developing story) | Discussion

Advent of Code 2025 | Discussion

I wrote this piece at the start of the year, so it's nice to see it finally out before the year's end! It looks at the notion of "hard steps" in evolution that allegedly make intelligent life rare in the universe, and why that might not be correct after all. nautil.us/we-might-not...

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." Ideas are different from things. They're additive and abundant.

"All of this falls apart if humans don't adopt the tech. This is why you've seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Google Gemini wants to "help you" read and reply to your emails."

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

Not surprising that Gary Marcus (@garymarcus.bsky.social) thinks LLMs will not get us to AGI. His recent column is about how the LLM-will-save-us narrative is crumbling at an accelerating rate, about how obvious the emperor's lack of clothing is becoming.

Advent of code 2025 commence demain! ⭐ adventofcode.com

v4.20 is out! * Unwrap quote chain * Matching frame color for images of unknown size * Upgraded to Qt6.10.1 * Bug fixes 🧵1/2