Day 2 of #CDSM25 kicks off at early ET / Centre Of The Universe Time. I’m aiming to be awake by “Unsupervised Discovery of Causal Mechanisms for Management Research” Marco Barbero Mot (Vanderbilt University) , Danilo Messinese (IE University) www.causalscience.org

Doing night three of The Hinton Lectures (TM). Likely with a lot of the usual #AIGS suspects. After having been spoiled all day by the best intermission music in science (feat @p-hunermund.com at #CDSM25), I’m somewhat assaulted by the light Canadian hotel jazz for the pre-show.

An analysis of 47,000 publicly shared ChatGPT conversations: ~10% related to emotional or mental health, ChatGPT exhibits a "default to yes" behavior, and more (Washington Post) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Waking up to #CDSM25 zombie firms. “Alternative Zombie Model” as a slide title. Brilliant.

“Based on spatial distribution of ATP and explored areas, Physarum can perform up to ~10^36 logical operations in 24 hours, scaling linearly in the non-equilibrium steady state.“

New preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2510.19976 "Morphological computational capacity of Physarum polycephalum" Suyash Bajpai, Aviva Lucas-DeMott, @msahsorin.bsky.social, Philip Kurian

What a read Tanya Talaga’s “The Knowing” is. There’s a passage about identity and persistence that hit. I don’t know how I’d recommend the sequence. Probably do The North-West Is Our Mother first, as it’ll make the Métis references in Northern Ontario gel a bit maybe.

Down at the centre of the Universe for The Hinton Lectures.

To give you an update, I have to do a little background on decoding. 🧵 At the end of the forward pass, the model produces a last hidden state, which is a vector. Cosine similarity measures how parallel that vector is to all the token embeddings. Each token gets a score called a logit based on this.

Back at Shopify tonight. 10th floor. AI Tinkerers is good one, grassroots, quite a few serious builders come out.

I support both public broadcasting and a system of private competition. Both the public system and private system (of tainted access journalism) has its own pros and cons. To be consistently pluralist, both need to thrive for us all to flourish.

Packed floor in spite of the snow today. Demo was well received in that the signal hit the intended target and I got a lot of real feedback. Appreciative for those gifts. And the disclosure of thoughtcrime. Friends, you know who you are, thank you!

Looking forward to this one in particular: “Forests for Differences: Robust Causal Inference Beyond Parametric DiDHugo Gobato Souto (Luizalabs) and Francisco Louzada Neto (University of Sao Paolo)” #CDSM2025

Maybe there are 8 aubergine democratic senators? And maybe they’re capable of calculus. Maybe some of them are blundering by misestimating the cleavage and the valence of the situation? youtu.be/qHhsc4lYamc?...

Deep into Tanya Talaga’s “The Knowing” and it’s incredibly well written, deep. Not sure how to sequence with Jean Teillet’s “The North-West Is Our Mother” but they pair.

“…the MP says Conservative House leader Andrea Scheer and party whip Chris Warkentin “barged” into his office, pushed open the door — almost knocking down his assistant— and yelled at him about “how much of a snake” he was.” www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Too soon for this. November 9. WTF.

There’s an exchange in “They Thought They Were Free” that me frappe. The German says to the American, ~ You had a free press and knew about the Japanese internment. And you did nothing. We did not have a free press, did not know, and did nothing. The American says “A jap is a jap.”

Here is my full report at Law Dork: www.lawdork.com/p/trump-admi...

The casting on Death By Lightening (Netflix, 2025) hits right in my demo: Macfadyen, Gilpen, Offerman. Fantastic writing. Now I’m curious about the book.

Milton Mayer’s “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45” is a brutal read. Well written. It’s the content. It changed my mind. Worth a look.

Gotta say, I’m not so confident that you do

longer form position here www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news... i really like this part

Using probes!

I’m seeing this for the first time sans context. Uh… wat?

Important paper on the role of ideological biases of individual staffers in driving policy decisions taken by international organizations: "we find that individual staffers influence the number, scope, and content of IMF conditions according to their personal ideological biases."

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

Hot off the press! Manufacturing & the Australian City, five articles examining the transformative role of manufacturing in the evolution of Melbourne, Sydney & Adelaide with a rich introduction by the editors Frost, O'Hanlon & Shanahan. A special issue of the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review!

#OpChildSafety: An Analysis of Anonymous' Digital Vigilantism Campaign cybermidnight.club/opchildsafet...

Picture a snowball made of neutron star matter with 13 little black holes embedded in the middle of it. All squeezed together so everything's touching everything. That's the kind of structure we're talking about here. This wasn't accidental. Something pulled these tokens together. But what? 🕵🔎🤖

NBC calls it for Zohran. www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...

Based on the exit polls, it doesn’t seem as though 96 didn’t repeat. Neat. www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...

Memories of Oligarching the 96 election. Yeltseeing is Yeltsbelieving. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Ru...

Next week is going to be fun. Hinton Lectures (Toronto) and #CDSM25 (online). Credit to both for changing my mind. www.causalscience.org

The median voter is going to love this! www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Well, if the audience that supports access journalism is large enough to leverage, then, yeah, it’s gonna happen. And the audience gets what it deserves. And that’s justice. If there’s an audience for journalism classic, then there should be an outlet for that audience.

That debris field is a horror. The slowly backing away from it adds a spec of surreality to it. Like… yup, that’ll do it.

BREAKING: Video shows crash of UPS Flight 2976 while taking off from Louisville International Airport in Kentucky

#Louisville Fire Chief O'Neill reports this #UPS flight to Honolulu would be carrying a full 250,000 gallons of fuel when it crashed full-load. Fire departments from all over the county and neighboring counties along with industrial orgs with fire suppressing foam are contributing to fight the fire.

Paper: Scaling Latent Reasoning via Looped Language Models ( arxiv.org/abs/2510.25741 ) Models: huggingface.co/collections/...

From local news coverage

I hope nothing happened. Retire the model already!

The all caps makes it funnier. It’s like MSG for comedy. As to the content itself: Lulz. Neo-NoUism.

That sound you hear is economists everywhere setting up their diff in diifs #econsky

This is insane… The Fed Reserve just pumped another $24 billion into the U.S. Banking System through overnight repos (and $125 billion over the last 5 days), amid fears of a liquidity crisis. This amount far surpasses even the peak of the Dot Com Bubble. This is crazy.

"For older people whose brains have begun to show molecular signs of the disease, but who have yet to display any cognitive symptoms, taking as few as 3,000 to 5,000 steps per day can help to stave off mental decline, a study finds1." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This is amazing news. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

FWIW, there was a shift in Toronto towards the end of the Tory era: People wanted to elect people who actually cared about the city, and for each other. Neat to see that turn starting state-side. Also explains some of the reaction we had here today towards TTC-Metrolinx.

We’re catching a light lecture at the Innovation Campus, South Park Commons. Also it’s 5:30 and pitch dark.

There are now fewer voters that parties can saddle with the short-term costs of long-term policies at low electoral cost, given these voters' loyalty (see Dixit and Londregan). academic.oup.com/qje/article/...