End of an era. A life well spent.

I am now „Enjoying watching other people play difficult video games old.

TIL: 🤔 Extreme Ironing is an extreme sport in which people take ironing boards to remote locations and iron items of clothing. "the latest dangerous sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme...

Pharmacists who recommend homeopathy should be willing to accept as payment envelopes that once contained money. - @davidjuurlink.bsky.social

Happy International Coffee Day! A German word that describes a coffee substitute, usually made from barley malt, is Muckefuck. It essentially means "rotting wood mulch" and can also describe any weak coffee. So next time someone makes you a bad coffee feel free to say "What the Muckefuck is this?"

Ratgeber: Das bedeuten die gängigsten Selbstbezeichnungen auf Social Media www.der-postillon.com/2025/09/selb...

Hungover Hegseth Struggling To Remember How He Ended Up In Room Full Of Generals

"Fremdschämen" (German): Feeling deeply embarassed for someone else who has lost that capability entirely.

This could have been an Email, military edition.

Maintenance grants: glad they're coming back in any form Partly personal: I wouldn't have been able to go - or stay - at university as an undergraduate without a grant But also not personal: education is a rock solid route for social mobility. HE not the goal for all but the opportunity matters

Big personal news - just booked my first international standup gig! Related: can anyone tell me what the Taliban find funny?

My son chose R over Python for his data science course. I obviously failed as a father.

Oh no, not him.

Omg! You might like this. Ha ha. Or it'll make you cry! (Sorry for the arbitrary picture of me 🤔) carolinefiennes.com/2022/08/20/w...

Buying a company by taking out a massive loan, then making the company you bought responsible for paying off that loan, is so patently evil that it should be beyond illegal. The kind of thing that inspires enlightened societies without corporal punishment to bring back the death penalty as a one-off

Day 272(29) - #sharptember - The month is nearly over, but we can't go without talking about the Latte Caputer, or 'RaTeCaPuter' - radio, television, cassette and, most excitingly, computer! This dates back to 1979, and seems to be based on a similar architecture to their pocket computers ... 1/2

Redete wirr und unverständlich: Hubert Aiwanger auf Oktoberfest in Sanitätszelt getragen www.der-postillon.com/2025/09/oiwo...

A Weiss improved amputation saw from the 1850's. John Weiss improved amputating saws when he realised surgeons were being slowed down by tissue clogging the teeth of the saw blade. He designed the slots, like the ones on this blade, to help clear the teeth during the operation.

Data collection is fine as long as it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Who’s collecting it, by the way?

My skepticism of LLM-as-scientist stems from how imbalanced the literature is. Median paper is mildly negative result presented as positive, it's unclear how to RLHF on good hypothesis vs. bad hypothesis, etc. We barely know how to teach this skill, how can we RLHF it

[very machine learning voice] now let's consider what happens to the bias and variance if we keep adding footnotes to the prediction equation

I'd enjoy a shower more if I had backup singers.

ultimately the mass stupification and illiteracy campaign waged by the big tech companies is profoundly antidemocratic. on the level of citizenship - beyond specific views on pedagogy - that should be reason enough not to support and adopt "AI"

Ok, I think I can go with that.

I literally use this to explain ML to people lol (especially for people with stats backgrounds, to emphasize the difference) youtu.be/QVuU2YCwHjw?...

My first bell pepper 🫑 🌱

Coding agents like Claude feel a lot like cracked text-based adventure games by Infocom from the 1980s. Not only because of the UI. Back then, I also didn’t speak the language very well and felt that I was missing some crucial hints from the original package a lot.

Other people probably think we were already past this point, but for me the whole “prosecute your political enemies” thing is the “put up or shut up” moment for MAGA. If they can’t see authoritarianism now, they don’t want to and never will.

One of the reasons this will be valuable for academics is that it provides a very clear recipe for pretraining ~3B-scale models on custom corpora.

Francois Chollet is one of the best at actually explaining what it takes to have ground-breaking AI. “You’ll know artificial general intelligence is here when the exercise of creating tasks that are easy for regular humans but hard for AI becomes simply impossible.” techcrunch.com/2025/01/08/a...

A bit unexpected!

Banyan is a special type of AutoEncoder, called a Self-StrAE (see fig). Given a sequence it needs to learn which elements to merge with each other, and in what order, to get the best compression. This means its representations model compositional semantics 2/🧵

Love the gateway drug metaphor.

💯! I learned the bootstrap way too late in grad school (because program was focused on deeply theoretical shit) and I still want to smash my desk thinking about all the time spent deriving/proving complex variance calculations. “Wait, I could have been kicking ass at real problems 2 yrs ago?!!”

How to Make Austrian Apricot Dumplings That Were a Favorite of the Highly Inbred Emperor Ferdinand I laughingsquid.com/ferdinand-i-...

Apple 1 - Prototype

So true. 🤣😆

When I worked in AI starting 40 years ago, we found 'AI' an accurate word to describe what we did. A major difference was that our AI did not increase the temperature of the planet.

I just wanna make cool stuff and make friends 😭

“Pesto” and “pestle” share a linguistic ancestor: “pinsere,” which is Latin for “to crush.” This is a great time to harvest all your basil and think about your enemies.

Finished the LEGO da Vinci airplane in my office and it might be a favorite LEGO build.

Some good suggestions here. Might try the buttplug during video conferences some day.

Hey, I am waiting for IKEA being branded a terrorist organization.

Looked at a news feed and quickly noped out. Decided to play #Atari instead because everything in the real world is stupid. Keystone Kapers is a damn fine diversion.

My secret „How to use a notebook“ method in project management is no secret any more.

Does anyone know where I can buy exact replicas of an old Nokia phone? As much as I am an AI/ML guy, I do not want agentic AI on my phone without any purpose that benefits me.

The cloud was only ever someone elses computer. And if you don't have it, you don't own it.

I miss machine learning as the buzzword. It promised less

Masterful impulse control on display here.