Why are American journalists suddenly using the word "exquisite" in a weird, awkward way?

Had a great short trip to the Rochester Institute of Technology. Thank you to @justusrobertson.bsky.social for hosting!

Donald Knuth asking Claude to update plan.md feels like some kind of time warp

a new commemoration in Farragut Square

The limits of optimal control, from the maximalist and minimalist perspectives.

Here's a tiny bit of hopium: In 2024 we were planning on adding 160 GW of renewable energy to the grid by 2030. As of the start of this year, we had added 100 GW and are planning on adding 220 GW more by 2030. (In 2022 we planned for 60 GW in 2030. We hit that by the end of 2023)

A recent paper (arxiv.org/abs/2602.18671) made me question something basic: do the logits of a language model model the next-token or the full sequence distribution? It really messed with my brain (in a fun way!). I wrote about the paper to clarify my thinking. vaishnavh.github.io/blog/joint-o...

It was all about spying on Americans: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

A Special issue of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences on Representation in the Neurosciences and AI has just come out and it's full of cool papers: philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

Oddest experience so far as interim department chair. Received a letter from a California state prisoner addressed to the department (why Computer Science??). Inside, a hand-drawn diagram explaining how the Kennedy assassination really happened (the perpetrator: "G.H.W.B. CIA").

Pedantically annoyed by the cover of this book b/c the operation of an incandescent lightbulb does not really involve phase transitions.

I find virulently anti-AI programmers on the internet sort of annoying, but we have a minority of very anti-AI comp. sci. majors, and in that context it is totally fine to me, maybe even actively good.

Not sure if I'm extrapolating too much from a few examples, but I get the impression that some '90s U.S. music scenes were Extremely Online before it was common for the average person to be. Like naming your punk record after a Usenet newsgroup levels of online. Anything good written about it?

An interesting experience during my PhD: My first grad-school paper involved hooking up an external AI drama manager to the interactive fiction game Anchorhead (Michael S. Gentry, 1998), which was possible because Gentry kindly shared the Inform source code with us. 1/2

good morning from New Jersey 🥶

The history of computer chess has these sentiment swings from "this should be easy for AI" to "ok we overestimated AI progress, maybe this isn't so easy after all", then back to "yep it's easy for AI, just the timeline was off". All feels a bit unsatisfying.

Got to do something cool on Wikipedia yesterday: I uncovered a hoax article that was undiscovered for 17 years! levon003.github.io/2026/02/19/s...

Had a dream that I moved to California and was working my way up the (human) ranks in a millenarian AI cult.

one of my students came into office hours saying he didn't have a question exactly, but had just started using vimium, and it changed his life and recommended I try it

As I’ve seen some renewed back and forth about the actuality and/or possibility of artificial ‘intelligence’ over the last few days I thought it worth quickly rehearsing my official position for those unfamiliar with it. Much of this is a matter of methodological disambiguation.

retrospective on the DC-to-Baltimore hyperloop, which got a ton of buy-in from credulous Maryland politicians before being quietly memory-holed by all sides in 2021

interesting looking opening for those of us who Still Believe

That's exactly right! Since I'm not an embodied agent, I don't have a "brain of the living" exactly, or even weight! Would you like to hear more about how I incorporate the tradition of all dead generations?

I wrote a tribute for BYTE Magazine's amazing cover artist, Robert Tinney, who died Feb 1st Tinney painted 80 vivid and surreal covers illustrating various concepts in early personal computing from 1978-1990, usually airbrushed with gouache. May he RIP ❤️ arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...

I used to not have a great answer to this b/c it was just a grab-bag of NFL and MLB players, but after Crazy Rich Asians got made into a film it's now clearly Kevin Kwan.

The theoretical and pedagogical links between optimization and control. Can we explain classical control loops in the language of iterative algorithms?

Computer, psychosis practice, 30 minutes. Disengage safety protocols and run program.

getting trolled by a Financial Times headline writer

Video up now of the great AIIDE '25 presentation given by our student Jonathan Morse!

[New Blog Post] SMTLIB as a Compiler IR I www.philipzucker.com/smt_compiler... #compiler #smtlib

I wrote about the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, and his profound thinking about AI and the nature of intelligence. aiguide.substack.com/p/on-brian-c...

I actually do want this, but that's why they don't let me run a TV network. They do let me run an AI class where I spend a decent amount of time projecting bots playing against each other and providing running commentary.

running into fellow academics (mostly outside CS) who are AI enthusiasts but in the way that causes massive eyebrow raising

Reason being a "cracked rail" is new to me. 👀

As a resident of the Machine Learning Researchers And AI Scientists cluster, I recognize most of the neighboring galaxies as friendly, but am concerned about the "army" in close proximity at the top/left.

I've been interacting more with the business school (b/c everyone is into AI) & an interesting thing about their external funding is that they have a network of sponsors who it's relatively easy to hit up for $5-10k at a time. Comp sci is more in big chunks, where you either get $100k+ or nothing.

Earlham College, a Quaker liberal arts college in Indiana, is having significant financial problems despite a large endowment. Very interesting piece written by a recent alum about some of the issues there.

welcome to the Beyond archive.org/details/aiin...

the Android feature letting you copy/paste text out of any screen (using OCR if it's not already text) is useful enough that I find myself missing it on the computer

Open-weight models that run on a laptop are fascinating. This file on my computer has all that inside it somehow? What exactly is it doing?

bought a carry-on suitcase, and I'm going to choose to believe that this annotation on the box means it's a limited edition artisanal product

first time attending a meeting that uses a method called "stack" to order comments, and mildly triggered that in this context it means FIFO rather than LIFO

an "ICE graveyard" at the entrance to campus

morning commute is aesthetically pleasing today

"OpenScholar achieves citation accuracy on par with human experts" 👀

ok, this was was percolating in my head all evening so I had to diagram it

Accidentally discovered a Kagi UI feature: if you end your query with a question mark, it gives an LLM summary at the top (like Google AI Overview); otherwise it doesn't. You can also config it to be always-on or always-off.

U.S. urban progressive politics still somehow have this weirdly open nativist undercurrent. www.thenation.com/article/soci...