Got to be mere inches from a tiger!

1/ We found that deep sequence models memorize atomic facts "geometrically" -- not as an associative lookup table as often imagined. This opens up practical questions on reasoning/memory/discovery, and also poses a theoretical "memorization puzzle."

Extracting Books From Production Language Models ahmeda14960.github.io/blackbox_web...

As chrome adds split tabs, I do start to wonder how much of my visual experience will become an ide 😂

The plane photos really don’t do it justice, but the super moon was actually huge and very visible from the window. Was super lucky to fly by it.

This hits especially hard as someone who emerged from English departments — listening to a lot of tenured profs contrast their perceived professional practices from coding/computation, at the active cost of their students… while they accrue debt. W-i-l-d.

When you happen to look down from a pier and a harbor seal emerges, looking up at you— before going underwater again, teasing me into waiting with my binoculars for half an hour… — Dear reader, the cute harbor seal did not return. 😔😔😔 instead I was treated to a smorgasbord of sea lions

My partner and I were looking for the last few edge pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but there were quite a few pieces to sort through. So as a joke he took a picture of all the pieces asked it to find them, and… it found them 😂 Fun benchmark idea: visual needle in a haystack (if not already a thing)

Let’s goooooooo!!! 🤪😂

TIL, San Luis Obispo features the very first Jamba Juice. Which in my historical mental model was the popularizer of the health smoothie? Idk if there was one before that?

California’s state slogan should really be “nothing you do will make your state as beautiful as ours, surrender.”

Little does Katseye know that 21st century kpop stars 🤝 19th century horticulturists

Will post prettier pics in a bit, but today I got to witness 3 park rangers coral a bobcat away from humans. Barely visible in this picture.

The tour guide’s sermon on the perils of yellow journalism doesn’t quite have the intended effect when you follow it up with the afforded opulence.

Monarch butterfly grove near Mismo beach! The sleeping clusters are very hard to spot. Also bonus image of sleepy California beach towns being unreal.

Downside: flight delays, missed connections, stuck in sf for most of Christmas Day. Upside: there’s an open dim sum restaurant tomorrow that looks out at the bay? Har gow-ing exactly as planned. 😏

As I listen on the phone to my mom’s holiday rant about pronouns, all I can think of is the dumb joke “wow, weird that you hate pronouns so much when your favorite movie is Ben-HUR.” Biting my lip, holding in a laugh, is probably the best case scenario in these situations.

It feels like Clair Obscur is doing a lot of heavy lifting — wrt building the next gen of US francophiles. I’m trying to think of the last time I’ve seen a piece of media excite an American audience about France. Amélie?

There’s a breakfast place in Ballard that has this *extremely* cozy bar in the back. And I now suddenly feel compelled to drink warm alcoholic beverages.

Maybe one of the happiest little accidents is that I bought mussels instead of anchovies for my tomato/fennel soup. And now I have something that tastes like shin ramyun broth.

Spent the weekend learning about ml compilers. Namely aot autograd, inductor, etc The fact that math efficiently routes to heterogenous hardware is really nothing short of a miracle Need a word for the teleological experience of finally understanding a design and seeing the face of a cuda engineer

What I’m trying to say is Monterey Seal Lofi encapsulates the focus-to-aww cycle once split between my computer and socal media on my phone.

Monterey Bay Aquarium Seal lofi: 1) amazing subgenre 2) surprisingly effective for focusing, spontaneously going aww, and then returning to work youtu.be/r4fsBII2ZlU?...

Idk if this already exists, but if there was a model that was trained to estimate the amount of time taken to produce an image, producing [(image, time)]. And for different image gen models, you can see the estimated time of the outputs. (Was musing different models of slop)

Mom hand painted after Monet's 'Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son'.

STATISTICS?!

I *was* focused on a thing, but then I started thinking about my rankings of literary authors as Twitch streamers. And I’m worried for the future of work that must get done today.

Instead of doing Spotify wrapped, they should’ve just locked your phone and blasted Golden for 24 hrs on max volume — we all know where this was headed anyway.

Very energizing read~ Also, if VOP becomes a thing, I just hope that we’ll have the wherewithal to give them a .vibes extension. Just imagine. ‘’’ ls 001.vibes 002.vibes 003.vibes ‘’’

Having ingested a lot of literature on distillation — if I were teaching LLMs at the technical level of a survey, I might do it through the lens of distillation. It gets you thinking about a lot of practical questions with clearer entry points into more theoretical ones. youtu.be/O1AR4iL30mg?...

This reminds me — are there any good collective resources of like “wanna do research fast? this neat trick will save you x time” Im always convincing folks to use torch/jax typing & dataclasses — because I do not have the mental bandwidth to remember what is in any given container variable.

Look, uiuc is great for many academic reasons, but if you’re a food motivated critter:

Boss: “hey I saw your one of your training jobs errored out, is there some cluster issue we need to report?” Me: *humming, adorning yet another stuffed tiger in a wreath* My jobs may have been submitted with priority 1, but little does my boss know that there’s an even *higher* priority!

Art institute questions of the day: 1) how many thoughts between that child and that goat? 2) what would a Flemish painter put on Mary Magdalen’s lap? 3) have the French ever seen a pelican?

"I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Today marks the third time my partner and I have been out, and someone asks if he does any modeling. Put this on my tombstone: “The twinks are insatiable, and I won’t have it.”

I’m confused about why he didn’t get the job. He answered the question correctly.

In a way that’s not completely known to me, I love the bit of pretending to be an alien pretending to be human. Ie. Waking up this morning at 6 am, asking my partner, “hello, fellow human, may I ask, how many of those small plastic baggies do you have? Excellent, I’ll take two.”

Good ML code comes from people who fundamentally believe that ML is a trickster god and wants them to fail

@alphaxiv.org released quickarXiv Swap arxiv → quickarxiv on any paper URL to get an instant blog with figures, insights, and explanations.

Interestingly, it's more about some notable high-quality outlets underperforming on engagement, rather than low-quality outlets overperforming:

This morning’s view + final fantasy soundtrack? *chef’s kiss*

My sister has introduced her childhood favorite sailor moon to the nieces. And all I can say is major solidarity with Sailor Pluto today.

illinois!durbin is 202-224-2152; "experiencing high call volumes" but keep trying and in the meantime send an email pronto www.durbin.senate.gov

My partner has started reading Wendell Berry. And look, nothing against Wendell Berry, but is it also bringing back memories of insufferably preachy acolytes in grad school? Yes. My Sunday morning is now spent reflecting on my visceral reactions to didactic agrarians.

Digital humanities researchers often care about fine-grained similarity based on narrative elements like plot or tone, which don’t necessarily correlate with surface-level textual features. Can embedding models capture this? We study this in the context of fanfiction!

I’m a machine that transforms free Sunday afternoons into walks along the arboretum waterfront trail.

you are not going to believe it, but pringles may not even be the best gem in this paper.