Alright, well, 3 week experiment vibe-coding stuff with Claude has reached a sort of finish point. Here's a MIDI... sequencer? arranger? I don't actually know the proper terminology. Windows and Linux builds (though the Windows one will pop up a defender warning still). github.com/ngutten/arra...

Trying to setup a release on a GitHub project for the first time... The gap between making software you can use and software you can distribute to others is so huge, how can anything actually work if its like this?

I made a tool that turns PCB designs into 3D-printable molds. you sandwich copper tape between the parts, sand the ridges, and you have a real working PCB. no etching, no chemicals. I am losing my mind castpixel.itch.io/pcb-forge

github.com/dollspace-ga... Wonder what this is for? Must be the wind

felt the need. i feel vastly under qualified to write something like this, but i also feel its especially important that we think about the way we use language

Asked Claude to code like a researcher. Got stuff like: env = np.ones(l) a, r = min(int(.01*sr), l//4), min(int(.05*sr), l//3) if a > 0: env[:a] = np.linspace(0,1,a) if r > 0: env[-r:] = np.linspace(1,0,r) sig = np.sin(2*np.pi*freq*tt) * env Touche Claude, I deserved that.

Trying to do a slightly larger project with Claude is making me think of 'design order trajectories' as an explicit object to be considered rather than something that (for me, when writing my own code) falls naturally out of what I need in the moment.

On occasion I've used DeepSeek for part lookup for microelectronics stuff (op-amps, etc) and its surprisingly good. Also on a technicality, I use LLMs for the task of evaluating the capabilities and behavior of LLMs, and rating that is kind of like rating 'how useful are birds for studying birds?'.

I wonder if it'd be useful to have something like a site that acts as a library of social interaction patterns - tagged for what sort of purpose, what sort of group size or membership, what kind of space (physical, online, hybrid), etc; structured so that each is treated as a 'proposal' with reviews

Ellipsoids rolling down hills might be kinda interesting. This is a phase diagram with respect to initial orientation of a 2x1x1 ellipsoid rolling down an incline - blue indicates that the contact point on the ellipsoid has a high entropy distribution (chaotic), red indicates low entropy.

BlueSky feature idea - require verified $1 donation to a linked charity in order to reply, also applies to the OP.

So I decided to run numbers about genAI energy usage for myself. Sources: climatedata.imf.org/datasets/7ce... and: www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/t... And estimated 10^8 tons CO2 emitted in US/2024 to ~$250b-$500b revenue. I'm more concerned now than I was, but for a subtle reason. 1/12

So I got myself a 3d printer to mess around with and learn some mechanical design stuff and... filament addiction is real. I think within a few months I'll probably have spent more on filament and furniture to organize the filament and dry bags for the filament than I did on the printer.

Hm, I'm noticing that when injecting arbitrary vectors into Qwen3's input (in place of the actual learned embeddings) they seem to be interpreted very strongly as short sequences of letters, not as something more abstract. Is there some way to quantify the 'concreteness' of an input layer now?

Dilemmas allow us to deploy conflict, or support, they allow galaxy sized adventure, or quiet literary novels. What are the tough choices the character faces that are tough *for them* gives me more tools. Conflict and flaws are almost orthodoxy, it also cuts off a wide amount of material for me.

I'm perpetually annoyed at how hard it is to do really simple but 'weird' stuff with the transformers and trl libraries. Like, if I want to replicate DeepSeek training, sure you can do that! But now I want the input to be a sequence of arbitrary vectors rather text? Time to rewrite GRPO from scratch

Blogpost to read today: strong argument that excessive focus on the first tokens is not something learned from data distribution (like model should naturally "care" about the start of the text to grasp the rest) but a fundamental feature of attention graph. publish.obsidian.md/the-tensor-t...

I know there's been stuff testing metacognition in various neural networks including LLMs, but is there anything (e.g. post chain-of-thought) about specifically *teaching* LLMs to report metacognitive information?

I think I would have agreed with this more when I was younger. this is probably ~how I felt when I was graduating high school, and then later design school, and into my early career and then I just started doing off-meta builds and those weird random things kept happening and now I believe in that

Promising! I take the sample, apply voltage Vh, let go, then measure the voltage Vc and take dVc/dVh. The negative portion is an interesting feature - I think its because of alterations to the electrodes. Now if I only had a thousand or so soil samples with known nutrient profiles to train on...

Doing some experimentation with charging/discharging curves of flooded soils. There's a weird voltage-dependent effect I don't understand that seems sensitive to the soil type. Or of course there could be a bug. Specifically, this immediate drop.

If we have some machine learning model that is trying to make a prediction (class, next token, whatever) based on different potential redundant sources of evidence (including its own learned priors) is there some way to predict which evidence channels will be favored? To influence that?

My greenhouse sensor project is making me think that maybe those green covers (vs the clear covers) are a good idea for me. Heat management now seems like the biggest issue, and I'm finding temperature is more strongly driven by the last 20 minutes of light than by changes to ventilation.

First time I've seen a practical application of fractal calculus! Or whatever it is you call fractional order integrals/derivatives... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopola...

Messed around with making a digital theremin from a capacitative sensing board. Drifting calibration makes this really painful and MIDI seems bad for smooth pitch shifts and volume envelopes. I still think the potential is there, but I need to do it another way.

On better vs worse directions for using LLMs to simulate behavioral participants in social science research statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/05/29/l...

Today's light curve in the greenhouse. What the heck is that jump near the end there?!

Is there something like a framework in which its clear when you can and cannot generate data, and what that data can be 'about'? If I want to infer free floating signals from each-other I just need to be able to synchronize those signals. But if I want to connect something to a ground truth...

Well, I got a bunch of sensors and took data once a minute in my greenhouse. It gets up to 110F in there during the day! It's mostly driven by the light - when a cloud passes, the temperature drops within a minute or two. The color of the light does some interesting things too...

Found samphire at a farmer's market. My understanding was, this is the same as sea beans or salicornia, but at least at this stage it tastes and looks pretty different. Are there significantly different varietals between e.g. the UK variant and what would grow in PNW marshes?

Crude impedance spectroscopy with a Raspberry Pi Pico. Really crude. Drive the sample with square waves at different frequencies via PWM, Fourier transform, divide, and hope. Not supposed to put a capacitative load on GPIO pins? Uh, well nothing happened, its fine right?

Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought reasoning is already a big thing. That is, CoT models can "reason" not only with chains of text self-prompting, but also by producing images, audio, and more, and engaging with the stimuli they self-produce in a variety of ways. arxiv.org/abs/2503.12605

Since I've been messing around with a Pi Pico, I've noticed something about working with hobby-scale electronics. It feels like there's always some little part you wish you had, that you forgot to order. Oh if only I had a DAC I could... oh, an opamp would make this better... 1/2

So I'm starting to learn to mess around with a Pi Pico. In theory it can sample an input at 500kHz though it doesn't have the memory to store even a second of that. What sorts of things might be interesting to measure at that rate?

I'm organizing a "Data for Good Rapid Response Team", i.e. a set of people who can be mobilized to work on short data science projects to help various groups and organizations. Sign up here if this is of interest to you, and please share with others with data science skills.

What's the state of the art in causal forest fire spread prediction? Something where you could put in a topographical map and satellite photo and say 'if we made a firebreak here, it would maximally reduce expected fire sizes in the area'.

🧪⚛️ I'll be talking at the #apsMarchMeeting 3:36 pm – 4:12 pm this afternoon on "How does non-living matter exhibit open-ended evolution?" Since all life is made up of non-living matter & thus emergent. A synthesis of earlier work with @ngutten.bsky.social + recent. summit.aps.org/events/MAR-J...

Added a bit of vital wheat gluten and the dough was strong enough I could basically stretch it very thin by hand (and then deepfry it). Its more chewy than crispy in the end, but good.

Scientific data and independence are at risk: We need to work with community-driven services and university libraries to create new multi-country organizations that are resilient to political interference. By @neuralreckoning.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/policy/scien...

So I got this phrase in a DeepSeek experiment: "But let's check with a calculator to confirm. Wait, I don't have a calculator here, but I know that sqrt(17) is approximately 4.123105625617661." Viewing chain of thought as self-manipulation to improve results, why 'I don't have a calculator here'?

Ok, I've got my record 'how long I made DeepSeek think'. It was by giving it a total beginner level tsumego problem to solve. It thought for 385 seconds, and (in the chain of thought) came to the wrong conclusion as to the appropriate move. Then it gave a different (correct) move in its answer.

I'm not sure exactly how to formulate this idle thought, but... Lets take the names of all characters across (human-written) fiction. Divide them into, say, 'character names used by at least N different authors' and the rest. What is the N for which those sets have equal counts?

Evidently asking DeepSeek-R1 to write a general relativity hydrodynamics code is unreasonable: "This code is purely conceptual—production-grade GRHD codes like IllinoisGRMHD require 50,000+ lines of optimized C/C++ code."

A roasted beet thing because why not, it was sunny out.

Would a high-speed TTRPG game design contest be an interesting thing? Something like, 3 authors have 2 hours to write a ruleset and adventure hook; a GM and 3 players do a 3 hour session for each game and they rate it on Fun, Ease of Learning, Ease of Play, and Creativity. Best game wins?

@dagophile.bsky.social I'm curious how your perspective on faithfulness in casual analysis looks if you take a perspective of (coarse grained) causality as being definitionally about the ability to predict responses to interventions in particular?

There's been inadequate discussion of how taking equilibrium causal models seriously requires models with counterintuitive temporal relationships. Consider this (Iwasaki-Simon) dynamic causal model for a thermostat. The dashed I-arrow indicates deriving Furnace from its derivative via integration.

I've been talking in more interviews about my antipathy towards the concept of 'conflict' as the base unit of plot, and how I think Aristotle's very old idea has actually damaged us because that quickly becomes story = plot = conflict = violence. I say that as a fan of fictional violence.

Don't repost paywalled papers. If there's a preprint, repost that. If there's no open access version anywhere... the paper doesn't want to be read, no need to give it air