Personal bias but I liked this transmitter article: www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur... “You won’t catch an engineer trying to formulate a grand unified theory of the brain” “Engineers know how to make things work […] This is what makes engineering closer to biology than to other […] sciences”

After 13 years in the US, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave. Having packed up everything and rethought about priorities, rather painstakingly, while I’m sad to leave the life I’ve made here, I’m also relieved that I won’t have to plan my life around immigration policies anymore.

I wish the whole unicode set was available from every emoji picker.

We're hiring in Seattle! HMU if you're affected by Amazon layoffs and have #julialang experience

Is this what Cuo-mentum looks like? How close is this race? And how can we even predict an unprecedented competitive general election mayoral race when New York City hasn't had one since 2009? Dear reader, we have the answers at this week's edition of MAYORAL SPEW. hellgatenyc.com/oh-god-elect...

Apply to the new CSHL grad program in BioAI/neuroAI! (Masters degree or equivalent required in a quantitative area such as computer science, physics, mathematics, or engineering) www.cshl.edu/phd-program/...

Moves as many people as every other transit agency in America put together! Twice as many people every day as the entire federal aviation system!

This is the biggest, toughest article I’ve done about so-called “AI psychosis.” It’s the story of a man who committed a horrific crime in his youth but served his time and against all odds found love and a new life—one that completely unraveled after he started talking to Google’s Gemini chatbot.

really neat clear explainer for the new on “centralizing flows” to theoretically model learning dynamics

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

🚨Our NeurIPS 2025 competition Mouse vs. AI is LIVE! We combine a visual navigation task + large-scale mouse neural data to test what makes visual RL agents robust and brain-like. Top teams: featured at NeurIPS + co-author our summary paper. Join the challenge! Whitepaper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14446

Do you plot transcriptomic data, coloring each cell by its cell type? ~ Don't use a default colormap! ~ Instead, use colormaps that capture biological meaning. If two cell types are very similar, their colors should be similar too. Read on 🧵 🧬💻

🚫TOMORROW'S FIGHT FOR SCIENCE RALLY POSTPONED🚫 We would like all our rallygoers to be safe and are postponing due to inclement weather! Fret not — we will let you know the next opportunity to join us in the fight for health and science for the people!

Understanding the "why" of biology requires knowing a fair amount of what could rightly just be called history. Like, a specific thing happened a certain way at a certain time. This is not how people usually like to think about the study of biology...

"evolutionary process is opportunistic, working with whatever variations arise, and it cannot be meaningfully equated with engineering toward an ideal." It is funny how anyone who has worked with evolutionary algorithms knows they're not so great, yet we assume real evolution is a perfect optimizer

When reporting on these kinds of claims, the media should ask:

NEW: The anti-Trump protest happening right now on the streets of Washington DC is HUGE! It looks like tens of thousands have joined. This is the view from 16th Street - people stretching as far as the eye can see 👏

Lovely morning on the North Dublin Riviera! 😊

Results so stunningly clear they inspired this classic xkcd (xkcd.com/2400/):

West Virginia is ridiculously beautiful, just leaving that bit of information here

my contribution youtu.be/6_NeqMAAsBk

Good to see @thetransmitter.bsky.social publishing thinking on AI and science. However this take below on “vibe coding” is closer to my expc: LLMs don’t do well with KISS and YAGNI; they don’t do design and architecture (deeper ideas!) well.

My day in four photos. #Birds 🪶 #watervision

Revisiting Sutton’s Bitter Lesson in the wake of GPT-5.

i rely on llms daily but using them well requires constantly staying in an extremely unnatural mind state, constantly adversarial. i’m not sure this scales very well and i hope we’ll figure out something more sustainable

#AcademicLife in Ukraine: preparing for lectures at night during a massive missile attack on Kyiv in an overcrowded underground station #EconSky #UkrainianView #RStats

It's tricky because in practice communication drives almost all of the costs, so neuromorphic research has mostly focused on just communicating the same info but with spikes hoping for a win. But spikes only lead to savings if you can get by with fewer, which means the algorithm needs to change too.

Best part about a land-grant university will forever be the ice cream from our own dairy

This approach (e.g. deep learning as heuristics or formalizers for a symbolic solver) can certainly be productive; e.g. AlphaProof relied on it for last year's silver. But I think it gets things precisely backwards about real intelligence.

Just finished my first month using @kagi.com as my search engine, at the Professional tier ("Standard AI"). Unlike with others, I almost never retried a query on Google. As for "AI", out of a budget of $10, I spent… $0.34. And I *really* like how they combine search w/ genAI.

EurIPS is coming! 📣 Mark your calendar for Dec. 2-7, 2025 in Copenhagen 📅 EurIPS is a community-organized conference where you can present accepted NeurIPS 2025 papers, endorsed by @neuripsconf.bsky.social and @nordicair.bsky.social and is co-developed by @ellis.eu eurips.cc

AI is supposed to be PhD level? More like working with a bunch of 5th graders, half of which are actively trying to make you scream.

There is still time to save science funding. The key is to now call members of the Senate Appropriations Committee esp if you are a constituent: Majority Members (15) Collins, Susan M. (ME), Chairman McConnell, Mitch (KY) Murkowski, Lisa (AK) Graham, Lindsey (SC) Moran, Jerry (KS) continued...

Apparently you aren’t allowed to point out that ‘AI for good’ can be whitewash on real problems, even with receipts

I worry that these data will be used to support dangerous stereotypes about faculty in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Basically, it might seem like faculty in those fields are slacking off after tenure, but there's a much more straightforward explanation. 1/🧵

anyways personally I think that the NYT should stop doing race essentialism and stop platforming race scientists but that’s probably just my tiny Chinese hands talking

Support local coverage of NYC that actually has some fucking standards: hellgatenyc.com/membership

far be it from me to tell scientists how to do their jobs but i feel like there might be value in surveying the <365 hot dogs per year demographic

Hoping today lives up to the promise of its sunrise.

"For the child born this summer in Texas, whose parents receive no documents, whose name never appears in any system, and who grows up asking why she can’t go on field trips, apply for scholarships, or open a bank account, the consequences are not legal theory. They are her life."

i also think that it is only a matter of time before this court rewrites section 1 of the 14th to effectively end birthright citizenship. the 14th amendment is the chief obstacle to a legal regime of tiered citizenship and subordinate castes, and they will not let it stand.

I am calling on Supreme Court reporters to issue a formal apology for every "here's how Amy Coney Barrett is DRIFTING TO THE LEFT" puff piece they ever had the temerity to pitch ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/skrme...

Dear #mathsky, if you repost this, it will let people see the article for free. Thanks! www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Lander is an eminently qualified candidate who could have seen the failure of his won campaign as a reason to be embittered against Mamdani (as, ahem, others did) but instead is pivoting to united the left-liberal vote and dampen Cuomo’s chances. Profoundly decent, stand up thing to do.

Yeah, I don't care if you identify as a liberal or a moderate, if you actually care about good government, transit and housing then there is no good reason to rank Cuomo or not rank Mamdani. I say this despite having reservations about parts of Mamdani's platform!

For the past 3 years, I've taught a course on Machine Learning for Climate Change to undergrads. At times, people have asked if the course lectures could be made available online. While I can't offer that, I have decided to start making "5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet" videos. Hope its useful!