so the kanye seeddance video didn't give me me too much motion sickness, but this one does. it's the rapid camera pull back that does it. it's been years, seems like the labs are never going to fix this problem. looking forward to a glorious future of AI-generated ads that literally make me nauseous

new end of winter metric just dropped: the day that Veronika starts removing her winter coat

♫♪ the best part of waking up is rainbows in your cup ♪♫

i think this is right. LLMs are great for overcoming incidental complexity, we just need to be careful to not to use it to avoid understanding essential complexity. it's way more important to understand eagain.net/articles/git... than it is to memorize git syntax (the CLI is not great!)

it's been clarifying seeing writing like this because my reaction has been exactly the opposite: it seems like software is no longer the main bottleneck, so i've de-identified as a software developer and pivoted to learning more about hardware, which seems to me where the remaining bottlenecks are.

Not something you see in textbooks very often: tripolar mitosis.

Before mice open their eyes at two weeks old, the retina exhibits spontaneous retinal waves. Waves at the start of the second postnatal week show a bias to propagate in the nasal direction (or right to left in the movie below). (2/11)

ATProto is now in IETF standardization process. BOF stage passed at IETF 124 Dublin. Working group formation is next. datatracker.ietf.org/wg/atp/about/

What Is an LRAD, and Why People Are Asking Us About It … 🔊 👂 adafruit.com/LRAD #lrad

With analogies to optimization algorithms, I describe a path to generalize from linear to nonlinear control.

Really excited to share our new paper in @nature.com! We uncovered how a physical instability of the cytoplasm coupled with the cell cycle drives cytoplasmic partitioning in early embryos #zebrafish #drosophila. Read more in this🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🤩 @poldresden.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de

I didn't realize there were microscopic cryptids www.cell.com/current-biol...

i love how excited this guy gets about the PCR of bulk metal foil resistors. www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9vB...

you don't need to guess ;) crt.sh?q=wsocial.eu

first attempt at heat set inserts. here, M3 inserts in a 3d-printed case for a zybo z7-20. not amazing IMO, I had some difficulties getting it in straight, but its close enough that it screws the lid to the case, so functionally it's a success

AI psychosis meets amphetamine psychosis: - ChatGPT one-shotted an Erdős Problem from 1980. - A human found a solution from 1936. - The 2nd author on the 1936 paper? Erdős himself.

help, two of my polecats got married and had children that inherited their religious/god affiliations, which happened to be a lone deity without religious order affiliations. those children grew up and became unable to execute tasks. can I get the deacon to baptize my heathen polecat children?

bold choice to start off your book by quoting yourself

Move over ReLU 🚀 Meet **ReSU** (Rectified Spectral Unit): a biologically inspired, self-supervised unit for learning from dynamical data. A backprop-free multilayer ReSU network learns predictive features and recapitulates *Drosophila* vision. To appear at AAAI: arxiv.org/abs/2512.23146

spring was fun while it lasted, but now its winter again

love to learn C++

An alternative view of a Serpulidae (bristle worm) larva! Such a cutie! #marineplankton 🦑

New blog post! ✨ I argue that AI will make formal verification go mainstream. martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/a... Three reasons for this: 1. LLMs are getting increasingly good at writing proofs using proof assistants. This will make formal verification vastly cheaper than it's been to date.

Wrapping up reinforcement learning week on the blog: Why RL is always leaving efficiency on the table, and what you can do about it.

7. The equation the AI scientist found is simple and, in retrospect, we humans could have come up it with ourselves. But we didn’t. The AI scientist did. The key innovation was replacing the Gaussian power of 2 with a parameter p controlling the peak shape.

Never seen the death of a ciliate like this-- usually it's too much pressure from the coverslip or too much osmotic pressure. But this gradual posterior-to-anterior "unzipping" effect amazed me ! Motic BA310e - 40x Objective - sped up 2X #microscopy #Paramecium #Iteachbiology #edusky

getting a local overleaf instance set up was surprisingly easy. bummer that there's no git integration in the community edition, but manual version control isnt that bad for what i'm doing

I think I will not be contacting my MathWorks license administrator to request access to the system identification toolbox

i saw the sky glow

gm

Big thank you to @pessoabrain.bsky.social for hosting me yesterday in the Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon! The lecture focused on how properties of human language like syntax might be neurally enforced, and included some critical discussion of the LLM literature. www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5wd...

How does the brain find its way in realistic environments? 🧠 Using deep RL and neural data, we show that hippocampal-like networks support navigation, learning, and generalisation in partially observable environments—mirroring real animal behaviour. Now out: www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroAI

instruction scream architecture

thanks Claude, sometimes I confuse 18 and 18, even though they're clearly different

matlab is truly awful software. it should be illegal for EEs to make programming languages

Next up in the talks from the #NaturalPhilosophy Symposium: Nima Arkani-Hamed offers Two Cheers for Shut Up and Calculate. (He previously was giving three cheers, but he's changed his mind just a bit.) Comments from me, of all people. www.youtube.com/watch?v=72QL...

Initial conditions: m1=62.0 m2=78.1 m3=42.0 (solar masses) v1x=5.06 v1y=2.72 v2x=-4.609 v2y=3.343 v3x=5.322 v3y=-3.352 (km/s) x1=-30.0 y1=30.0 x2=-21.0 y2=-14.0 x3=18.0 y3=14.0 (AU from center) Music: Battlestar Sonatica (BSG) – McCreary

Blake Werner, Lizhi Yang, Aaron D. Ames: Architecture Is All You Need: Diversity-Enabled Sweet Spots for Robust Humanoid Locomotion https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14947 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14947 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.14947

Ever since I made a video about Fourier Transforms, one of the most requested topics on the channel has been its close cousin, the Laplace Transform. I've been having a lot of fun animating a mini-series about this topic, and the main part is now out. youtu.be/j0wJBEZdwLs

saw some cool mushrooms

new tigran, now with matt garstka on drums, and there's a guitar??? new supergroup idea: animals as leaders, but they add tigran www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSLz...

i think i figured out how to walk properly again. it only took me 10 years to realize that I needed to buy zero drop shoes and then very slowly walk 2-3 miles every day for weeks, focusing on maintaining proper form. i hope that i can soon (next year?) run a mile for the first time in 16 years

ahh yes, the Arboreal Whistle Pig

apparently one of my superpowers is that almost every AI-generated video gives me motion sickness. so I have a pretty reliable algorithm for detecting AI videos: 1. watch video 2. wait for nausea (it usually doesn't take long!)

new neighbor moved in recently

I predicted the author from the title alone

Gemini helpfully pointing out a sign mistake I made, even while it seems to be having some kind of output generation problem