Yeesh what a week to finally watch one battle after another

On the bright side, nobody’s gonna complain that you’re spending too much time writing tests nowadays

When the web search is personalized but the image search is not

Excited to present a new preprint with @nkgarg.bsky.social: presenting usage statistics and observational findings from Paper Skygest in the first six months of deployment! 🎉📜 arxiv.org/abs/2601.04253

I bet holidays are really good for the AI companies. People finally have time to try out their products and then get hooked.

I've never used Cursor, but I use Claude Code a lot. We'll see how this one pans out...

This is supposedly the benefit of the LSP integration but it’s currently broken in CC: github.com/anthropics/c...

Should agents be able to use a debugger? Claude Code is like me and loves to print instead. Should they be able to command-click to the function definition like I do in an IDE, rather than grepping files?

Kids these days don’t understand the difficulty of being an adult in the early 2010s, winding your headphone cord from your ears down under your scarf, inside your peacoat, and into the audio jack of your iPod touch.

2026 gonna be like Interviewer: Tell me about a time that you and Claude Code disagreed. Me: I asked Claude to create a custom serializer. When it showed me its implementation— Interviewer: Excuse me, it sounds like you weren’t in YOLO mode? I’m sorry, but this role won’t be a good fit.

Got rid of a bunch of my old physics textbooks, which allowed us to get rid of the bookshelf, which created space for my drumset. My life is a perennial partitioning of space and time to make room for activities.

well this is lovely science.nasa.gov/specials/you...

I wonder if universities moving to oral exams, due to the modern futility of assigning writing assignments, will improve students’ interviewing abilities

Nice idea by @tdhopper.com at the end of the post to use voice-to-text with Claude code. I sometimes find myself dragging my feet about using Claude code since I don’t feel like typing out everything to explain what I want. tdhopper.com/blog/how-im-...

I wrote a short essay on what I'm calling the AI Attribution Error. doi.org/10.59350/c3g...

Oh hey I finally have a name for this bsky.app/profile/etha...

the fact that there is free parking at all in manhattan is wild to me

A personal recap of 2025. It was a year of a new style of engineering. Left some ideas for what might come next. lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/12/22/a...

New blog post: Spiritual Bypass, but with GPUs. The "Machinal Bypass," when AI becomes a shortcut around the work that makes us human, and why some tasks should feel a little hard. blog.stephenturner.us/p/machinal-b...

Score one for multi-task learning www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Time for the copyright maximalists to start campaigning for erowid reparations

Okay, I went down the single sideband (SSB) modulation rabbit hole and how the math works out (in part because I'm studying the exam content for an amateur radio license).

Work is doing a livestream at 12 ET of a bunch of new things we've been cooking up www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnXu...

Can vision transformers learn without images?🤔👀 Our latest work shows that pretraining ViTs on procedural symbolic data (eg sequences of balanced parentheses) makes subsequent standard training (eg on ImageNet) more data efficient! How is this possible?! ⬇️🧵

Don’t look at the comments, Ethan, it’s not worth it

So do all the WBD engineers get to make Netflix salaries now?

State of AI: An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter openrouter.ai/state-of-ai ...interesting looking at how different models are used for programming versus.. ahem... "role play"

Here are the slides and recordings from our Boston DataFusion Meetup in September: Youtube: youtu.be/wCAud478Dg8 Slides (pdf): drive.google.com/file/d/18KGH...

The key is to reallocate your spending based on each category’s inflation. The more you drink, the less you’ll be worried about the economy.

Unit tests in research code feel like something that's slowing you down until they wind up saving you six months of suffering

Another year, another handle to put her to sleep for the winter

My contribution to The Discourse: Before writing the quoted blog post, I tried to build the thing that I describe in the post. I couldn't figure it out. I've been writing Python professionally for a decade, but it was beyond me.

✨ #NeurIPS2025 paper: Scalable Feature Learning on Huge Knowledge Graphs for Downstream Machine Learning Combining contrastive learning and message passing markedly improves features created from embedding graphs, scalable to huge graphs. It taught us a lot on graph feature learning 👇 1/10

I don't know how to put it eloquently into words but my product manager thought leadership take is: I'm gonna bet on the company that delivers 100 features customers would like over the company that delivers 10 features they marty cagan'd their brains into believing are the best features

Thank you for choosing Amtrak (Not that you had a choice)

I’m feeling this drumset

A model for detecting LLM generated text is under review at #ICLR2026. The website using this model detects one of the reviews for this paper as LLM generated ... 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

I wrote about "chart go up" arguments on social media: varunprajan.github.io/blog/chart-g...

Fish sorting line.

Breaking: we release a fully synthetic generalist dataset for pretraining, SYNTH and two new SOTA reasoning models exclusively trained on it. Despite having seen only 200 billion tokens, Baguettotron is currently best-in-class in its size range. pleias.fr/blog/blogsyn...

I’m honored to serve 🫡

“…you’re much better served as a student by getting a degree in an “irrelevant” subject that motivates you to put in real, high-quality work than by shuffling through something more relevant on a surface level doing only the bare minimum to meet the requirements.” open.substack.com/pub/chadorze...

Latest newsletter (free) covers the newest AI video models, some misc 3d tools, an OCR model bonanza, a few games links including a fun new AI-assisted 2d tile project, my fairytale hunt project, and more... arnicas.substack.com/p/titaa-72-f...

In astronomy, an analogous effect is the Malmquist bias. "Usually heard in the phrase, 'You fool, you forgot to account for the Malmquist bias.'" -- Ethan Vishniac en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmqui...

As promised, here's a longer explanation of why you should vote YES on all the NYC ballot initiatives EXCEPT #6 ✅ YES on #1 ✅ YES on #2 ✅ YES on #3 ✅ YES on #4 ✅ YES on #5 🚫 NO on #6

(translating Icarus for the modern age) Oh he'd been cooking alright, but then he was cooked

Choudhury and Kim et al., "Accelerating Vision Transformers With Adaptive Patch Sizes" Transformer patches don't need to be of uniform size -- choose sizes based on entropy --> faster training/inference. Are scale-spaces gonna make a comeback?

sometimes I feel like I work for the government