Wrote a Substack on this #aras25 poll: Catherine Connolly is surviving her scrapes - yet Heather Humphreys is within the margin of error for winning open.substack.com/pub/gavreill...

New special issue of GPEM on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design! Edited by Penousal Machado and Juan Romero link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New book review, freely available in GPEM: “Reversible world of cellular automata” by Kenichi Morita, reviewed by Tomas Rokicki link.springer.com/article/10.1...

GPEM journal has a new special issue on "twenty-five years of grammatical evolution"! Edited and with an introduction by Mahdinejad, Murphy and Ryan. Special issue: link.springer.com/collections/... Introduction: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Our gas cooker is an annoying sigmoid. The gas tap is either on with minimal flow, or on with full-flow, with only a tiny range - about 5 degrees of the controller's turn - giving useful intermediate values.

Next up: Massachusetts

Plausible Knowledge Notation: "a notation and model for imperfect knowledge, such as everyday knowledge that is uncertain, context sensitive, imprecise, incomplete, inconsistent and likely to change" w3c.github.io/cogai/pkn.html

Ireland! We need just 1,483 ppl who are Irish nationals to sign this EU petition to initiate a ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy* across the EU. The UN considers such ‘therapy’ to be mental torture. #SpeirGorm Please sign & share with all EU citizens that you know: eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#...

Students who can't really write in English but use LLMs to write their emails to me - should I treat them as having communicative intent? Do they intend to say the things they say, or do they intend some underlying meaning which I should charitably guess at? Or is it just empty syntax?

Dear international colleagues, repression in the Netherlands is worsening. We can really use your support. Please join me in signing this open letter demanding accountability from our Executive Board for the wrongful arrest of six students and staff at my university docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I could write an essay on this image Satire of antisemitic cartoons made to mock antisemitism repurposed by an Israeli to depict the Irish as the shadowy backers of their non-white enemies, thus bringing the caricature's functionality back to its original intent

The GECCO 2025 conference will be held in Málaga, 14-18 July 2025. You won't miss it, will you? gecco-2025.sigevo.org/HomePage

Happy to announce differential operators for PySR + SymbolicRegression.jl! This means you can literally just... evolve an integral:

i asked Claude to write a Barthelme-esque short story with the aesthetic sensibilities of "The School", and it gave me this. i mean. i mean.

this ennui is not caused by shortcomings of people on Twitter, it's just people

Honored to receive the Best Paper Award at the #NeurIPS2024 Pluralistic Alignment Workshop Check out our preprint "Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problems" at arxiv.org/pdf/2407.02273!

I do not know why The Whole of the Moon has such power, but by god it has. But plugging it into a singing schoolhallfull of Irish children *exactly as old as I was then* is a supercharger event.

I refuse to read the article but I wonder what scenario people like this imagine, when they hear we're running out of data. Do they think it's used up, or deleted?

Important illustration of the difference between the design stance, the generalisation stance, and the scientific stance (for want of better terms). 1/2

Diarmuid Ferriter for president www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024...

YES, now we're thinking with portals. Bad news for those clinging to the hope we would run out of data. Or that LLMs can't reason.

Science Foundation Ireland has said the termination of Professor Philip Nolan's contract with the agency was "never intended to imply any finding of wrongdoing on his part"

I was previously an international reviewer for the Marsden fund. I think this decision is embarrassing for NZ and should be reversed. www.science.org/content/arti...

Over 30 prominent scientists call for a ban on the creation of a "mirror cell"--a microbe made of molecules that are mirror images of their natural forms. It could cause a mind-boggling global disaster. Here's my story [gift link] 🧪https://nyti.ms/3OUCXp6

Visual auto-regressive modelling. Start with a tiny image, and the model iteratively predicts a larger one, adding detail. Similar to diffusion, which starts with a large but noisy image, and the model iteratively predicts a less-noisy one, adding detail. neurips.cc/virtual/2024...

Would it be fair to divide the AI world into "techbros" and "tech anti-bros"?

SMBC is on Bluesky! AI discussion in the 98th percentile, in four panels, with jokes! And often sex!

The original sin of the modern left is conflating morality with truth. You see it all the time here and on Twitter, and increasingly in real life. To escape it, we need to be able to imagine: *a bad person who is still correct*. A weird, unthinkable thought.

Not even a trace of mercy for people staying at home in big cities in boring plains, Lucas?

"Sora is a data-driven physics engine." x.com/chrisoffner3...

Of course the dichotomy "AI is fake and sucks" v "AI is real and dangerous" is a bit too simple. But anyone who uses terms like "AI booster" (which Marcus used in his response), "TESCREAL", or "techbro" is in no position to criticise.

Highly recommend (long) read for anyone who's been leading a lab 10+ years!

BLUESKY MEGA-THREAD Altmetric is thrilled and also LITERALLY RELIEVED to officially announce: We are now tracking research attention as it happens on Bluesky! We have been picking up posts on the site since late Oct. Our team is on Bluesky all day answering questions. Let's get into it!

🧵 Today with @polymathicai.bsky.social and others we're releasing two massive datasets that span dozens of fields - from bacterial growth to supernova! We want this to enable multi-disciplinary foundation model research.

New essay: "How to be a wise optimist about science and technology?" michaelnotebook.com/optimism/ind...

I think intelligence is the ability to reify patterns

Friends, this week marks a monumental step forward in my path towards pushing for a greater ecology of accountability in the age of AI. Thrilled to officially announce the AI Accountability Lab (AIAL) @theaial.bsky.social at Trinity College Dublin is launching today, Thursday Nov 28, 2024 aial.ie

Worth another share, for the week that's in it…  How Ireland's PR-STV electoral system works, explained with a 🔴specific 🟠 (#notspon) 🟡 brand 🟢 of 🔵 popular 🟣 colourful 🟤 chocolate confectionery. @virginmedianews.bsky.social #ge24 (Part 1 of 4)

Jack Chambers echoing Martin's line about SF being anti-EU. That was true a long time ago. But Chambers has learned his line and says it as if it's current, and isn't thinking too hard about it. #GE24

My kids' class had a #GE24 general election today here in Galway West, with STV and everything! The winners were: Noel Grealish (Ind) Sean Kyne (FG) Catherine Connolly (Ind) Gráinne Seoige (FF) John Connolly (FF) I think Hildegarde is probably safe, otherwise could be accurate :-/

There are a lot of misunderstandings and skill issues in this thread But possibly the deepest is this attitude that there is basically one AI system. If free ChatGPT does something, then that's an eternal characteristic of AI.

Lads, we are base, conservative, and basically bad

Doing good science is 90% finding a science buddy to constantly talk to about the project.

3rd-party library maintainers might find it cumbersome to handle the transition to the new estimator tags while keeping backward compatibility with older scikit-learn versions. We will devise a way to smooth out the transition before releasing 1.6.0 final: github.com/scikit-learn...

I'm making it easier and easier to watermark generated AI content with @huggingface.bsky.social and @gradio-hf.bsky.social. Definitely recommend using this when generating. Please let me know if you have additional feature requests, super happy to assist. huggingface.co/spaces/meg/w...

class KonishiMindSeed: def __init__(self, size: int = 1000000000): self.size = size self.bit_length = 6 self.instructions = np.random.randint(0, 2**self.bit_length, size=self.size)

He's full of zingers, but his is a single-issue party, and no other party wants to re-open that issue.