For a previous birthday, I bought my partner a Klein bottle (kleinbottle.com). This Christmas, I bought her a Klein bottle opener.

Me: …is this the part where you say you can’t advise me any more because you don’t want to be responsible for this disaster? Gemini 3: Not at all. In the spirit of culinary science (and because I am an AI and cannot taste the consequences), we are absolutely doing this.

Eventually, our house will reach an equilibrium where the dogs track as much mud back outside as they track inside.

I don't think these systems are people — or should become ppl — but I also don't think Hamlet is a person. And yet, I don't mind the subterfuge that makes him seem to be one. There's a spectrum between "base model glossolalia" and "character-dot-ai persona," and I don't feel prescriptive about it.

This is one of my favorites. Pop-punk sound with a slightly distorted vocal and the vibe of a really enthusiastic 12-year-old playing a video game. And getting in over their head.

It’s such a surreal experience to hear something like “When the Universe Listens” turned into a song… it makes the outside world sound like my inside world, and that’s just not something that happens for me very often. youtu.be/o1Y2nm-0BeA?...

It’s easy to agree that we should anticipate and mitigate harms from AI. It’s much harder to agree on what harms are likely and what responses are justified to prevent that harm. If you want a productive conversation, we have to be more concrete.

You can now pre-order the third book in my Wanderlust Saga, coming out January 15th, 2026! If you’ve ever wanted to read a book centered on a cyborg mushroom in a far away galaxy, this is the book for you! marylowd.com/books/#wande...

I finally turned my old webcomic, SPACE HOUNDS!, into an actual graphic novel! You could have a copy in your very own hands in a matter of days: marylowd.com/books/#space...

Here's @mikecaulfield on AI and fact-checking: We're not taking the fact-checking powers of AI seriously enough. It's past time to start. https://mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/its-time-to-take-the-fact-checking

The exemplar of superhuman A.I. performance to date www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

Does anyone else cook like this? By sending photos to ChatGPT and getting on-the-fly adaptive cooking advice?

Wow 80% bad-faith responses, and people lecturing the creator of Flask here and the creator of Django/datasette in the comments on why AI is useless for software engineering...

Programming in 2020: My code is buggy, I blame the compiler. Programming in 2025: My code is buggy, I blame Claude.

Sometimes vibe coding feels like you’re trying to ride a wild horse, the one they said no one could tame, but maybe, just maybe you could win her over with your animal empathy and kindness.

Olmo 3 7B & 32B base & thinking models @ai2.bsky.social has done it again, fully open models, fully open process seems competitive with Qwen 3, excel you can fully reproduce any part of the training process allenai.org/blog/olmo3

First opinions, 2nd opinions, analyzing lab tests, preparing for a clinic visit, helping to make difficult diagnoses, and more use cases. Its popularity will keep increasing despite lack of objective data for benefit or harm www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/w...

I think I could live on egg nog. It would be like that whole Soylent craze, except so much better. Not to mention more festive.

She’s right. The government started putting gender on passports in 1972 out of concern that men and women were getting too hard to tell apart, what with all the hippies with long hair and feminists in pants and whatnot. Strike gender from IDs. Everywhere. It serves no purpose. @murray.senate.gov

I’ve reached the point of actively encouraging my college-aged kid to ask ChatGPT for help, because 20 minutes of searching through Petrucci’s chem textbook to find the definition and formula for partial charge of a molecular bond is NOT educational or a good use of time.

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

I’m on sabbatical this year, but I haven’t been doing a startup, new projects with distant colleagues, or writing a book. No, I’ve just been catching my breath after 22 years of academia (grad school+prof life) and 18 years as a parent. And I’m finding that… maybe I have space to think and learn!

Ok, I finally got my own domain (lowd.cc), set up a semi-modern site using Hugo and claimed my BlueSky handle. I used GPT-5 Codex for this too. It did ok at translating my content from static html to Hugo .md and .yaml, but debugging it was still a pain.

I made a thing! Since the NaNoWriMo website is gone (RIP), I vibe-coded a NaNo-style word tracker, including many stats, UI options, and a cat picture reward for each daily milestone.

Sometimes when I put a song into Suno, what I get back is pure magic. My Flowers for Algernon-esque story, “Techno Babel” (co-written with @lowd.bsky.social) is one of those cases… Also, new wave as a genre of music can be kind of amazing. youtu.be/GCxLMWIMFKY?...

In case you haven’t been following closely, there’s been amazing progress in AI models for music! My partner has been adapting her original spec fic story collections into whole albums, 1 song per story. (Kind of like how Elton John’s “Rocketman” is based on the Bradbury short.)

I can remember analogous panics about Dungeons and Dragons. Everything that teenagers start doing in large numbers is dangerous. It always causes them to lose touch with reality and estranges them from their families. I doubt that civilization can survive if we keep letting teenagers do new stuff.

Yeah to be clear I expect slop to end up like kitsch in that it becomes its own countercultural art movement that people defiantly brand their work as to get attention and cater to the audience that's looking for it.

I worry that, in an effort to prevent chatbots from supporting self-harm, we will end up with LLMs that refuse to comment on a draft of a murder mystery novel. Worse, all LLMs will be controlled by large companies, because they’re the only entities that can afford the liability.

I thought I wouldn‘t be one of those academics super into outreach talks, but I just put together something about understanding LLMs for laypeople and I get to talk about results that I don’t really focus on in any of my technical talks! It’s actually really cool. I made this lil takeaway slide

melt down the guns forge the steel into beams raise the beams to build schools but first melt down all the guns

Using a verification email for 2FA turns a 10-second login experience into a 10-minute login experience.

I'm thousands of miles from home, but my laptop connects to the wifi with no hiccups. I love eduroam!

I'm at @satml.org this week! Great conference, great community, and hosted in a great country this year (Denmark).

A very exciting day for open-source AI! We're releasing our biggest open source model yet -- OLMo 2 32B -- and it beats the latest GPT 3.5, GPT 4o mini, and leading open weight models like Qwen and Mistral. As usual, all data, weights, code, etc. are available.

UO faculty have voted to authorize a strike. 89% turnout, 92% in favor. Why? During the pandemic, inflation soared while salaries were stagnant. UO admin refuses to acknowledge the problem and wants us to just accept the pay cut. Thanks to my union, @uauoregon.bsky.social, for representing us!

New research from Costello, Pennycook, and Rand. Can conversations with AI help reduce belief in conspiracy theories? Quite possibly. What’s the mechanism? Evidence production. Let me explain my little-t theory about how this might work.

New blog post: Stop talking about AGI, it's lazy and misleading I argue that we all could do better than using the slippery, undefinable term Artificial General Intelligence. We would have a much better discussion by focusing on concrete tasks and capabilities togelius.blogspot.com/2025/01/stop...

Here are my notes on OpenAI's new ChatGPT Operator browser "agent", including initial thoughts on their approach to mitigating prompt injection risks simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/23/...

Here's the talk. I hope you enjoy it www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwfY...

If the current AI gold rush is anything like the dot com boom, some of these ventures will end up like pets dot com and some will end up like Amazon dot com.

I think that's a key question here: do you find AI tools useful or not? People who don't find them useful think their energy use is a complete waste People (like myself) who use them every day are much more accepting of their energy costs

After all these years, The Hampsterdance Album is still a masterpiece.

AI is like plastic — a lot of people hate it because it often comes across as fake and tacky, but it’s flexible and it’s cheap and there’s so many things that would be impossible or impractical without it. And yes, a lot of AI will be junk. Just like everything else. (cf Sturgeon’s Law.)

I think social media would be better if there were separate servers for PVP and PVE, just like in WoW. Let everyone who wants to troll, dunk, flame, and pile-on do so in their own space. And then let the rest of us gain xp, form parties, collect achievements, or whatever, without being ganked.

Garbage in, garbage out — and it may not take much garbage to do real harm! This is why data curation and model testing is so important.

My TV debut! On New Year's Eve, I spoke with Global News about AI — past and future, pros and cons. I think it went well! www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP0x...

“I’m tired of drinking the Lesser of Two Bleaches. Stop telling me water isn’t bleach. Here’s a study finding that tap water has trace amounts of chlorine in it. Checkmate, you bootlicker for Big Water.”

(sung to my very muddy dog as I towel her off) "Shouldn't a dog who's so good inside Have a matching exterior? And since folks here to an absurd degree Seem fixated on your fur debris, Would it be alright by you If I de-muddified you?"

My first new book of the year is out — DISCOVERY OF THE WANDERLUST. If you love B’Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager, you might like this book. If you like reading about animal characters on spaceships, you’re very likely to like this book. marylowd.com/books/#wande...