I’m attending COLT 2026 in San Diego. You can see the beach from the conference venue; not sure if that’s a good thing. 🤔 learningtheory.org/colt2026/

Today marks 10 years since I defended my PhD. Gosh, time flies. I can’t claim to be early career anymore.

Why do you have two phones? Well, you see, sometimes there’s a QR code on a page and I need a second device to scan it.

If someone give you used baby stuff, the important thing is not whether it is useful to you, the important thing is that giving it away is a commitment device for them not having another baby.

Do not make major life decisions without talking to people.

Honoured that our 2016 paper, Robust Estimators in High Dimensions without the Computational Intractability, w/ Ilias Diakonikolas, @daneelssoul.bsky.social, @jerryzli.bsky.social, Ankur Moitra, Alistair Stewart, was awarded the Gödel Prize This is the highest award for papers in theoretical CS 1/7

Huge congratulations to Ilias Diakonikolas, Gautam Kamath, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li, Ankur Moitra, and Alistair Stewart on being awarded the Gödel prize for their breakthrough work on algorithmic robustness! www.sigact.org/prizes/g%C3%...

Privately Estimating Monotone Statistics in Polynomial Time Gavin Brown, Ephraim Linder, Mahbod Majid, Vikrant Singhal http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27912

A handsome red bike, abandoned. By a busy road, outside my home. Locked to a tow away sign. What happened to its owner? Not even a thief has come for it. What will the HOA do? I see it daily and wonder.

but they were all of them deceived, for another monday was made

You should only cite papers that you have read thoroughly. You should be confident that the papers you are citing are correct; you should also apply due diligence to the references therein. To be safe, you should probably not cite anything, unless maybe it's a self-citation.

I can't believe that in 2026 bibliographies are still more likely to tell you which page of the printed journal the article is on or which city the publisher is based in than to give you a URL. Were page numbers *ever* useful? Did print journals not have a table of contents?

Here's an example of a "hallucinated" citation from a decade ago (i.e. pre-LLMs). The same bad citation appeared in multiple papers. I eventually traced the source to Google Scholar (and it's now fixed).

While I generally agree with this policy, the focus on hallucinated citations specifically makes me uncomfortable: I usually get my BibTeX from Google Scholar. Yes, GS is sometimes wrong. No, I don't carefully check my references. Is using AI to fill in references really morally any different?

New blog post by @stein.ke on #DifferentialPrivacy: what happens when you modify the definition of neighbors to make it asymmetric? Why would you do that, and does that buy you anything? differentialprivacy.org/one-sided/

One-Sided Differential Privacy differentialprivacy.org/one-sided/

ArXiV has a new LLM policy (Screenshots with alt text so you don’t have to click through to the other place and see all the stupid responses)

List of accepted papers at #COLT2026, the Annual Conference on Learning Theory: learningtheory.org/colt2026/acc... (h/t @gautamkamath.com)

"For People"

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to satisfy my curiosity: A standard gasoline/petrol pump delivers about 15 megawatts of energy. (In contrast, the fastest electric vehicle chargers deliver half a megawatt.)

My cynical hypothesis for why there's a lot of discussion about datacenters in space is that Elon needed a justification for merging xAI with SpaceX. Elon being the CEO of both is an obvious conflict of interest, so he needed to explain to investors why it made sense -- hence space datacenters.

Pleased to share that I'll be presenting this paper at COLT in San Diego! 😁

Re. AI "consciousness" takes: I would be interested to read something from a psychiatry or psychology perspective. People who have spent time debugging human intelligence might have something insightful to say about artificial intelligence.

I remember watching some American lecture a New Zealand fast food worker about this view. As far as I can tell this is an Americanism and totally arbitrary.

I have an app to control my garage door opener. Every time it takes like 30s to load. What is it loading? Once I'm logged in, it should only need to send one UDP packet: (app_id,door_id,open_or_close,timestamp,hash(app_secret_key,door_id,open_or_close,timestamp)) That's like 32 bytes tops.

Nothing incredible novel, but a short 🧵 thread about MGFs, their use, and why I love Taylor series. Say you want to compute the moments of a r.v. X, which is "sufficiently well-behaved" (in some rigorous sense). That is, 𝔼[Xⁿ], for some integer(s) n≥0 of your choosing. How do you proceed?

AC: Please discuss this submission and respond to the authors' rebuttal. me: The scores range from "reject" to "strong reject". We don't need to waste more time on this.

This is a challenging legal problem for NeurIPS (and other conference participants)! You might be wondering how this is possible given the First Amendment? I wrote a quick explainer on the current status quo of relevant First Amendment cases & law to get you up to speed. 🔗👇

My parents are the opposite: They check in, drop bags, & then go wait at home. "Boarding is in 10min." "OK, let's eat dessert." "No, we need to drive to the airport now!" "Relax, they have your bags; they won't leave without you." *30 min later* "Final call for passenger Steinke." Stressmaxxing...

ICML requires authors to serve as reviewers. Reviewers aren't supposed to use LLMs (with caveats 🧵). ICML used prompt injection to catch reviewers using LLMs. And now they have desk rejected the papers submitted by those reviewers. What a mess...

Schools have ruined St Patrick's and Valentine's days for parents. E.g., this morning I had to prepare lunch for a random other kid in my kid's class. What does this have to do with St. Patrick?

Which task should I do first? (i) Send reminder emails to late reviewers. (ii) Submit my own late reviews.

Started/going

Some people are still debating whether or not LLMs are "useful," so let's stake out one clear use case: LLMs are useful for translating between languages. That includes translating between natural languages (e.g. Spanish to English) and, more recently, to formal languages (e.g. English to Python).

It's interesting how much you end up learning about your own papers when preparing a talk about them. Condensing things into slides really clarifies your own understanding.

When citing a conference publication, it's important to include the date and location of the conference it was presented at for the benefit of readers with a time machine.

I just discovered that someone blocked me almost certainly because of this post. Lol. 😂

🇺🇦

Owning a vineyard is just farming for rich people.

Let's say you want, e.g., to compute the expectation of a Geometric r.v. That'll involve, at some point, evaluating a series of the form "Σ (k+1) p^k" which looks like what Lovecraft may have done to a geometric series. How to do it? One trick I enjoy: differentiate the same function, in two ways!

I like spotting license plates from interesting states. This one was notably interesting.

Anthropic and OpenAI are both losing money and they know this can't go on forever, but they are locked in a race to develop better and better AI. OpenAI is trying to make some money with ads. Anthropic is basically looking at OpenAI, smiling, and asking "you feeling tired already?"

Your #NeurIPS2026 reviews ask you to compare to five papers on clawxiv.org What do you do?

Amazon sent me an empty/broken package. I'm trying to get my money back, but there's no explicit option for this. I may have to "return" the item by sending an empty package back.

me: How should I invest my savings to avoid the AI bubble? tech friends: What bubble? non-tech friends: What savings?

I wonder how much of the appeal of chatbots is that they are basically next-level adblockers. A lot of queries should have perfectly good web search results -- e.g., give me a recipe for X or what is good to do as a tourist in city Y -- but those web pages are unusable due to ads and SEO.

In the battle between artificial intelligence and human stupidity, my money is on the humans.

I try to avoid posting about politics here, but I feel compelled to say some things that should be obvious: 🧵

I really want @arxiv.bsky.social to collect more author metadata (and actually use it).

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