I like my cities to be sittable, shittable, and public transittable.

going to a rationalist and being like listen buddy i heard about this scary new idea. its called $70’s basilisk. what if there was an entity that, when it came into being, eternally tortured everyone who didn’t give me $70? it’s a simple exercise of pascals wager white boy

In college I tried to desolder an IC on the board of the original NES using a hairdryer (look, I was broke and tried to be crafty...)
Baaaad idea

For those outside academia: if you apply for ERC funding and fail to get it, you can’t reapply for two years - now being extended to three. There’s no reason to do this except to slow down applications, because there is not enough money anywhere.

Nationwide Survey: Most Farmers Can’t Afford Fertilizer

Farmers are ringing the alarm bells: 70% can't afford enough fertilizer. "[N]itrogen fertilizer prices have risen more than 30%, while combined fuel and fertilizer costs have increased roughly 20% to 40%. Urea prices have increased by 47% since the end of February."
www.fb.org/news-release...

Loving it! Loving it all! The spreadsheets, the feedback, the sticky little problems the team are waiting for you to write the way out of. I remind myself: "what are you here on this earth to do?" I mutter. "This." And get right back into it. I remember my death. It's coming! "So what are you going to do about it?" Comes the inner whisper. I mutter "This!" and get right back into it. If I worry about what other people think, I try to raise my gaze all the way out past the heat death of the universe. This! Mmm, I love it.

Ultimately, you have to put your ego aside and try to enjoy the ride. This advice from Charlene Putney (in The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope by @inkle.co) feels worthy of printing out and sticking on the wall.

Lots of open questions: is RSI indeed happening at the Big Three labs? How long can the exponential of LLM ability gain last? How much do Chinese models rely on distillation, and can they keep pace given chip constraints? Will there continue to be frontier open weights models?

Whenever something awful happens, I now think of the title of Omar El Akkad's 2025 “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.”

Random coffee thought: The text is just text. It is ultimately our mind that gives meaning and consequence to text. Does that mean our mind is the harness?

Kremlin hotline: Hungary colluded with Russia to delist sanctioned oligarchs, companies and banks A hotline between Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave Moscow strategic information on critical EU…

Leaked calls confirm that Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó is being run as a Russian intelligence asset in the halls of the European Union and NATO at the highest levels. Incredibly damning transcripts. Another EU foreign minister has likened Szijjártó to Kim Philby.

Australia-bound medicines rerouted as Middle East war escalates The Middle East war is forcing major pharmaceutical companies to divert critical medicines away from one of the world's most important trade routes, to ensure there are no supply issues in Australia.

There’s not just re-routing of meds, there’s also supply chain shortages of chemicals used to make the meds offshore www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

"Researchers at Stanford University modeled how many people could die or be disabled in 25 years if vaccines for polio, measles, rubella or diphtheria were no longer available."

Polio: 23k paralyzed
Measles: 290k deaths
Rubella: 41k born w/ congenital rubella syndrome
Diphtheria: 138k-1M deaths

*me, having a second cup of coffee*
"you can just do things"

A fair coin "knows" π.
Stop flipping when heads first outnumber tails. The expected fraction of heads is π/4. Average many trials → estimate π.
Result by J. Propp, animated for #PiDay.
Made with #Python #NumPy #Matplotlib and @marimo.io
#Mathematics #MathArt #CreativeCoding

Congratulations Thomas!

One of my most deeply held beliefs is that refusing to name truth makes you stupid--literally degrades your intellect.

There are real people, real women, real girls whose images have been edited by grok at the request of users.

This is not some fictionalised, nebulous harm.

That the 'adults in the room' and 'rules-based order' governments are humming and hawwing over taking a firm line on this is extraordinary

OpenAI researcher resigns, claiming safety has taken “a backseat to shiny products” More turmoil inside the house that builds ChatGPT.

Lol.
www.theverge.com/2024/5/17/24...

But probably the coolest use of OpenSpiel recently has been in collaboration with @kaggle.com as environments in the Kaggle Game Arena (see here: bsky.app/profile/kagg...).

In the first round, LLMs played head-to-heat against each other at chess! ♟️🤩

A+ trolling from Zelenskyy

was at an event on AI for science yesterday, a panel discussion here at NeurIPS. The panelists discussed how they plan to replace humans at all levels in the scientific process. So I stood up and protested that what they are doing is evil.

Full post:
togelius.blogspot.com/2025/12/plea...

64x64 pixel dungeon crawler. Pac-quest.

Featuring Pac🟡Girl

"It has 99% accuracy" is essentially the ML equivalent of "It compiles, so it works"

Lol. Whoever tuned that model has never heard of recall and their training set probably was lots of p*rn and p*rn only.
That is exactly why you should do a decent ML course about model evaluation practices and ethical implications before you start training models.

1/6 Belgium is helping Russia in its war against Ukraine.

How? It is the final obstacle preventing Ukraine from accessing Russia’s frozen assets.

Does Belgium want to be remembered as Russia’s helper?

I've seen you do things with LLMs on here. If you can do things with LLMs companies love you currently.

Take care. As somebody who dropped out of the circus: Tenure is overrated.