If navigation apps like Google Maps were invented today, they would be called "AI" and hyped as "AI agents." It's truly amazing how well they work, and now everyone completely takes them for granted, and many people completely outsource the mental task of navigation to them.
free video for intro lectures on auditory perception
Considering a big change to some slides, I find the Mitch Hedberg line to be apt: “I write jokes for a living, I sit in my hotel, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny.”
it’s the point on the image plane that is nearest to the vantage point, so ‘nearest point’ or similar would be accurate, even if it’s somewhat unintuitive.
What is wild to me is the defense, BY THE NEURIPS BOARD, that fabricated citations do not mean "the content of the papers themselves [is] necessarily invalidated"
It does. It very much does. What do you think citing other work is for? What do you think writing a paper is for? What do you *think*?
Agree with all this. I've probably been that person; now I also try to minimize interactions with these people. I think it ultimately comes from insecurity.
Here's my take for communication:
aaronhertzmann.com/2025/06/23/n...
and reviewing principles:
aaronhertzmann.com/2025/06/23/n...
“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” he wrote in 1976.
Wrote a summary of a great keynote by @zey.bsky.social at NeurIPS, arguing that we’re having the wrong nightmares about AI: not AGI or superhuman benchmarks, but good-enough genAI at scale threatens "load bearing frictions" society relies on to signal effort, authenticity, sincerity, credibility.
![Excerpt reads: "Prioritize your neighborhood
Neighborhoods drive our happiness (or unhappiness) more than we think.
When Lina Martinez, director of POLIS, the Center for Wellbeing Studies at Universidad Icesi in Colombia, studied the happiness of households in the city of Cali, she couldn’t find much difference between poorer and richer areas. “Their happiness is pretty much the same,” she said. But that changed when she isolated neighborhood conditions, such as access to transit, health care and parks. “The conditions of the neighborhood affect happiness,” she said. “I can’t link that to the space where [people] live.”
That aligns with findings from a 2023 study of the Vancouver metro area: Researchers found no significant differences in well-being between people living in single detached homes, duplexes, townhouses, laneway houses and apartment buildings (basement units smaller than 300 square feet were the only negative exception). What did people say they missed most in their neighborhood? Affordability, proximity to family and friends, and a sense of community. Home design was eighth on the list."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ks3gpa6ftoyaq7hmf6c4qx4c/bafkreicapfknasylzk2lqzaxxeb5mchgnru75obggn45dusda6j5zogvuu)
Excerpt reads: "Prioritize your neighborhood Neighborhoods drive our happiness (or unhappiness) more than we think. When Lina Martinez, director of POLIS, the Center for Wellbeing Studies at Universidad Icesi in Colombia, studied the happiness of households in the city of Cali, she couldn’t find much difference between poorer and richer areas. “Their happiness is pretty much the same,” she said. But that changed when she isolated neighborhood conditions, such as access to transit, health care and parks. “The conditions of the neighborhood affect happiness,” she said. “I can’t link that to the space where [people] live.” That aligns with findings from a 2023 study of the Vancouver metro area: Researchers found no significant differences in well-being between people living in single detached homes, duplexes, townhouses, laneway houses and apartment buildings (basement units smaller than 300 square feet were the only negative exception). What did people say they missed most in their neighborhood? Affordability, proximity to family and friends, and a sense of community. Home design was eighth on the list."
A Washington Post article suggests that, beyond a certain threshold, larger homes don't make people happier. Instead, well-being is correlated with affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods where they feel socially connected.
www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...
Hey everyone! I have enough publications to stop working for the rest of the year!
Wow, congratulations!
(But don’t worry, she gets lots of pampering and adventures.)
It’s tough to listen to recordings of my dog barking and howling intermittently while she learns to stay home alone, but I did like this auto-transcription produced by the audio recording app (Apple Voice Memos)
Congratulations! Time to update my bibtex file.
Most LLM evals use API calls or offline inference, testing models in a memory-less silo. Our new Patterns paper shows this misses how LLMs actually behave in real user interfaces, where personalization and interaction history shape responses: arxiv.org/abs/2509.19364
Seems like a metric that can be optimized for (gamed). Tweak your essay (manually or with help) until algorithm gives good marks. Requires access to same or similar AI.
Of course, multinational conglomerates aren't the best sources of edgy new stylistic innovation.
Back before text-to-image, people could appreciate the weird, surreal quality of GAN art. It evoked a lot of historical weird and surreal art, like Francis Bacon or Odilon Redon, without the baggage of today's "AI". See: arxiv.org/abs/1910.04639 .
People say that the new "AI"-based ads look like garbage, but the Brian Eno quote is relevant: people learn to appreciate the quirks of a style. The tastes here are about associations, e.g., if people who hate "AI" take the glitches as signifying "AI", then people will hate the glitches.
I think Doctorow means "reverse centaur" as something more general than an "accountability sink" (the term he uses). His reverse centaur is, basically, a person being operated by a machine, providing skills (vision, delivering packages, accountability) that the machine can't do on its own.
Thank you!
Would love to read more to get some concrete examples. What's the citation?
Historian Thomas Hughes argued that technologies are malleable when young, then harden. Right now we're still shaping AI, or at least it is being shaped by our institutions, norms & use cases
Eventually these systems build a momentum of their own. That is why choices now matter, things are fluid.
Descended from their ancient forebears, Queens of the Stone Age
*Ideally* the review decision takes the best parts of each of the reviews, and a bad or negligent review can be ignored rather than just "bringing the average down."
I agree, and it sounds like your view is very much aligned with the book. I also highly recommend his previous book "Status and Culture" which touches on these trends at the end.
Modern Art devalued pure skill alone; the context, role, and story behind the work became central to its value, though skill is still valued in service of these elements. Perhaps we can expect similar reversals from the spread of Generative AI.
aaronhertzmann.com/2025/10/25/i...
7/
But something similar happened when photography was invented. Photographs radically challenged value of realistic pictures, which had previously required immense skill to create. This led to Modern Art and its reversals of value. In Van Gogh’s words, recreating reality was “just photography”.
6/
@wdavidmarx.bsky.social further argues that generative AI will accelerate poptimism's loss of value when cultural artifacts "can be made anywhere by anyone, and offer no useful social distinctions between philistine and aesthete”.
culture.ghost.io/genai-is-our...
5/
There is a lot to dislike about contemporary art, and it has had its share of idolizing money (Koons, Hirst), just as @wdavidmarx.bsky.social criticizes poptimism's love of financial success. Like all culture, it is messy. 4/
