M A Osborne

A white swan dips its head to feed among green duckweed and reeds, half-hidden beneath trailing willow branches.

Swan

I aim to confuse

It is funny

9YO had not heard of Cash and Nico (but is watching Minecraft videos on YouTube as I write): we will check out with thanks for the tip!

FNF is also big in our household (and is also stupidly hard)!

Haha our kids are clearly well-aligned! It was indeed EVW 9YO was telling me about, and he sings the gangster rap non-stop (and plays the level). Very cool that your son is creating himself, I will share with 9YO :)

With my ageing fine-motor skills and slowing reflexes

I have played it, and am AWFUL

9YO was just telling me about a Geometry Dash player who “is really good, even though he’s 39 years old”. I am 44. I will never recover from this devastating blow

Epilogue: I got another email like this today, and then I looked up the paper and discovered that it was real, I had co-authored it and then forgotten about it

Pretty bold to include a hallucinated citation putatively written by the very person to whom you are applying

Your work on Gaussian processes for environmental modeling (“Active Learning of Environmental Models,” Osborne et al., 2012) and multi-objective optimization for sustainability trade-offs (“The Automation of Science,” King et al., 2009, with your contributions) directly informs my methodological approach. I propose: 1. Bayesian optimization to identify high-impact monitoring

My work is so influential that prospective PhD students are now being influenced by papers that an LLM thinks I wrote but actually did not

Efficacy of universal masking for source control and personal protection from simulated cough and exhaled aerosols in a room Face masks reduce the expulsion of respiratory aerosols produced during coughs and exhalations (“source control”). Factors such as the directions in which people are facing (orientation) and separation distance also affect aerosol dispersion. ...

You’d think so, but to my knowledge this question has only been addressed in lab settings e.g. Lindsley et al. (2021),
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC..., Patel et al. (2016)
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC....

Source control is more effective than receiver control (intuitively)

Thanks David! One-way masking in a FFP3 seems to be working for me, but I have other layers of protection in addition (regular vaccination, clean air)

ChrisFossArt.com – Chris Foss art, Chris Foss prints with unique customised sketches. Shop Shop Chris’ iconic images are available as prints from our shop Chris first experimented with airbrushes in the early 60’s and has become one of the most widely recognised artists using this m...

Came here to say this! Chris Foss is a legend chrisfossart.com

Haven’t been posting much, but I would like to confirm that I am still masking and still haven’t been reinfected with covid (funny how that works)

None of us play, but we would like to buy a piano keyboard for our kids: shouldn’t be top-of-the-line, but shouldn’t be junk, either. Any tips appreciated!

a lovely coastal scene with a red and white striped lifeguard station on a sandy beach. The foreground shows marram grass in the dunes, whilst offshore wind turbines are visible on the horizon. The dramatic cloudy sky adds atmosphere to the composition.

Copenhagen, 2024

🚨New AI Safety Course
@aims_oxford
!

I’m thrilled to launch a new called AI Safety & Alignment (AISAA) course on the foundations & frontier research of making advanced AI systems safe and aligned at
@UniofOxford

what to expect 👇
robots.ox.ac.uk/~fazl/aisaa/

Thank you! I wasn’t sure about your post and appreciate the explicit confirmation!

I don’t love the description of increasing autism diagnoses as an “epidemic”

As evidence for your theory, staff in shops often initiate conversations with me in English (unlike other customers), and the only reason i can imagine for why they do so is my mask

I am happy to defer to your judgement here—in addition to my visible privileges (gender, height), I’ve only lived in Aarhus, and only for a few months, which is unlikely to be representative

I am pretty sure that @brebis.bsky.social also lives in Denmark. My own 2p: no one else masks here, but I haven’t gotten any grief over my mask, either

Apes smart enough to figure out the various disciplines of complex science explaining how deeply they are screwing up the thin eggshell of biosphere that is their only plausible home, yet too dumb to do anything about it

I just got my Covid booster, and you should, too!

Multilayer pony
My little perceptron

Covid is still out there, and masks still work

21575 (crazy!)

5,290 papers will be published at NeurIPS this year. If you could still get the proceedings in a book, it would be like 50,000 pages long. That’s 14.5 papers a day to read each and every day until the next NeurIPS