2/ But I have one good argument left. Today, I had a parameter optimization problem where I couldn’t observe the function and needed to use human raters who could only say which inputs should give higher values. If I did not know how RLHF worked I would not have “seen this problem before.”
1/ I am constantly droning on about how AI ppl need to understand what their models are doing. I am starting to lose the battle when it comes to model selection - “I can just ask Claude and it will select the right model for me, so stfu about me needing to understand what it is doing.”
Let me ask the question that is going to have me burn on the pyre: why do we need models to learn good representations already? Why does it matter?
My take on possible oil scenarios & conflict in Middle East. Inspired by Jurassic Park and Jeff Goldblum’s explanation of chaos theory. This one hit close to home as I know too well tail risks. My mom cried - should have warned her first. Lots of humility amidst uncertainty.
I really hope that this does not turn out to be a Claude targeting mistake. We will likely never know, but this is precisely the reason that Dario did not want Anthropic tech used without humans in the loop.
Wow
This looks interesting. I have always hated vector databases because they force stock embeddings.
github.com/GoogleCloudP...
A little faded, but still there.
I thought about taking the flag down today out of shame. But then I worried about what my neighbors would think - not in the way one normally uses that phrase. I was afraid that they would think that I had given up. I am not going to give up on my neighbors.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Saw this in dead trees version which is ancient by now, but the approach is cute. Claude Sonnet 3.5 smokes same epoch other models on 0-shot slop classification. Error rates are not impressive though.
otava.apache.org
Great to see leading performance engineering tools coming to the ASF
Rattler security
After clearing 2 rodent nests there, we were actually happy to find “security” under the AC unit yesterday. Loud rattle is a plus.
When I get bored with science, it's because I've read the same paper three times from different authors whose media diet consists of corporate PR releases and unhinged slop summaries for viral arxiv drops.
I don’t think it is so much devaluing as over-simplifying. Claude can do amazing things with code because the language is so simple and good prompts can be translated into that low-dimensional space easily. The mistake is thinking that, like (some) code geniuses, that must mean it can think.
It’s hard to image any leadership job in any company where Trump’s no plan, grab-ass leadership style would not get you fired. This is so embarrassing.
Go work with Ted. You will learn something.
Integrating AI-driven risk detection with scheduling systems could enable construction projects to automatically adjust plans in response to emerging issues, potentially reducing delays and improving resilience.
I am tempted to try the problem :)
Beautiful day for a run
www.quantamagazine.org/the-man-who-...
This article really bugs me. Missed opportunity to explain the arguments. Smear piece distracting from what must have been a great collaboration. I expect more from Quanta.
gist.github.com/dollspace-ga...
We can actually do this kind of thing now. Let’s harvest the AI surplus to improve software quality.
Any sufficiently large k-nn is indistinguishable from magic
🧙♂️
When a company in an industry built on hype tells you that a use case is a bad idea—and actually dangerous—that means it’s a *catastrophically* bad idea.
While whiskey Pete plays army with Grokk and shoots at speedboats, our defenses against today’s actual imminent threats fall into disrepair.
Now THAT's a headline.
"The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents"
fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...
Did ChatGPT write this talking point for you, Sam?
Or do you just *organically* suck this bad?
By the numbers Here’s where the cryptocurrency industry stands, early into the 2026 election cycle: $288 million: Total cryptocurrency industry spending toward the 2026 election cycle to date. This includes funds sent to pro-crypto PACs, direct contributions to candidates, and contributions to non-crypto PACs.a $221 million: Cash on hand with pro-crypto super PACs, ready to deploy in the midterms $100 million: Additional committed funds that pro-crypto PACs say they have secured but haven’t yet appeared in FEC filings $3 million: Already spent by pro-crypto super PACs in the 2026 cycle, primarily on special elections in Florida and Virginia $74 million: Contributions to Trump PACs in the 2026 cycle by crypto companies and executives
Here’s where the cryptocurrency industry stands, early into the 2026 election cycle:
• $288 million: Total cryptocurrency industry spending
• $221 million: Cash on hand with pro-crypto super PACs
• $100 million: Additional committed funds
• $3 million: Already spent by pro-crypto super PACs
In our new preprint, we explain how some salient features of representational geometry in language modeling originate from a single principle - translation symmetry in the statistics of data.
arxiv.org/abs/2602.150...
With Dhruva Karkada, Daniel Korchinski, Andres Nava, & Matthieu Wyart.
