against interpolation
Physics PhD turned AI4Science postdoc at UWisconsin-Madison Data Science Institute. Gardening, banjo, roller derby, union organizing. Empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls 🏳️🌈 Opinions, bad jokes, etc. all mine. He/him, more or less.
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against interpolation
kobayashi maru walkthrough
Yep I made an alt for this and it's really great to compartmentalize TBH
I will never not get over the whiplash I felt when I discovered that the data analytics section on the official WFTDA statsbooks page features a bunch of plots that were made using ROOT, the niche particle physics analysis toolkit that we all kind of hate- this very much reminds me of that LMAO
"Tao is one of the most prominent mathematicians and academics to publicly oppose the administration’s actions, calling them an “existential threat” to his field, and academic science, more broadly. He said public advocacy is a priority over his research, for now." www.nbcnews.com/science/scie...
BRB, asking blueskygrok if this is also true
becoming the most hated physicist in the laboratory by saying "looks like somebody needs a HUGS Boson!" several times a day
Truly, our cities are riddled with criminals
Great Blue Heron from yesterday, one of the most unfriendliest birds that make a most horrid sound when they see humans: #birds #blue_heron #heron #nature
Gotta throw them at the window like pebbles
NEW WRITING: "What will you stay curious about, even when authoritarians try to shape your reality by telling you not to think, not to read, not to ask questions, not to dare consider the possibility that there’s more to life than this?" 🧪
This tweet lives in my head rent-free these days. Selena Gomez is Oreos, Sydney Sweeney is Pants, et cetera
I just found out there's a mushroom called Chicken of the Woods, and we all know about Chicken of the Sea, so I ask you: HOW MANY LOCATION-BASED CHICKENS ARE THERE?!
There are lots of things that we can say is perfect being the enemy of good! There are things we can wiggle on! Allowing trans people to be cast out of society IS NOT ONE OF THOSE THINGS!!!
OSHKOSH, WI: During a high-resolution sonar survey of the Fox River, the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association and Wisconsin Historical Society unexpectedly located the L.W. Crane—a 90-ft wooden steamboat built in 1865 that burned and sank in 1880. The wreck matches historic records.
What if we host another Floramerica and rebuild the Santa Maria and open a new City Center Mall on the site
I try to sharpen this by e.g. making a point to distinguish between LLMs as technology and LLMs as product. Studying LLMs can tell us some cool structural stuff about language (was Chomsky right?), but that's a very different use-case than letting them run DOGE or do people's homework
The thing is, though, most of the models that do stuff like tumor detection and text modeling and mass surveillance and Merlin birdsong ID and chatbots are all built in highly similar ways- they're not very different at all, ontologically. The distinction is mostly at the level of application
A lot of people are anxious about the proliferation of consumer LLMs, replacing artists with diffusion models, and computer-vision enabled surveillance- but are still fairly pro-NNs for things like tumor spotting and reading carbonized scrolls.
Personally I think so much of the "AI Discourse" is driven by terminology that is "technically correct" but not functionally useful. For example- the GenAI/Analytical AI distinction doesn't really make sense when often the only structural difference is just hotswapping the last few layers of a model
My Subway Hot Take is that city alderpeople should go back to spelling the job title as "ealdorman" because it makes everything seem chock full of Medieval High Drama
Imagine reporting a story about layoffs at your own news org and getting the circular PR runaround AND having to rely on an anonymous source for just the NUMBER of layoffs. That’s WPR/PBS WI: a place full of great people who deserve so much more from their leaders and institutional culture
I put the vicar in the moon hat, which I highly recommend
Monumentally shitty journalism: Dane County Jail officials *have not even claimed* that drugs in the mail have killed anyone. Yet here is @wkow27news.bsky.social offering a baseless exaggeration to jail officials’ scant claims. Copaganda upgrade plus
One man cannot, overnight, change a fact as written in thousands of copies of hundreds of different books across the world's libraries. But under pressure from the politicians or guided by his own depravity, he can rewrite history overnight by altering the output of the LLM he owns.
absolutely buck wild that as a child he had this kind of grasp on blocking and composition
Can I get a venti toilet paper, please
computer, end program
#FossilFriday A little tyrannosaurid skull which has never caused any controversy or conflict, CMNH 7541. A young Tyrannosaurus? (And the holotype of Nanotyrannus lancensis, regardless of the status of that genus and species). At the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Following qualitative inspection of 100 CV papers & 100 patents, we highlight two salient themes that emerged: 1. humans are subsumed under the term ‘objects’ 2. the field goes out of its way to obfuscate surveillance 8/
To get insight into linguistic evolution of the field,we compared the log odds ratios of word frequencies in paper titles from 1990s vs 2010s.We see a clear qualitative shift from generic application-ambiguous language in 1990s (‘shape’, ‘edge’) to a focus in 2010s on humans (‘action’, ‘person’) 4/
Exciting! Can you do Bell tests with this kind of setup?
sorry but this sucks. consolidation is ruining space. we used to have lots of places to get sucked into an event horizon beyond comprehension and soon it’s just gonna be one infinitely dense point of matter. count me out
Strunk & White stole all their ideas from that spider
Cannot understate how weird it is to go from zero to "I am in unexpected bodily contact with a mammal"
Sitting on my stoop this morning with my book and my yard chipmunk neighbor was so mad at this that he SPRINTED ACROSS MY FOOT
if your milk hotel is neutral in times of injustice, your milk hotel has chosen the side of the oppressor.
Have not seen it but knowing the ways that you are about superman, it seems pretty clear you'd dig it
🧵We're excited to announce a new section of the Cambridge Digital Library for the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection of Mediterranean embroideries. View the full collection: https://loom.ly/BPvABM4
Wondered what it would take for AI agents to design and test new theories for fundamental physics, just like a physicist? We show how, an example in neutrino model building! Paper with Jake, Max, Victoria, Jason leading crucial aspects, also @danielwhiteson.bsky.social . arxiv.org/abs/2506.08080
Scientists for Palestine is holding a school on quantum physics Palestinian students in Jordan in July, but they need donations to make it happen! 🇵🇸 www.scientists4palestine.org/palestinian-... www.gofundme.com/f/support-pa...
Introducing...your sneak peek at the cosmos captured by NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory! Can you guess these regions of sky? This is just a small peek...join us at 11am US EDT for your full First Look at how Rubin will #CaptureTheCosmos! 🔭🧪 #RubinFirstLook ls.st/rubin-first-look-livestream
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has just released some of its first images. Its powerful new telescope will be able to quickly spot previously unseen astronomical objects. https://n.pr/405DN8P
In honor of today's big science, I am currently eating a Very Reuben (Large Sauerkraut Sandwich Tonight)
"i asked chatgpt" yeah well i went to the doctor, i went to the mountains, i looked to the children, i drank from the fountains there's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line and the less I seek my source for some definitive closer I am to fine
Good morning
Shouldn't it be "An I"
Happy solstice, friends. Enjoy the stretch of sunshine and gather its gold for darker days.
More like niced tea. Because it's nice
Honestly, may we all be as cool as the WORT folks
One time my mom spent like an hour trying to identify a birdcall and it turned out to be the neighbor's lawnmower that he couldn't start
My partner & I were trying to ID a bird we heard while walking and the guy who had stopped his car to let us pass got out and was like "it's a frog, actually. Cope's Gray. I do frog surveys... Sorry" And then got in his car without a word and drove off. Absolute king
Word on the street is "bird on the street"
😢 OOF Thinking of ya, always down to chat if you need a friend!!!
Hornbills from ‘ Edinburgh journal of natural history and of the physical sciences, with the Animal kingdom of the Baron Cuvier,’ conducted by William MacGillivray, 1835-1839. UW-Madison Special Collections. #naturalhistory
Also with a Beckford-Rosebery provenance, Knud Leem, Beskrivelse over Finmarkens Lapper (Copenhagen, 1767), an account of travels among the Sami, at SD Auctions, Oslo (est NOK700,000-900,000) #c18th #c18 #18thc
Also, it's not like a particular organization has a monopoly on AI criticism/SciComm etc.; people who want to see something different can and should also write articles and blogs and stuff!!! Different voices have different roles to play in shaping the discourse; IMO the answer is more, not less
Excited for this! Go buy/read this book!!
Oooo what's the shelfmark?
Oh these are GORGEOUS
Huge fan of DAIR, huge fan of Room, very very excited for this
Bratwurst, mostly
I stand in solidarity with the nearly 1000 SEIU Meriter Hospital nurses in Madison, WI who are rightfully demanding fair pay, safe staffing ratios & improved safety measures. After over twenty bargaining sessions, Meriter Hospital needs to get serious and reach a contract now.
... We were definitely there at the same time lmao
the point of this is that the way forward is solidarity. collective action to resist authoritarianism works and it begins with an alliance of all university members - faculty, students, and administrators. they've beaten monarchs in the past and we can beat wannabe monarchs again in the future.
Small point of clarification from NSF source: "The single grant per institution for all fellows is a formality for ease of administration of money ... So this is a stop to Harvard being able to draw down the money but the students are still GRFP Fellows."
Pierre "save big money at" Menard, author of the Quixote
I'm very excited that we are able to expand our team. These are great jobs for those that want to be active in AI/ML and data science in a research environment and work on problems that have real-world impact. Spread the word!
Does it apply to coed leagues? Wondering if WFTDA will opt to merge with MRDA or something like it
In my experience, WFTDA will probably opt to drop the W before they turn their backs on trans folks.
Connectionsplus.io is great! It has a lot of custom boards
New Schattenblog-- Post 11: N-Spaces-- a brief one on the quantum physics of narratives, AI, Patinir, Warhol, and ripoff shrouds of Turin. schattenblog.avmarraccini.com/post-11
Northwestern has not received any NIH funds since March. No written communication about why or what can be done. Thank you Ben Singer for raising awareness at #ATS2025
I'm gonna keep on dancin at
Josiah McElheny, Modernity, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely, 2003 #artbots #moma https://botfrens.com/collections/14377/contents/1136957
this is well put, yes: "there is another hill right behind it."
It's out! We describe probable reptile tracks from the earliest Carboniferous of Australia. This pushes the amniote record back by some 35-40 million years and implies that the tetrapod crown group originated deep in the Late Devonian. The paper is Open Access. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Ghost stump
The Great Wisconsin Birdathon is well underway and we’re halfway to our goal and we need your help to keep flying! All proceeds support bird conservation, vital habitats, and the mission of the BIPOC Birding Club of Wisconsin. Thank you! 🤗 Donate here: charity.pledgeit.org/WIBirdathon2...
Congrats, doc!!!
Birding has ruined me- I just pressed the crosswalk button to cross a street and when it beeped I went "ooo black-capped chickadee!"
We're also a sunny and gizmo household!!! I love how you can tell them apart by the fact that one of them is slightly more frowny
Thinking about devastating cuts to NSF: US gov-funded science has been the engine upon which most of the tech wealth was generated. But the oligarchs (currently hoarding much of that $) think it’s their own brilliance & not the accident of standing close to the scientific engine that made them rich.
@saintsoftness.bsky.social has anyone done a good Horkheimer+Adorno and GenAI essay yet?
(I don't disagree with your take, mind you- but IMO the gut impulse of disgust when a dead actor gets AI-resurrected has a lot more to do with the fact that the models are built by large companies in unscrupulous ways, so it's not clear whose values are going into the artistic process)
But there *are* people involved at every step- people built the models, people generated the data used to train the models, people ran the models and postprocessed the outputs. Humans built and ran the tools, they didn't spring forth from a vacuum
I’m really only just getting into it but I genuinely love birding as a hobby. The entire goal is to look at the bird. Is there a bird? There is a bird! Look at the bird! If you are very keen you can learn what to call the bird so that you can properly thank it for the joy you feel when you see it. 🪶
When you live in NE Ohio, the Kent State shooting is more of a living memory than history, not only on May 4th but throughout the year. For better and worse, that event shaped and continues to shape the region. The past is never dead, it's not even past. 🗃️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Pr...
new gender neutral greeting just dropped
Happy May Day, join your union ✊🏻 youtu.be/R8eK9ZXf-Ow?...
Paging @cosmolooney.bsky.social
I will be very annoyed if they're taking a legitimately good data analytics problem that you could solve by hiring one passionate data/ML scientist and just... feeding it into ChatGPT
The only way I can think of this making sense is if it's a simulator or something? Otherwise it's a great use case for a graph neural network or something like it, but those usually aren't considered generative
Once again, I was left to wonder: was Pete Hegseth signal chatting military attack plans to everyone but me?? Am I the one that’s insecure, or is it his communication practices that are insecure?
For #Easter, a #Roman metal brooch in the shape of a rabbit (or hare), with traces of its original enamel decoration still adding a splash of colour. Animal-themed jewellery was popular in the Roman world, especially brooches 🐇 AncientBlueSky #Archaeology #RomanArchaeology #HappyEaster
I sincerely hope that going forward if we ever make it out of this mess, academia won't penalize students for their graduation timing like it basically did during early COVID. So many of the "years since X" clocks assume a normal job/admissions market and that is very much not the world we are in
