Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Byron Galbraith @intrinsicmode.com · Jun 16

Happy Father's Day! Hope you're back home by now

Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Jo Wood @jwolondon.bsky.social · Jun 15

@dtemkin.bsky.social 's Rivulet esolang prompts ideas around code and #datavis comprehension. How do we make sense of visualizations when we are unfamiliar with the 'grammar' of their design?

An introduction Rivulet:

observablehq.com/@jwolondon/r...

An editor:

observablehq.com/@jwolondon/r...

A Rivulet program in the form of coloured lines meandering over a yellow background with faint grey gridlines. The red line on the left traces a vaguely stag-like image with three-tined 'antlers'. On the right are orange, green and blue lines tracing a vaguely castle or maze-like structure with crenellations on the top edge.

The program calculates the factorial of some input value, which in this case is 7! =5,040.

The Rivulet source is

1 ╵╰─ ╵╵╰──╮
2 ╮ ╮ ╭ ─╯╷
3 ╮╷ ─╮│ │╭──╯
5 │╭ ╭╶╵╰─╯│ │╷
7 ─╮ ╭─ ││ │ ╰───╯ │╰──│
11 ╭─ │ │ ╭─ │╰─╯ ╭ ╰───╯╷
13 │ │ ╭─│ │╭─│ ╭─╮│
17 │ ╭──╯╭───╯ │╭────╯│ │ │ ││
19 │╭──╯ ╭─╯╭────╯│ │ ╰───╮ │ ││
23 ╰───╯╯ ╯ ╯ ╮╯ ╰───╯╮ ─╮╷ │╴╯│
29 ╰─── ╰───╯ ╭╯ ─╯
31 ╭ ╭╯
37 │ ╭─╯
41 ╰─╯
43 ╷

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · Jun 12

Good Science

xkcd.com/3101/

5-panel comic. (1) [teacher with long hair next to whiteboard] TEACHER: I’m supposed to give you the tools to do good science. (2) [teacher addressing students] But what *are* those tools? Methodology is hard and there are so many ways to get incorrect results. What is the magic ingredient that makes for good science? (3) TEACHER: To figure it out, I ran a regression with all the factors people say are important: [embedded list in sub-panel, cut off at end] Outcome variable: correct scientific results. Predictors: collaboration; skepticism of others’ claims; questioning your own beliefs; trying to falsify hypotheses; checking citations; statistical rigor; blinded analysis; financial disclosure; open data (4) TEACHER: The regression says two ingredients are the most crucial: 1) genuine curiosity about the answer to a question, and 2) ammonium hydroxide. (5) STUDENT: Wait, why did *ammonia* score so high? How did it even get on the list? LONG HAIR: ...And now you’re doing good science!

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Popehat Agitates And Irritates @kenwhite.bsky.social · Jun 6

If a seven-year-old can’t walk to the store the fault lies not with the parents but with the community.

How-Sen Chong @how-sen.com · Jun 6

In order to eliminate any inconvenience to cars, we’ve made it illegal for children to be children

NBC News

Parents are charged after their son, 7, is struck dead in a car accident.

Gastonia, N.C., police charged the parents with involuntary manslaughter charges after allowing the victim and his brother to walk home alone from a nearby grocery store.

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Neuromatch @neuromatch.bsky.social · Jun 6

The Neuromatch #ImpactScholars Program is a global initiative that provides early-career researchers with hands-on mentorship, collaborative project work, & next steps to grow as
computational scientists.

🤓 Berilsu Öner shares her #MyNeuromatchStory
⬇️
buff.ly/MBxDOJf

#Neuromatch #Neuroscience

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · Jun 4

Finally finished reading Eshraghian et al guide to training SNNs, and wow. It's one of those review papers that feel so generous. Full of insights that could each generate entire research programmes, but rather than hoarding, they shared it with us all.

arxiv.org/abs/2109.12894

Training Spiking Neural Networks Using Lessons From Deep Learning

The brain is the perfect place to look for inspiration to develop more efficient neural networks. The inner workings of our synapses and neurons provide a glimpse at what the future of deep learning m...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · May 21

Would it hurt people in tech to go and *talk* to someone with a degree in education? Most people don't understand what schools do. TL;DR: it's a lot more than info dumping into student's heads and it is certainly a lot more than daycare.

Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · May 20

Ok well this sentiment from Luis von Ahn is absolutely gross. I will not be giving Duolingo any more money. AI first: 🤮 fortune.com/2025/05/20/d...

He predicted education would radically change, because “it’s just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.”

“By the way, that doesn’t mean the teachers are going to go away, you still need people to take care of the students,” he added. “I also don’t think schools are going to go away, because you still need childcare.”

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Byron Galbraith @intrinsicmode.com · May 15

It's just one dude's house that he's done this crazy art around, but it's definitely worth a quick visit.

Phipps conservatory is also always nice.

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Byron Galbraith @intrinsicmode.com · May 15

Randyland randyland.club

Randyland: Art Museum in Pittsburgh, PA

Explore the vibrant world of Randyland, Pittsburgh's premier art museum! Immerse yourself in a kaleidoscope of colors, creativity, and culture at this must-see attraction in Pennsylvania.

randyland.club

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

John Bull @garius.bsky.social · May 9

Was at a conference dinner a while back and one guy said "The future is AI. It doesn't replace senior developers, but no more need for juniors."

To which i replied:

"Where do you think senior developers come from. Straight from the womb?"

He went quiet, then wandered off to a different huddle.

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · May 8

Yesterday it was a middle aged woman in my gym doing the same thing. Talking a young man’s ear off about how much chatGPT helps her do her work. Charts and writing — “i’m not good at that and now i don’t need someone in the org flow to do it”.

Siddhartha Mitter @siddharthamitter.bsky.social · May 8

On the C train in Manhattan, two women — middle age, business look, clearly lawyers from the conversation — going on and on about ChatGPT. Helping them do research, write briefs, even plant a garden at home! So quick and easy!

Ugghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Rob Sheridan @rob-sheridan.com · May 5

Bring physical buttons back on absolutely everything. Clicking, snapping, tactile friction. Chunky single-purpose electronics. Retreat from the gesture-based app-connected hellworld of the 2010s into the warm sensory embrace of the retrofuture 1980s

WIRED @wired.com · May 5

Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars.

Finally the auto industry is coming to its senses. Real buttons are sooooooo back baby!

Rejoice! Carmakers Are Embracing Physical Buttons Again

Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its sen...

www.wired.com

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Sander Dieleman @sedielem.bsky.social · Apr 25

One weird trick for better diffusion models: concatenate some DINOv2 features to your latent channels!

Combining latents with PCA components extracted from DINOv2 features yields faster training and better samples. Also enables a new guidance strategy. Simple and effective!

Thodoris Kouzelis @nicolabourbaki.bsky.social · Apr 25

1/n Introducing ReDi (Representation Diffusion): a new generative approach that leverages a diffusion model to jointly capture
– Low-level image details (via VAE latents)
– High-level semantic features (via DINOv2)🧵

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Byron Galbraith @intrinsicmode.com · Apr 18

Today I was able to have an LLM generate a midi bass line, have it loop that on my synth via MCP, and then jam on that on my drum kit. This is the start of something exciting

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · Apr 15

As long as universities continue to have their main role be "ticket to middle class," it'd be insane to expect them to serve classical liberal education functions. It's too late, but I think things would be a lot better if job-prep and preserving the Great Conversation were separate institutions.

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · Apr 12

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

David D. Levine @daviddlevine.com · Apr 12

LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

: Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'

www.theregister.com

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · Apr 10

It turns out to be hard to evaluate natural language with natural language. What should we take away from the conundrum of LLM evaluation? www.argmin.net/p/evaluation...

Evaluation or Valuation

The infinite regress of evaluating large language models

www.argmin.net

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · Apr 8

Good presentation that makes sense of a messy research landscape.

Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · Apr 8

I gave another talk last friday at the USC ISI on some thoughts on RLVR and what to try with it. Not a ton new in here, but going over the challenges and tradeoffs we are working through right now (along with more discussion on some of those new GRPO variants). Slides in YT desc.

Experimenting with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)

Here's the latest talk I gave, last friday at the USC Information Sciences Institute. It's a slightly more technical version of the RL talks I've been giving...

buff.ly

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Hilary Mason @hmason.bsky.social · Apr 5

This Github ticket is the kind of proposal that inexperienced engineers tend to make, because they think it's about code, and not about the humans who use the system.

In any competent organization, these junior folks would get some very direct feedback and it would be a growth moment.

Waldo Jaquith @waldo.net · Apr 5

This is profoundly ignorant stuff. www.wired.com/story/doge-d...

In a GitHub ticket viewed by WIRED, Lavingia also suggested abandoning Drupal, a content management system (CMS) that the VA uses for publishing updates and information about the agency and the services it provides on VA facility websites. “I think we should consider removing Drupal as part of our workflow, and all content should just live in the codebase,” he wrote.

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Mor Naaman @informor.bsky.social · Apr 2

Stop everything you are doing and review the best Open Data chart you will see all year.

Credit: @nkgarg.bsky.social's lab

Kenny Peng @kennypeng.bsky.social · Apr 2

2) The dog name/baby name scatter plot: Max and Charlie are more dog name than human name. Dogs aren't called Ethan though.

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · Apr 2

We went through this in the 2010s. The Turing Test is a thought experiment for Turing to grapple with the fact that no one could define “intelligence” so he tried to operationalize it and gave the Imitation Game as as example. It was never meant to be conducted. The method is under-controlled.

Gary Marcus @garymarcus.bsky.social · Apr 2

Rumor has it the Turing Test has been solved. Don’t believe everything you read.

ChatGPT hasn’t really just passed the Turing Test, and it would scarcely matter if it did.

I explain why, here:

open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

AI has (sort of) passed the Turing Test; here’s why that hardly matters

Don’t panic

open.substack.com

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Rob Sheridan @rob-sheridan.com · Mar 28

20 years ago, Nine Inch Nails “The Hand That Feeds,” the first music video I directed. To celebrate this anniversary, I have constructed this immersive 2005 simulator to transport you to an authentic media viewing experience of the distant past.

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Konrad Kording @kordinglab.bsky.social · Mar 26

Accepting “the bitter lesson” and embracing the brain’s complexity by Dyer and Richards. Great article! www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/acce...

» Accepting “the bitter lesson” and embracing the brain’s complexity Close menuMenuClose menuSpectrum logoYouTubeBlueskyMastodonYouTubeBlueskyMastodon

www.thetransmitter.org

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · Mar 25

This is fun - training NNs using only biases works well!

Ezekiel Williams @ezekielwilliams.bsky.social · Mar 25

1/7: Super excited to share our new paper! This one should be of interest to neuroscientists and deep learning theory folks. This paper was a collaboration with Alexandre Payeur, @averyryoo.bsky.social, Thomas Jiralerspong, @mattperich.bsky.social, Luca Mazzucato, @glajoie.bsky.social

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Daniel Temkin @dtemkin.bsky.social · Mar 25

Rivulet is a language that prioritizes flow. Its script was influenced by mazes, space-filling algorithms, Anni Albers' Meander series, calligraphy-friendly conlangs and natlangs

This program calculates the first set of Fibonacci numbers, stopping at 21.

It can be found at github.com/rottytoot...

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Reposted by Byron Galbraith

Hilary Mason @hmason.bsky.social · Mar 22

A friend pointed out that the quasi-religious way so many tech guys talk about AI is in part because they don't want to grapple with the guilt of what they do; AI is a God, AI will fix it. No need to be responsible for what you put in the world.

I can't stop thinking about that.

Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social · Mar 22

The most dangerous thing about AI chat bots is how many men with political power treat them *exactly* and unquestioningly like actual Ancient Greek oracles.

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