This toot from Charlie Gao about the new release of {mirai} (R’s newest async evaluation framework) mentions the new function race_mirai() which > returns as soon as the first mirai you pass to it resolves. This supports more async usage patterns in #RStats.This caught my attention, partly because I’ve been thinking about “alternate pathway” designs recently, albeit in a very different context. I saw the latest paper from Thinking Machines Lab titled ‘Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference’ and the header “image” (actually a complex svg, not a rasterised image) for that shows the result of an LLM annotated with alternatives which were not selected (but might have been with higher temperature) and their ‘score’ for how likely they were to be selected (presumably)This reminded me of Tufte’s graphical sentences, apparently in his book ‘Seeing with Fresh Eyes’ but which I could only find one blog post referencing.

Calculating the nth roots of unity in R and Julia