Was asked today “what is ‘Balboa?’” and answered that it was a Caribbean island named after a 16th century Portuguese general etc. before pausing to acknowledge that these assertions were based only in a vague feeling of plausibility rather than fact and this is how I discovered that I am an LLM.

Had a chat with my dad after Thanksgiving dinner about AI. He said "My view of AI is that it is like the universe; it continuously grows and expands as it learns new things. But is there a limit to how much it can grow or what it can do?"

Aside from energy and data storage, 3 limits came to mind.

Found a cool simulation tool for robotics development!

Fibonacci spiral by the artist Anita Chowdry, based on medieval Iranian and Mughal illustrations, 2012.

There are now several benchmarks testing spatial reasoning and agent capabilities of LLMs and VLMs:

- arxiv.org/abs/2410.06468 (does spatial cognition ...)
- arxiv.org/abs/2307.06281 (MMBench)
- arxiv.org/abs/2411.13543 (BALROG) - additional points for the LOTR ref.

Kind of a broken record here but proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/...
is totally fascinating in that it postulates two underlying, measurable structures that you can use to assess if RL will be easy or hard in an environment

Adding my love letter to

arxiv.org/pdf/2304.01315

Empirical Design in Reinforcement Learning
by
Andrew Patterson, Samuel Neumann, Martha White, Adam White

JMLR 25 (2024) 1-63
#ReinforcementLearning

These aren’t the heroes we deserve, but they are the heroes we need.

I am enthralled by the critical role that truth plays in human society. In the Information Age it has become clear that nations live and die on truth and lies. It is a topic that I rarely see discussed on popular media outlets.

This is the first time that I want to finish a book purely out of spite. It is simultaneously motivating and frightening to know that such baseless drivel can be so widely published. I’ll be writing a critical analysis of this for months to come.

Learning about Graph SLAM in my probabilistic robotics course. The more I learn about CS, the more I’m convinced that anything and everything can be represented by a graph structure.

D&D Combinatorics xkcd.com/3015

Why so many clever robotics algorithms don't scale

Reminds me of when I was in college. I used to get a chipotle chicken loaded griller (small burrito) from Taco Bell and hide it in the interior pocket of my parka to keep warm. I often forgot about it, only to remember it mid-conversation and whip it out to snack on. The looks I would get.

As a previous controls engineer, the electronic props and set design in Alien Romulus is just …

Levar Burton's work, Aftermath, pulling no punches from page one and feeling very timely right now.

(Also, I should mention that there is a metric ton of trigger warnings for readers of this novel) 📚💙

no more live action video game movies unless it’s tony hawk pro skater. all the background characters are played by tony hawk except tony hawk who’s played by jeremy allen white

#ComputerScience students use #MinecraftEDU in the #Python language to place real Minecraft blocks.
First, we used say commands for the elements in the array using a loop. Then we placed them. Nested loops made walls. Next, random blocks will be selected from the list.
#EduSky @edusky.bsky.social

IT IS DONE. Series 2 of HTTCS the Pod launches at 2pm today... Subscribe now and turn on notifications at pod.httcs.online
#TeamCompSci #UKEd #Computing #ComputerScience #CSEd