Using AI to cure cancer or fight climate change makes as much sense as using neuroscience to figure out AI. It's all yak shaving. If your goal is to "solve X" just go solve X, don't try to solve Y then use Y to solve X.

This is an awesome discovery: A single-celled organism with no brain called Stentor seems capable of Pavlovian learning. Yes, it can actually learn to associate two things despite having no neurons. My latest for @newscientist.com. 🧪 #science #memory #learning www.newscientist.com/article/2519...

Single-celled organism with no brain is capable of Pavlovian learning

A trumpet-shaped, single-celled organism seems able to predict one thing will follow another, hinting that such associative learning emerged long before multicellular nervous systems

newscientist.com

I miss when ideas mattered in machine learning.

NEW ANALYSIS: China's CO2 has now been 'flat or falling' for 21 months * Down in 2025 * Still below Mar 2024 * Clean energy wave a key factor If this is China's peak (TBC) it's the climate story of the century so far… www.carbonbrief.org/...

This you, @truebe.horse ? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...

One year, and we're on the brink of war with the rest of NATO. God help us after three more years of this.

I'm not really sure how to square this with the US spending 1% of GDP on datacenter construction.

Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈@josephpolitano.bsky.social · 7mo ago

The US is losing blue-collar jobs for the first time since the early pandemic—year-on-year job losses have hit 145k as manufacturing, transportation, & mining industries lose jobs at a rapid pace while growth in construction has nearly zeroed out

If anyone DMed me recently - to use DMs for this app in the UK, I have to go through age verification, which I have not done yet on principle. If you are trying to reach me privately, email or Twitter DM works.

I'm starting to think The Blob might not have been such a bad thing after all.

Excited to share our latest preprint, on using deep learning to extract the weird fractional quantum statistics of 2D topological materials: arxiv.org/abs/2512.15872

Extracting Anyon Statistics from Neural Network Fractional Quantum Hall States

Fractional quantum Hall states host emergent anyons with exotic exchange statistics, but obtaining direct access to their topological properties in real systems remains a challenge. Neural-network wav...

arxiv.org

Not sure why they bother asking for my age on this app, everyone knows everyone on Bluesky is exactly 39.

I am not at NeurIPS.

The first recorded case of COVID-19 was on November 30, 2019. ChatGPT launched to the public on November 30, 2022. What new horror was unleashed on the world yesterday?

I'm a bit surprised that in the era of conversational LLMs, there hasn't been a revival of interest in the art world in Cohen, Frank and Ippolito's "Argument Drawings" www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/ric...

Utterance Is Place Enough | Frances Richard

Mapping conversation

cabinetmagazine.org

New (sort of) preprint on arXiv today: a generalized bias-variance decomposition for Bregman divergences! arxiv.org/abs/2511.08789

A Generalized Bias-Variance Decomposition for Bregman Divergences

The bias-variance decomposition is a central result in statistics and machine learning, but is typically presented only for the squared error. We present a generalization of the bias-variance decompos...

arxiv.org

Trump's approval rating is now roughly comparable to what it was in mid-2020, at the height of COVID unemployment and George Floyd protests.

I think that we should all strive to live our lives in such a way that, when we die, our greatest accomplishments are not overshadowed by constant bickering about exactly how racist or sexist we were.

I think every one of my ML colleagues from a decade ago who stayed in academia and avoided the AGI/LLM race is now doing "AI for science". Really feels like those are the only two options left.

I feel like these Catholic converts who think they can argue with the Pope just did not do their research. If they want a religion where they can argue nonstop with everyone, up to and including God, they would obviously be better served by converting to Judaism.

Sharon 🪳🌹@sharonk.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Just checked on ClearSky and I'm not on a single blocklist and now I'm worried that I'm not influential enough.

Joel is on a mission to get the EA/rationalist set to embrace Rortyian pragmatism. It's a tough job but someone's gotta do it.

Joel Z Leibo@jzleibo.bsky.social · 9mo ago

[1/9] Excited to share our new paper "A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood" published today. We feel this topic is timely, and rapidly growing in importance as AI becomes agentic, as AI agents integrate further into the economy, and as more and more users encounter AI.

If things become so polarized that anything "AI", no matter how broadly construed, becomes knee-jerk associated with the Trumpian right wing, I should probably just kms. www.axios.com/2025/10/31/m...

Behind the Curtain: Anti-AI socialism could be Democrats' future

This climate is ripe for an anti-AI socialist to emerge as a counter to Trump.

axios.com

I can't believe how fast they went from "removing this cookie-cutter statue is erasing history" to "well, the East Wing was kind of shabby anyway".

Even the Jacobins didn't tear down Versailles. They sold off the furniture and let it fall into disrepair, but they didn't just knock down a whole wing.

Very excited to be able to talk about something I've been working on for a while now - we're working with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, IMO the leading fusion startup in the world, to take our work on AI and tokamaks and make it work at the frontier of fusion energy. deepmind.google/discover/blo...

Google DeepMind is bringing AI to the next generation of fusion energy

We’re announcing our research partnership with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to bring clean, safe, limitless fusion energy closer to reality with our advanced AI systems. This partnership...

deepmind.google

Obviously everyone on Bluesky is going to hate on this because it involves Musk, but the idea of using next-token-predictors (which LLMs are an instance of) to help the disabled communicate has a long history: www.inference.org.uk/dasher/Speci...

Laura Jedeed@laurajedeed.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Hi hello did you know that Elon Musk's third Neuralink patient (previously nonverbal) is "getting help from Grok" to communicate and I hope -- I REALLY HOPE -- he's not stuck in his own brain listening as a robot talks for him without his input because this, to me, would be worse than death

Trump basically forgot about the whole annexing Canada thing after like three months and hasn't mentioned it in ages, but America's reputation in Canada has been destroyed for a generation. Just one of a million sad stupid pointless things from the last year.

Even I’m not sure this will end well. Graphics courtesy of Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis.

The fate of the global economy hinges on whether the AGI race is the Manhattan Project or the Philosopher's Stone.

So IIUC, the position of the UK government is that Israel's actions in Gaza are so grave that there must be immediate recognition for a Palestinian state, but also that if you wear a shirt that says "Palestine Action" you are supporting a terrorist organization and should be arrested.