Tiago Peixoto
@tiago.skewed.de
Statistical mechanic, secular Bayesian. Prof. of Complex Systems and Network Science @ Goethe University Frankfurt Head of the “Inverse Complexity Lab”. @invcomplexity.skewed.de https://skewed.de/lab (Personal account)
Great post by @manlius.bsky.social on the ongoing “debate” about higher-order representations.
Manlio De Domenico@manlius.bsky.social · 5d agoA HON is not strictly required by higher-order dynamics. Today, in this new #ComplexityThoughts we discuss how and whether it is the best scientific representation and under which conditions. This time we ask Newton and Kepler for some help. Read it here 👉 manlius.substack.com/p/when-is-a-...
A HON is not strictly required by higher-order dynamics. Today, in this new #ComplexityThoughts we discuss how and whether it is the best scientific representation and under which conditions. This time we ask Newton and Kepler for some help. Read it here 👉 manlius.substack.com/p/when-is-a-...
"Interdisciplinary science is just the embryonic stage of a new discipline. To value interdisciplinary science for its own sake is to value history over progress—that is, to value people's past training more than their current work." journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
“Antedisciplinary” Science
journals.plos.org
I think people really should understand — especially young researchers — that if you use LLMs to draft most of the text of your paper, then: 1. It is often entirely obvious that you did just that. 2. The quality of the generated text is often terrible, and it hurts to read it.
Mathematicians: “Math isn't really about proofs, it's about understanding!” Physicists: 👀 terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/i...
If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it
[This is a guest post by Grant Sanderson. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] A sentiment echoing throughout the mathematics communit…
terrytao.wordpress.com
Very misleading plot. Implies that the entropy is a function of a microstate, instead of a macrostate — a.k.a ensemble, or distribution.
Matt Henderson@matthen.com · 3w agowait- why does the entropy go down?
It was exactly ten years ago today, on my 33rd birthday, that I posted this comic online.
Approximating the Lorenz attractor with a chaotic leaky water wheel. The orange dot is the centre of mass of the water. It traces (a projection of) the familiar attractor as the wheel spins seemingly randomly left and right.
At ~$0.07/kWh for electricity alone, $22M buys ~310 million kWh. A human spending 100W on average consumes ~64,000 kWh in 75 years. So $22M corresponds to the lifetime metabolic energy of roughly 4,800 people. This is brute force, not intelligence.
Tiago Peixoto@tiago.skewed.de · 3w agoSome humans were already fooled by Eliza-like programs decades ago. I don't think we stand much of a chance against data-driven brute force at scale mascarading as intelligence. Most people can't intuitively grasp what $22M of computing power means. The AGI propaganda will be difficult to beat.
Some humans were already fooled by Eliza-like programs decades ago. I don't think we stand much of a chance against data-driven brute force at scale mascarading as intelligence. Most people can't intuitively grasp what $22M of computing power means. The AGI propaganda will be difficult to beat.
Trevor A. Branch@trevorabranch.bsky.social · 3w agoMillennium math problem solved by OpenAI may have "regurgitated" competitors unpublished work... also they spent more than $22 million in computing power in one week to scoop them. techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/o...
And you have to ask yourself: why was it worth $22M to them? Because to them math is just their most successful PR bid, (since the claims of AGI aren't sticking). They are betting that the (false) claim "We solved math, so we can solve everything" will gain them way more than $22M in market share.
Trevor A. Branch@trevorabranch.bsky.social · 3w agoMillennium math problem solved by OpenAI may have "regurgitated" competitors unpublished work... also they spent more than $22 million in computing power in one week to scoop them. techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/o...
Causal inference is the art of knowing exactly why your estimate isn't causal
“Almost everyone who ever lived was born recently, because population grew exponentially, so a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present.” According to this logic, either we are all outliers or our individual presence is this date is evidence for the end of the world coming soon.
Julia M. Rohrer@dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 4w agoFun little game in which a human life is randomly drawn for you. I ended up a girl, born in the Yangtze Basin in 670 CE. Died in infancy at 6 months 🥲 anyhumanever.com
*STRONG PARETO LAW* “If you don't see it, you don't have skin in the game, you idiot!”
This is remarkable. Marco Rubio stated, "Iranians are thieves. They cannot impose tolls on the Strait of Hormuz." In response, Abbas Araghchi remarked, "Consider the speaker. Approximately half of Venezuela's oil production is now directed to the United States. Who is truly the thief?"
An AI “hallucinating” is still pretty much science fiction, since it implies an internal experience. A much more accurate terminology would have been “AI confabulation”. But alas, we are stuck with bad terminology, such as sampling from a fitted LLM being called “inference”. 🤦♂️
William Gibson@greatdismal.bsky.social · 2mo agoThe idea of AI “hallucinating” is one I wish I’d had!
People of Clacton! Show your support for me by putting a bin outside your house, one day this week, of a colour of Tendring Council's choice. This will be unequivocal proof of the success of my campaign.
Die brasilianischen Präsidentschaftswahlen finden nun im Oktober statt, und Bolsonaros Sohn kandidiert und liegt in den Umfragen knapp auf dem zweiten Platz...
Christoph Bautz@christophbautz.bsky.social · 2mo agoWas für ein Signal der Hoffnung: Die Entwaldung des Amazonas - und damit der Lunge der Erde - ist fast gestoppt. Und das in einem Moment, wo das komplexe Ökosystem kurz vor einem irreversiblen Kipppunkt steht. So sieht konsequente und effektive Umweltpolitik aus, von der wir lernen können.
"Puzzles reveal the limits of AI. The missing Aha! moments" by Cris Moore. Gift link 🎁. A more humanistic view on the value of solving problems ourselves. iai.tv/articles/puz... #MathSky 🧪
Puzzles reveal the limits of AI
<p><em>Puzzles compress the experience of insight into miniature, letting us watch understanding take shape in real time. Computer scientist <strong>Cristopher Moore</strong> argues that while AI can ...
iai.tv
This story reflects a larger crisis in the field of Holocaust studies, about why we study the Shoah and what, if any, implications it should hold for the present. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
An Israeli professor lost a prestigious US job offer after speaking out on Gaza. Now the university is paying him $250,000
The University of Minnesota withdrew an offer for Raz Segal to lead its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies after an organized campaign against his hiring
theguardian.com
People rave about AI doing everything from proving theorems to finding bugs in software, etc, but by far the biggest boon to my productivity has been the ability to add my signature to PDFs directly from Firefox and Thunderbird with a few mouse clicks. What a time to be alive.
The carnage of brute force “intelligence”. futurism.com/artificial-i...
AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain
AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.
futurism.com
The members of my group gifted my a t-shirt commemorating 20 years of @graph-tool.skewed.de (counting from the first commit in 2006 during my PhD)! 🎉 Time passes just way too fast. 👨🦳
It's hard to express how weird and cool it was to think about virtual reality and the internet *before* it existed, while the USSR was still standing (even in the future predicted in the book). Reality turned out to be so much lamer; even if our computers have way more than 3 MB of *HOT RAM*.
Richard McElreath 🐈⬛@rmcelreath.bsky.social · 2mo agook I looked up the different editions and I am pretty sure this is the cover of the used paperback I had. so like 1985. you young people have no idea how cool this book was
Clustering a network with 1.5B edges using the nested SBM in parallel using 256 threads, with the newest @graph-tool.skewed.de version. 🚀
Wise words from @doctorow.pluralistic.net "'Post-political' movements are made up of people who don't know what politics are. A 'centrist' is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property." pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/w...
Eigentlich beruht das ganze Christentum auf einer Leihmutterschaft.
My investor told me he doesn't really see the moat in my plan. I explained that's the point. The glacis protects the base of the wall and obscures the ditch entirely. By the time the assault party reaches the counterscarp with fascines, they will be committed and under crossfire from grapeshot
