Jonathan Cheng
@jonathancheng.bsky.social
English Literature PhD turned ML Researcher. I convert cold brews into noisy experiments. Foundation Models @ Apple NYC 🏳️🌈
The phrase “I’ll finally get a break after <mask> is done” needs to be removed from my training data. It really shouldn’t pass any factuality or quality filter.
Which all just reeks of what happens when a status order gets upended by some new technique. Basically everyone who is under threat runs around shouting “Never mind what I appeared to value before, what I *really* value is this incredibly intangible thing I possess that also preserves my status”.
New from our lab! #COLM2026 When people generate stories, they don't just write one prompt. Instead, they explore narrative space via branching edits 🌱 We reconstruct 24k of these edit trees 🌳 from chat logs and map edit types, story formats, how they relate to tree depth, and more!
Advait Deshmukh@advaitdeshmukh.com · 3w ago1/7 In 1941, Borges imagined an impossible novel that follows all narrative branches at once. Today, we can observe chatbot users exploring narrative possibilities as they repeatedly edit story prompts. In our COLM 2026 paper, we studied this branching exploration via the WildChat dataset. 🧵
My facial expression when I wake up to wandb graphs that *do not* match my expectations.
This paper and its predecessor have just been a joy to read.
alphaXiv@alphaxiv.org · 3w agoOn-Policy Distillation is surprisingly data-efficient, with a single query recovering 72% of the full-data gain because rollouts already cover 71.5% of the relevant state space. So the bottleneck is how slowly the student absorbs dense token-level teacher supervision www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2609.04172
I just happened upon Babymetal and the song Ratatata. And the people in my life are not ready for this to become my whole personality.
It’s been a long week, but my god. Silent hill returning to its New England-Rust Belt Gothic roots. Still not sure why Japanese renderings of Centralia was such a thrill for my pre-teen self 😂 youtu.be/df9v2l1kEx8?...
Silent Hill Townfall - Official Gameplay Trailer
YouTube video by IGN
youtu.be
Someone asked me what my ideal work environment looks like. And all I can imagine is me swiveling my chair, with a valley girl accent, saying “you already tried to increase the batch size, don’t do it, girlfriend!🌸”
Claude just now: “the file you remember exists — as a tombstone.” …Jesus, Claude. Surely my files are not *so* dire?
TIL that my dad, who wasn’t close with biological parents, was wrong about his genealogy. He always thought he was 1/2 Spanish, 1/2 Chinese. TIL I learned that I’m 1/4 Peruvian! And I have a bunch of cousins in Peru and *Wales* 😂
Just learned that a much smarter member of my team did their BA in English. And, boy oh boy, I’m about to become *very* annoying.
The passage describing the wall of contorted, angry statues was foreshadowing…of bsky’s displeasure towards someone not liking Piranesi. So it’s more like a Hall. In the southwest wing, in the year the albatrosses arrived.
Ryan Moulton@moultano.bsky.social · 2mo agoThis is the way that Bluesky is a bubble. Everyone loves Piranesi. Everyone goes crazy when someone new reads Piranesi.
Something, something rl gym environments.
Eris@isolyth.dev · 2mo agoAgent who just REALLY wants you to lift, bro
Got around to reading Piransei. Anyone who saw me on the subway, would’ve seen me *really* trying to get into it. My take: The Book is a Hall of great Beauty in which very little happens. I walked its length twice and found the same Statues, and the Tide, when it came, did not carry me anywhere.
Oh sure, if *I* watch videos in bed for 30 mins, it’s a “bad habit.” But if a model watches pedabytes of videos it’s “sft?” Life is so unfair.
About to pose the classic weeb dilemma to my partner, would you rather watch: * a deeply serious and beautifully animated film about an aging Japanese actress * or… an anime about an idiosyncratic teenager using his power to usurp an American empire — also, robot fights!
TIL Stonington Burrow contains one of TSwift’s homes and, perhaps more importantly, a nautical art museum! I’ve learned that “haunted galley” is generally what I’m looking for.
Saw a bunch of these ship heads at a boat building in Mystic today. Thinking things like, “first arcade fighter?” “Which character would I choose?”
if you think students will be routinely collaborating with LLMs after graduation, #1 priority is to study rhetoric because you need to recognize BS and critique the rigor of an argument that *looks* good. the elite users are going to be like, philosophy, classics, and english majors.
Yale, I’m not gonna lie, you’ve got it real good. 😂
Just watched Six the musical, and I’ve discovered: 1) the closer a musical is to a concert, the more I prefer it 2) Kirstin Maldonado from Pentatonix is one of the cast members right now!!! I think my favorite musical experience I’ve ever had?
Tonight marks the first night my partner and I are cheering for very different teams tonight. Lord save this household 😂
Upsides of heatwave, sneaking into usually busy restaurant, staring into David Bowie’s eyes. Downsides, *faints*
New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜
The confluence of surviving gargantuan deadlines, catching up on research I wanted to do, and bingeing the new Olivia Rodrigo album is really, really hitting the right way. Oh, what’s that? Sun is shining, iced coffee in hand, and all my training jobs are emitting healthy logs? *skips*