Modern search: “You came looking for X, but wouldn’t you rather spend some time on the more addictive Y?”

We could try to build a very expensive high energy quantum computer ring under Paris

Dank Kompositionalität lernt man das Einmaleins aber nicht mehr das Einmaleinmaleins

Probability theory causes a certain mathematical inflation: random variables are functions, events are sets, and probabilities are countably additive set functions of total mass one defined on σ-algebras.

Gaurav Arya’s presentation at PLDI'26 on "Gradient Estimation as Probabilistic Inference" bringing sound, compositional and automatic gradient estimation for expectations in probabilistic programs. Great job, Gaurav!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aWz...

[PLDI 2026] Flatirons 3 - PLDI Research Papers (Jun 19th)

YouTube video by ACM SIGPLAN

youtube.com

No feeling like arguing for 40 minutes with a confident idiot, only to realize they were right for all the wrong reasons. [1.2em]

Zorn's lemma: Transfinite induction as a service

arXiv📈🤖 The Difference Between "Replicable" and "Not replicable" is not Itself Scientifically Replicable By Devezer, Buzbas

arXiv📈🤖 Betting on Bets: Anytime-Valid Tests for Stochastic Dominance By Arnold, Choe, Scarsini et al

Yes, that's the contrast of interest The relevant observations are imo 1. MH is a causal inference problem first and a probability problem second, and 2. the association usually called collider bias is information you can make use of for decision rather than just being, as it normally is, a problem

Dust behaves as if someone put a minus sign in front of the Laplacian: dust ends up in the corners instead of spread out.

This is basically my villain origin story. "How old are you?" (unique responses)

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

At a technical university the steps of Pearl’s ladder are called stochastics, stochastic control and optimal transport

Causal inference is often hidden in plain sight. In a randomized clinical trial, the setup is such that interventional and conditional distributions coincide. That is E(X | do(T = t)) = E(X | T = t).

REMEMBERING HARRY VAN ZANTEN Botond Szabó and Aad van der Vaart in the ISBA Bulletin.

It’s giving late-game vibes of Sid Meier’s Civilization, where the player is bored and just trying to see what happens if they declare some wars before they abandon the game.

Students learn early that correlation does not imply causation. Correct, but incomplete... Certain patterns of independence and conditional dependence constrain #causal structure very strongly. A simple example:

Vaguely funny expression: a serious title

God made not only the numbers but also a sequence of independent standard normal random variables.

The (samizdat?) solution book to the classic soviet era “Problems In Mathematical Analysis” by Demidovich was called “Anti-Demidovich” by the students. 😀

The event B having happened is not the same as the receiving the information O that the event B has happened, because you also condition on receiving the information at all in the latter case. Conflating this contributes a lot to the "paradoxa" such as boy/girl paradox, Monty Hall...

Excited to share our recent paper, ”Compressing Biology,” to be presented at the Imageomics workshop at NeurIPS 2025. 🔬💻 Work led by my amazing PhD student Télio Cropsal. #cellpainting #stablediffusion #imageomics arxiv.org/abs/2510.19887

Compressing Biology: Evaluating the Stable Diffusion VAE for Phenotypic Drug Discovery

High-throughput phenotypic screens generate vast microscopy image datasets that push the limits of generative models due to their large dimensionality. Despite the growing popularity of general-purpos...

arxiv.org

#AITHYRA, Vienna's new Biomedical AI institute, is hiring Postdocs! Come work with us. Openings in: 🔹 Generative AI 🔹 Multimodal ML 🔹 Virology 🔹 Enzyme Function Apply by Nov 20: oeaw.ac.at/aithyra/post... #PostDoc #AI #ML #Vienna #ScienceJobs

AITHYRA Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences@aithyra.bsky.social · 10mo ago

The Starting Principal Investigators at #AITHYRA the Research Institute for Biomedical Artificial Intelligence of the OeAW in Vienna invite outstanding candidates to apply for postdoctoral positions in the field of AI/ML & Life Sciences. www.oeaw.ac.at/aithyra/post... Please apply by 20 Nov 2025!

Great first day of the 3rd annual CHAIR Structured Learning Workshop @ Chalmers! 🥳 Event page & agenda: ui.ungpd.com/Events/60bfc... 1st day featuring: @betapata.bsky.social @janstuehmer.bsky.social @arnauddoucet.bsky.social @frejohk.bsky.social

Very nice by Jun Otsuka @junotk.bsky.social and Hayato Saigo: link.springer.com/article/10.1... about causal interventions/do calculus via string diagram surgery

Our process causation paper is published in Synthese! We propose that process causation (a la Salmon, Dowe, MDC new mechanists) can be modeled using a category-theoretic framework. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Confounding is just the failure of the Doob conditioning functor from a Markov category into the associated category of backward-forward optics to be lax comonoidal

Oh, hats up to Mike Hicks who authored a policy paragraph on double-blind reviewing and amphibious type systems for POPL 2013 which has stand the test of time and is used in ICSME, OOPSLA, ECOOP, SPLASH, ICFP, PLDI, POPL, CSF, CAV... pldi12.cs.purdue.edu/others/dbr-f...