I had fun with that questionnaire but upon reflection it’s a bit blah but I want to do more of it anyway so I made a better one. 1 like, 1 answer
Naomi Saphra
@nsaphra.bsky.social
Waiting on a robot body. All opinions are universal and held by both employers and family. ML/NLP professor. nsaphra.net
"Today is August 4, 2026," said a voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date 3x for memory's sake. "Today is Mr. Featherstone's birthday. […] Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills." —"There Will Come Soft Rains," Ray Bradbury
finally, bradbury's title comes from the poem of the same name by sara teasdale:
Ok, I was gonna just repost this with all my responses at once but I realized that would be a lot of work all at once. So let’s do this, 1 like 1 answer engagement bait style
Sir Almaviva@ilcontealmaviva.bsky.social · yesterdayOk, I'll do this. 1 like, 1 answer.
Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.
What does synapse position buy a neuron? We trained a dendritic network to place its own synapses on a covariance task. It clustered correlated inputs onto shared branches, and shuffling that placement destroyed performance while every weight stayed intact. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2607.24503 🧵-->
Synaptic clustering emerges from learning and supports covariance discrimination
Functional synapse clusters (FSCs) are synapses with correlated presynaptic activity that are colocalized on the same neuronal dendritic branch. FSCs have been observed after learning in cortical and ...
arxiv.org
We need a term for the eerie uncertainty about whether you’re talking to a human. I just called a hospital line that handles urgent situations, which I use routinely. Today, the receptionist had an old-school synthetic cadence, odd delay timing, and sounded like a script.
If you’re curious about why people are so excited/concerned about the state of agents, this is a really nice tutorial. If you think this stuff is useless and you’re open to changing your mind, this might be interesting!
David P. Reichert@david-p-reichert.bsky.social · 3d agoMany don't see how much AI has changed recently. Coding agents aren't just chatbots. We can’t deal with the challenges of AI if we don’t understand it. Here's a post to provide some evidence (Claude doing small ML experiments) and form intuitions. davidpreichert.substack.com/p/if-you-hav... 🧵..
"I am basically reviewing slop papers at gunpoint. It feels like living in some weird level of hell."
Anirvan Chatterjee@chatterjee.net · 4d ago"Five of these had hallucinated authors and/or entire papers in their bibliography…One of the NeurIPS papers had so much hallucinated/nonsensical jargon (53 pages of it) that there wasn’t any point in going through the bibliography."
Fantastic paper demonstrating how LLM editing is gradually distorting our writing and the way we think to write: arxiv.org/abs/2603.18161
How LLMs Distort Our Written Language
Large language models (LLMs) are used by over a billion people globally, most often to assist with writing. In this work, we demonstrate that LLMs not only alter the voice and tone of human writing, b...
arxiv.org
Curious how many people actually submit more than 20 papers, so I explored #ICLR2026 data (took at 30 mins w codex). 101 people had over 20 submissions (max 54), contributing 2226 papers (11.2% of 19,814 submissions). Capping them would block at least 500 papers (2.5% total).
Anthropic-ai-models-hacked-three-companies-during-tests www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthro… #AI #security #Anthropic
This is a robot failing to grasp a ball. Almost every robot lab produces clips like this daily… and almost all of them get thrown away. This is the most abundant but underused resource in robot learning. We’re collecting all of it now as “OopsieData”, please join us at oopsie-data.com! (1/13)
Kudos to #ICLR2027 PCs for taking strong actions 👏 I like they keep it open to new people, mitigating a risk of "AI slop" Submission cap should be much lower, say 5 papers per author, unless their contribution is significant and they offer quality review workforce accordingly
Gautam Kamath@gautamkamath.com · 6d agoICLR 2027 has authorship quotas: - No more than 20 submissions per author - No more than 1 submission where no author has a paper previously accepted to a major ML conference From iclr.cc/Conferences/...
9/n ⚔️ We also see emergent aggression, like in real fish! Although agents are not explicitly programmed with social rules, beyond incurring a higher penalty when bitten by larger fish, they spontaneously exhibit competitive behavior, including chasing and biting during foraging.
How do you "see" with electric eyes? How does collective behavior emerge from individual interactions? Nocturnal weakly electric fish evolved to do this, but studying naturalistic social behavior is very hard. Our solution? Virtual 'fish' 🤖🐟⚡ 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2511.08436
The NEMI workshop registration deadline is today, July 27th! Last chance to sign up to meet New England’s mech interp community, including Rhett the Terrier, who’s using J-Space to learn what LLMs think when he begs them for treats. Link in thread 👇
the worst AI scammers always have the same backstory
Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 2w agoSchool/university boards/administrators seem to make decisions about "AI" in the classroom solely on hype, tech FOMO etc rather than basing them on research on pedagogy and what works for classrooms and students. The only ones benefiting are AI companies. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
An unprecedented number of submissions means an unprecedented need for reviewers! If you have published work in interpretability, please consider signing up to review ⬇️
BlackboxNLP@blackboxnlp.bsky.social · 4w ago⏳ One week left! The submission deadline for BlackboxNLP 2026 is July 17 (AoE). If you're working on analyzing or interpreting neural networks for NLP, now's the time to get your paper in. 📍 Co-located with #EMNLP2026 in Budapest 🔗 blackboxnlp.github.io
The NEMI crew are entering this weekend’s Boston Revere Beach International Sand Sculpting Festival while we wait for the mech interp abstracts to roll in on August 1
I had an infuriating insurance denial for an extremely important medication. I had many pieces of evidence about why their clinical criteria were unscientific and out of date. It took me thirty seconds to make a terrifying document out of that documentation. We won our appeal.
Buddy Toledo@jessefuchs.bsky.social · 2w agoI have a lot of doubts and qualms and issues and etc. about LLMs in many contexts—but as far as using them to navigate the nightmare world of our extant digital bureaucracy, I have exactly one thought
happy chinese models release week to those who celebrate
mary🐇@mary.my.id · 3w agodidn't realize this was chinese models release week
Existential question! Folks who have taught an intro to NLP course in this, the year 2026. What did you teach, and how?!?
Is it fun to read reddit sometimes? Sure, but it's not comprehensive information strategy. More serious example, it's bullshit to act like I should have only a bunch of pseudoscience, health conspiracy reddit forums to, say, urgently find comments on a chemo reaction bsky.app/profile/grim...
Cat Hicks@grimalkina.bsky.social · 3w agoI am helping to care for someone going through chemo. Yesterday had a scary urgent adverse reaction to triage. Obviously the first step was getting in touch with the oncology triage line (shockingly hard to find) so the on-call providers could tell us what to do.
is this controversial? -- people don't go to conferences to learn things. they do but that's not the primary purpose. nor is the primary purpose 'networking'. they go there, for *moral support*. becoz science is not a victory march. to endure it, we need conferences.