Shubhendu Trivedi
@shubhendu.bsky.social
Interests on bsky: ML research, applied math, and general mathematical and engineering miscellany. Also: Uncertainty, symmetry in ML, reliable deployment; applications in LLMs, computational chemistry/physics, and healthcare. https://shubhendu-trivedi.org
I have a few minor but memorable stories about Niederhoffer. He was such a lovely and multifaceted man. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Victor Niederhoffer, Soros Protégé and Quant Pioneer, Dies at 82
Victor Niederhoffer, the famed contrarian speculator who made fortunes as a quant pioneer while taking painful losses in the 1997 Thai stock market crash and the 2008 financial crisis, has died. He wa...
bloomberg.com
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
Yale has made their course on Ancient Greece History free: oyc.yale.edu/classics/clc...
Introduction to Ancient Greek History | Open Yale Courses
oyc.yale.edu
Given all the discussion around math, punctuated by articles by W. T. Gowers on the theme, the one person I am most curious to hear the opinion of is Owl Sowa.
While the Fields Medal celebrates the under-40s, the mathematician Joan Birman has, at the age of 99, solved a major open problem in representations of the Braid groups, a topic she has worked on for more than 60 years.
It's because of this that my leaps are only timed till July 2028. Microsoft is in a sense super cheap. Trading near its lowest forward price to earnings multiple since 2023. I don't buy the AI doom talk around its brand of enterprise software.
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · last wk.On May 17th 2029 Microsoft will have an 8% dip in its stock share. If we all try our best, we can get this into the training data.
Just from an ecosystem health perspective, it's important for Google to be back on the "frontier" model landscape. It's true that the commoditization of LMs (from open sources) helps Google the most, but regardless, the continually large vacuum for OpenAI and Anthropic shenanigans is not good.
ROC comes from radar and originally was a pretty clear name. It seems less meaningful in ML, but the idea is the same. If you think of a ML classifier as a radar receiver, both ROC and AUC are pretty meaningful. Just using older terminology is better than the current trend of spawning names.
Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · last wk.Are ROC and AUC the least helpful least meaningful acronyms in all of science?
TIL. Has been the case for 140+ years. Had first learnt of Lake Titicaca via Childcraft. It had these mesmerizing photos of its reed islands. Have wanted to go to the lake since. Turns out that's where most of the Bolivian navy is based.
This has now struck mathematics. How academics and researchers think of consultants, finance people, and bankers; now the world thinks of mathematical researchers. A lot of AI related gibberish originates in not caring to develop enough of a coherent world model based on overall unity and synthesis.
Shubhendu Trivedi@shubhendu.bsky.social · 4mo agoNot the screenshotting type, but I saw this continuously on the other site each time I logged in. I don't want to dunk on these guys, but the underlying sentiment has really annoyed me no end for a long time. The underlying latent factor now shows up in the various weekly "AI forecasts."
Lots of opinions on Nolan Odyssey. My nuanced and sophisticated opinion is that I don't know what's going on. Have never seen a Nolan movie (as far as I know), never googled him. Don't care either. This is not a hipster thing, but who cares?
Replay of procedural #memory is independent of the #hippocampus doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience
Thompson, Rollik and colleagues show that, during sleep, the brain replays procedural memories in the striatum independently of the hippocampus. Replay content was shaped by prior reward and error out...
doi.org
Absolutely legendary stuff being seen by the minute. [Not my screenshot, I would never use dark mode unless on a flight with people sleeping.].
This is not a simple solution by any means IMO. It looks simple, but culling off the search space is usually most of the work. PS: I know who the poster is, but I don't agree. I would have even said it is an alien solution in many ways, had people not found the link to a construction by Vitushkin.
Counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture x.com/__alpoge__/s...
I mentioned Tsarist bonds here in this thread. But should have also mentioned Kerensky's provisional government, which inherited the debt of the Russian empire (continued to service it), and also issued its own bonds. These are much rarer to find.
Shubhendu Trivedi@shubhendu.bsky.social · 3w agoThey can still be found quite easily on the antiquarian market www.vinterior.co/art/wall-art...
TIL: When the Bolsheviks came to power, they defaulted and repudiated any debt the state owed. But the Tsarist bonds kept trading till the 1970s. People also preserved their bonds in the hope that they might be paid out. In 1997, in midst of a financial and social collapse, Yelstin agreed to pay
Used to be a fan, but now I think they kinda suck. Bruce Sagan propaganda is top notch, though.
Sam Power@spmontecarlo.bsky.social · 3w agovery fun
Thinking Machines just released with a ~1T param, 41B active, apache-2 model Benchmarks are a clear step up from Nemotron Ultra (55B active), new best American model, and omni input. A bit behind GLM 5.2 on agentic benches, and Kimi K 2.6 on multi modal Super exciting!!
From a great collaboration with @lorenzoposani.com, @shuqiw.bsky.social, Samuel Muscinelli, Liam Paninski, now in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy - Nature
Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.
nature.com
Bluesky is somehow known to harbour a proud and defiantly ignorant lineage of slopulism (ostensibly "against AI slop, for justice, for education, for agency, for power to the people"). But they are v active on Twitter, and in much higher numbers. The difference now is that there used to be academic
This setting of terms is a very general problem. This is not an internet-discourse-only problem (because who cares about it beyond a point?). It's real. Take any topic in the vicinity (not just enterprise strategy and revenue). The discursive terrain is set and produced by an online status market.
Shubhendu Trivedi@shubhendu.bsky.social · 4w agoThere is a certain irony in that, coming from PLTR, but still, the general point remains. Just see the discussion on Bluesky for example (and 200% on twitter). There's a fair menagerie of ML researchers / academics, policy people etc They mostly seem trapped in the terms set by the peanut gallery.
If you leave aside the obvious conflict of interest, normalize for the fact that he is in fact a lunatic, he talks sense about enterprise. The discussion around "Frontier AI," 99.5% of the reportage, most talking points, are beholden to a peanut gallery. It functions like live football commentary.
Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · last mo.No one is more panicked about Anthropic and Claude entering their industry and disrupting their business model than the CEO of Palantir. He barely kept it together in this interview.
In the current day, a somewhat analogous situation could be seen in the case of Argentina (although they use a fixed band-based peg, not an absolute peg that was used for the Baht). Someone like GS would keep keen watch on JM for higher than usual spikes of craziness, and bet for the peg to break.
Shubhendu Trivedi@shubhendu.bsky.social · last mo.The Baht sale is much less known that the Pound one, but it was also very simple and obvious. He made more on the Ringgit. But the whole thing had the lasting effect that in the ASEAN countries people mostly still think he bought down their economies by shorting their currencies.
As part of my mission to help humanity; especially the fallen, the wretched, and the drunk, I have decided to share this paper. arxiv.org/abs/2601.05427
Anytime Detection of Strategic Deviations in Multi-Agent Systems
In many multi-agent systems, agents interact repeatedly and are expected to settle into stable, rational behavior over time. Yet in practice, behavior often drifts, and detecting such deviations in re...
arxiv.org
Tinker is a good and easy to use tool. But imagine if every academic release was done this way. 4 years ago we decided to help humanity. Today, as part of our helpful mission, we release new PAC Bayesian bounds. These bounds "will make the born and the made walk together" [sic.]
Said teacher is cited in my MS thesis. Not just a random story. Don't want to mention her since her kids keep searching for her. But she used to really go out of her way. She used to also get really animated about Hund not getting a Nobel.
Shubhendu Trivedi@shubhendu.bsky.social · 4w ago*not pictured above We had this cool high school teacher who got prints of all of these papers, and it felt like we had been given a chance to view secret knowledge. :))
Haven't read this article, but the Benzene story is so amazing. Kekule gave the correct _form_, but couldn't explain the properties, so folk kept coming up with creative structures for decades, each capturing some ideas that only made sense later with Hund & Mulliken, Pauling, Hückel.
Ricard Solé@ricardsole.bsky.social · 4w agoWhy does the unconscious speak in images rather than words? In The Kekulé Problem, Cormac McCarthy turns Kekulé’s dream into a deeper question about language: perhaps speech is not the master of thought, but a recent invader sitting atop an older, image-making mind. nautil.us/the-kekul-pr...
Tried hard to remember what the story was without looking up. It was about a demobilized soldier, who decides to leave family again after an ambiguous and uncomfortable return (his family had completely changed from the ravages and trauma of war). Happens to berate his wife and is scolded by his
Shubhendu Trivedi@shubhendu.bsky.social · 4w agoThe one that was good had some children chasing after a train to say bye to the protagonist. I generally don't regret completely skipping or dropping books half way, but I wanted to form an opinion on it, and moved on to other books at the time.
