My radical suggestion for peer review: Move from nominal pre-publication review to explicit post-publication review. The original reason for peer review was that journal pages are a limited resource, so we need a filter before publication. That no longer makes sense with digital publishing. 1/

Fun fact: You can have two amazon accounts registered to the same email address, as long as they have different passwords. Don't ask how I discovered this or what happens if you change the passwords to be the same.

xkcd.com/2385/ openai.com/index/huggin...

Buy new phone. Copy photos from old phone. Turn on cloud backup. "Your cloud storage is full." Delete photos from cloud. Photos deleted from phone because backup is on. 🫠 That is not what a "backup" is, Google.

I couldn't find a nice (and up-to-date) visualization of the history of who is leading on arena.ai/leaderboard so I got Claude to make one: stein.ke/ai-leaderboa... (I'll try to keep this updated.)

What does “tokens per second per request” mean?? www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 3w ago

“.. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. “.. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.” @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Bastille Day 🇫🇷, Independence Day 🇺🇸, Canada Day 🇨🇦 are all in July. Isn’t it a nice coincidence that all these events happened in the middle of summer so we can enjoy national holidays in good weather. 😎 The pattern also holds down under: Australia Day 🇦🇺 is Jan 26, Waitangi Day 🇳🇿 is Feb 6.

I’m attending COLT 2026 in San Diego. You can see the beach from the conference venue; not sure if that’s a good thing. 🤔 learningtheory.org/colt2026/

Today marks 10 years since I defended my PhD. Gosh, time flies. I can’t claim to be early career anymore.

Why do you have two phones? Well, you see, sometimes there’s a QR code on a page and I need a second device to scan it.

If someone give you used baby stuff, the important thing is not whether it is useful to you, the important thing is that giving it away is a commitment device for them not having another baby.

Do not make major life decisions without talking to people.

Honoured that our 2016 paper, Robust Estimators in High Dimensions without the Computational Intractability, w/ Ilias Diakonikolas, @daneelssoul.bsky.social, @jerryzli.bsky.social, Ankur Moitra, Alistair Stewart, was awarded the Gödel Prize This is the highest award for papers in theoretical CS 1/7

Huge congratulations to Ilias Diakonikolas, Gautam Kamath, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li, Ankur Moitra, and Alistair Stewart on being awarded the Gödel prize for their breakthrough work on algorithmic robustness! www.sigact.org/prizes/g%C3%...

Privately Estimating Monotone Statistics in Polynomial Time Gavin Brown, Ephraim Linder, Mahbod Majid, Vikrant Singhal http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27912

A handsome red bike, abandoned. By a busy road, outside my home. Locked to a tow away sign. What happened to its owner? Not even a thief has come for it. What will the HOA do? I see it daily and wonder.

but they were all of them deceived, for another monday was made

You should only cite papers that you have read thoroughly. You should be confident that the papers you are citing are correct; you should also apply due diligence to the references therein. To be safe, you should probably not cite anything, unless maybe it's a self-citation.

I can't believe that in 2026 bibliographies are still more likely to tell you which page of the printed journal the article is on or which city the publisher is based in than to give you a URL. Were page numbers *ever* useful? Did print journals not have a table of contents?

Here's an example of a "hallucinated" citation from a decade ago (i.e. pre-LLMs). The same bad citation appeared in multiple papers. I eventually traced the source to Google Scholar (and it's now fixed).

While I generally agree with this policy, the focus on hallucinated citations specifically makes me uncomfortable: I usually get my BibTeX from Google Scholar. Yes, GS is sometimes wrong. No, I don't carefully check my references. Is using AI to fill in references really morally any different?

Mark Riedl@markriedl.bsky.social · 3mo ago

ArXiV has a new LLM policy (Screenshots with alt text so you don’t have to click through to the other place and see all the stupid responses)

New blog post by @stein.ke on #DifferentialPrivacy: what happens when you modify the definition of neighbors to make it asymmetric? Why would you do that, and does that buy you anything? differentialprivacy.org/one-sided/

One-Sided Differential Privacy

Differential privacy is defined in terms of pairs of neighboring datasets. That is, \(M\) is \((\varepsilon,\delta)\)-differentially private if, for all measurable events \(T\) and all neighboring pai...

differentialprivacy.org

One-Sided Differential Privacy differentialprivacy.org/one-sided/

One-Sided Differential Privacy

Differential privacy is defined in terms of pairs of neighboring datasets. That is, \(M\) is \((\varepsilon,\delta)\)-differentially private if, for all measurable events \(T\) and all neighboring pai...

differentialprivacy.org

ArXiV has a new LLM policy (Screenshots with alt text so you don’t have to click through to the other place and see all the stupid responses)

List of accepted papers at #COLT2026, the Annual Conference on Learning Theory: learningtheory.org/colt2026/acc... (h/t @gautamkamath.com)

"For People"

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to satisfy my curiosity: A standard gasoline/petrol pump delivers about 15 megawatts of energy. (In contrast, the fastest electric vehicle chargers deliver half a megawatt.)

My cynical hypothesis for why there's a lot of discussion about datacenters in space is that Elon needed a justification for merging xAI with SpaceX. Elon being the CEO of both is an obvious conflict of interest, so he needed to explain to investors why it made sense -- hence space datacenters.

Pleased to share that I'll be presenting this paper at COLT in San Diego! 😁

Thomas Steinke@stein.ke · 10mo ago

I'm excited to share this paper. It answers a question that has bugged me for a long time: Can sample-and-aggregate be made more data-efficient? The answer is yes, but at a steep price in computational efficiency. See 🧵 for more details. Also, it was a fun opportunity to add a new coauthor. 😁

Re. AI "consciousness" takes: I would be interested to read something from a psychiatry or psychology perspective. People who have spent time debugging human intelligence might have something insightful to say about artificial intelligence.