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Arseny Khakhalin

@khakhalin.bsky.social

1.1K followers 380 following 5.4K posts

Data Scientist in Berlin Former Bard College prof For my after-work alter-ego, see @elstersen.bsky.social Support Ukraine! 🇺🇦

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · Apr 14

Minimalistic bifurcation :)

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
f = lambda x,k,a: (x if k==0 else f(a*x*(1-x), k-1, a))
y = [f(.21, 17 + i % 19, 2.5+1.5*i/10000) for i in range(10000)]
plt.plot(y,'.',markersize=1);

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 56m

Someone needs to make a map of potential tourism locations, assuming a hill-shaped curve of experience as a function of popularity. Japan is clearly not a good target now. But what is? The trick is probably in going against the grain, but without literally dying

Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Roope Kaaronen @roopekaaronen.net · 2h

Application culture is so orthogonal to how research happens.

Drafting a 5-year plan to do science is ridiculous when I rarely even know what I'd be doing a year from now.

At least my own career has been a random walk in the idea space. None of it could have been predicted in an impact statement.

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 1h

I had these two posts (Void's and this one) almost side by side, and that's... Curious. That's curious.

max 🌌 @sneptech.bsky.social · 2h

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2h

I hate to break the spell, but the best second reaction to this site would be to type a character into the form, click "submit", and check out the page that you get...

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2h

Clarinetist! A child therapist playing clarinet is dangerous for the regime. So typical.

Federal agents barrel into band at Portland ICE protest, arrest clarinetist, accuse her of assault

Oriana Korol, a 38-year-old child and family therapist, remains in Clark County Jail.

www.oregonlive.com

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 3h

You'll learn the joke once you put a single character in the form and click "submit"

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 3h

Ah ok it's a joke, a rickrolling-style joke. Bastards :)

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 3h

Wait, HOW on earth can it be processed locally? 🤯 Surely formatting is unpredictable enough that you cannot use an "advanced regex" for it, even an overcomplicated regex created by an LLM, you kinda need an LLM to do the "translation"... Or at least that what I would have assumed!..

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Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 12h

I heard someone describe Azure as “the Boomer cloud”

Crude but also accurate

Cannot recall any startup that is not on AWS or GCP

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 3h

No-no I think you made a very good point! but indeed it seems that the dose makes the poison :) Just flavoring heavily still felt ok (imho), and the art in some of those sets was amazing. Many ppl hated Ixalan for example, but in the hindsight it was ok.

But then short-term ROI capitalism happened

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 18h

Gosh, that's the author of this gem!! Wow! That's a VERY high bar indeed!

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 18h

I'm actually not at all sure it practically applies to anything cybernetics-related, but this article itself (1940, Scientific American) is so very interesting! (And short to read, literally this one page)

⚡️🌙 @dystopiabreaker.xyz · 1d

Don’t Worry — It Can’t Happen

(also, the scientists who claim fission exists are just in the pocket of Big Science, and they’re literal nazis anyway, and also it’s just a stochastic reaction that peters out, and only physbros care about it, and it hasn’t ever happened before so it won’t)

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 18h

It was reversible tho, as it was still isolated to certain planes and could be retconned if necessary. It was still conceptually in-universe, and Vorthos could survive that.

Now, it's gone :(

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 19h

In Germany, when teaching math, they typically provide "lecture scripts", which is more of a skeleton of a lecture, with key formulas. If you mark your thoughts on it, THIS would increase retention. But just stenographing everything? That's useless. Demanding that students do that? Counterproductive

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 19h

A discussion on prof subreddit on how "students can't take note anymore" duh, covid, ai, collapse.
www.reddit.com/r/Professors...

My 2 cents:
1) Taking notes doesn't improve retention (lots of referenced studies)
2) Requiring note-taking is mildly exclusive for some ppl (foreigners, dyslexics etc)

Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 20h

This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads:

Abstract
A "
'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings.
This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.
CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind.
Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming
ACM Reference Format:
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B.
Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3759429.3762631

1 A Way of Knowing

From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves.
I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I?
What kind of person? What kind of mind?

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 20h

> If I were to categorize these examples into two broad categories, they would be “helping me learn” and “automating boring tasks”.

This checks!

Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 20h

Do we know how anyone learns this?

Gordon @gordon.bsky.social · 21h

Learning to ask the right questions is a crazy high-leverage skill. Now even higher leverage.

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Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Shahab Bakhtiari @shahabbakht.bsky.social · 20h

💯

A good bit of uncertainty, and actually two types:
1) Low probability of success (in grants and projects) and
2) Epistemological uncertainty about what matters most (information asymmetry)

These two combined drive a large part of the anxiety and over-commitment that prof jobs involve. 1/3

Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 21h

Understanding how the constraints of the job line up with what each of us want & need is important. The fact that there's a good bit of uncertainty thrown in is what makes explicitly working through that exercise hard, I suspect; eg "Could I thrive/survive if I spent my time ...???". /2

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 20h

Wow that does sound like fun! Thanks for the good point / lovely gift :)

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 20h

How come? Isn't it rather a proof of it, and _both_ practical and conceptual / theoretical, at that?

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 1d

I find it hard to respond give advice, given how good the ForYou feed is. Would it be better to push Discover closer to ForYou, or would it be better to make it quite different from it, so that ppl could use both?

Either way, this looks like a move in a good direction! Thank you! :)

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 1d

Wouldn't it be "Explore" tho?

Discover-like feeds can serve two different purposes, sampling outside of your follows, and giving you a digest of top posts of your follows if you haven't logged for a day or two. It would be cool to have 2 feeds for that, but for now Bsky seems to combine it in one..

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 1d

Basically my point is, bookmark adding was introduced before confirmation dialogs became a thing, at least on the web.

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 1d

Olden tech. It was like that since 1907 when it was first introduced, and haven't changed since. As bookmarks are sorted alphabetically by default, if you turn them visible as a toolbar, your leftmost bookmark will be one from 1950s that you added as a wee kid. The site no longer exists.

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