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Alejandro Schuler @aschuler.bsky.social · 2h

Big Doug Hofstadter energy

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 1d

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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no earthquake (cultural tutor) @noearthquake.bsky.social · 14h

LLMs have convincingly demonstrated that coding is the easiest activity, maths is medium hard, and having taste is the hardest

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Elisabeth Parés Pujolràs @epares.bsky.social · Sep 13

Excellent piece.

We know how to improve writing ability: it's by doing more, not less of it.

"LLMs do not improve one’s writing ability much like taking a taxi does not improve one’s driving ability. Students should hone their writing, thinking, and other academic skills at every opportunity."

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Ross Miller @rosshm16.bsky.social · 9h

I love journals whose policy is not to bother with any formatting minutia (outside of big-picture stuff length limits) until after review, but they are few and far between unfortunately.

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Peter Tennant @pwgtennant.bsky.social · 1d

So much of your career chances are determined by whether you are working with a successful and supportive team.

I.e. Whether you are working with a line manager or mentor who hands down opportunities. Coauthorships on papers. Coapplicants on grant.

If you're not being given these, you MUST move.

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Tuffy @smtuffy.bsky.social · 1d

The pivot from “I’m building god” to “I’m building a jerkoff tool” is pretty funny

Reuters @reuters.com · 1d

OpenAI to allow mature content on ChatGPT for adult verified users starting December reut.rs/3J8NTAi

OpenAI to allow mature content on ChatGPT for adult verified users starting December

OpenAI will allow mature content for ChatGPT users who verify their age on the platform starting in December, CEO Sam Altman said, after the chatbot was made restrictive for users in mental distress.

reut.rs

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Alejandro Schuler @aschuler.bsky.social · 18h

Wait, you back in the bay these days?

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 2d

An excellent response from Ben Harrap.

I can only play in your back yard if you invite me in – Ben Harrap

benharrap.com

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Hisham Zerriffi @hishamzerriffi.bsky.social · 3d

“Your job is not to turn in completed assignments; it's to learn how to think.”

Ted Chiang‘s succinct summary of the issue with using AI in education.

I’m not a sports guy but the athlete metaphor he uses in this interview is pretty spot on.

The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art: Q&A with Ted Chiang

cdh.princeton.edu

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Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 6d

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

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Alejandro Schuler @aschuler.bsky.social · 5d

I give 15m but usually all done beforehand. Done in lab/discussion section, TAs photograph all the little bubble answer sheets w/ phone, upload to gradescope, and all get autograded. My class is like 120 students so process has to scale.

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Alejandro Schuler @aschuler.bsky.social · 6d

Although individually low-stakes, cumulatively students must pass a high percentage of the quizzes to pass the class. I use spec grading so that they can't use points in other categories of assessment to substitute

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Alejandro Schuler @aschuler.bsky.social · 6d

More constant but lower-stakes formative assessments. My course has short (3 q) pass/fail, multiple choice, in-person quizzes every week. But students can retake (another version of) them some weeks later to get the credit back upon fail.

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Alexandre Adler @bachpropagate.bsky.social · 7d

Look, we’re both very sorry about the widening gyre.

The US president on the phone in Dr Strangelove.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 7d

The elimination of USAID is a moral atrocity and all involved made a choice to enable, and then lie about, ending the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

MAE SOT, Thailand (AP) - Mohammed Taher clutched the lifeless body of his 2-year-old son and wept. Ever since his family's food rations stopped arriving at their internment camp in Myanmar in April, the father had watched helplessly as his once-vibrant baby boy weakened, suffering from diarrhea and begging for food.
On May 21, exactly two weeks after Taher's little boy died, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and declared: "No one has died" because of his government's decision to gut its foreign aid program. Rubio also insisted: "No children are dying on my watch."
That, Taher says, "is a lie."

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Steve Senior @stevensenior.bsky.social · 12d

Just. Reduce. Child. Poverty.

Wellcome Trust @wellcometrust.bsky.social · 12d

We want to transform early intervention for youth mental health.

Our new funding award will help achieve this.

We're supporting teams to accelerate the evaluation and roll out of effective social and psychological interventions.

Applications close 11 Nov ⤵️
wellcome.org/research-fun...

Benny Prawira, Lived Experience Advisor at Wellcome says, "My wish is that new psychosocial interventions can do more than just make youth 'feel better' – but actually help them stay in school, find jobs and rebuild relationships."

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Susan Kaye Quinn is Writing Solarpunk 🌞🌱 @susankayequinn.bsky.social · 21d

They've lost the 9yos

JA Westenberg
@Daojoan@mastodon.social

My 9 year old and his classmates have started using “that’s AI” to mean “I don’t believe you.”

Me: we’re having dinosaur meat for dinner

Kiddo: that’s AI
Sep 24, 2025, 07:36 AM

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Vanessa is the name of the Doctor! @hpsvanessa.bsky.social · 11d

I only ever heard second-hand from my German relatives what the 1930s were like but it sounded like this. You see the story, it feels wrong, but everyone else around you is just carrying on, shopping, working, going to the cinema. So you do the same. Keep your head down, maybe this is fine? Normal?

CNN @cnn.com · 11d

Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken. https://cnn.it/4pPCXIt

37 people arrested and American kids separated from parents after ICE raid at Chicago apartments | CNN

Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken.

www.cnn.com

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Melissa Ryan @melissaryan.bsky.social · 12d

I always pay attention to what stories People Magazine and other consumer media outlets cover. That's how you can tell that something has broken through the usual political and news bubbles. This horrific Chicago story has broken through. people.com/ice-agents-o...

ICE Agents Rappel from Helicopter in Overnight Chicago Raid, Dragging Kids from Beds to U-Hauls

Overnight on Tuesday, Sept. 30, federal agents from different agencies raided an apartment building on the South Side of Chicago, pulling men, women and children — some of them allegedly naked — from ...

people.com

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Alex Blechman @alexblechman.bsky.social · 11d

Asking “is the postal service profitable?” is a new thing

If you visit a 1950s post office it looks like a Greek temple. They have statues of eagles. There’s a big mural of a flying woman holding a cornucopia. They didn’t whine “is the bronze bas-relief of Prosperity profitable?”

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Itai Sher @itaisher.bsky.social · 11d

This op-ed is excellent and I encourage everyone to read it.

Universities must reject the Trump compact.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

Opinion | Trump’s ‘Compact’ With Universities Is Just Extortion

www.nytimes.com

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Andrew Mercer @awmercer.bsky.social · 11d

I guess my point is it’s unphysical concepts all the way down. But for some reason people really don’t like this one in particular.

Sure, it’s not the only way to frame causal inference, but I’m not sure it’s inherently worse. Different frameworks mostly emphasize different sets of priorities.

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Alejandro Schuler @aschuler.bsky.social · 10d

I don't believe the number 2 is "real" but I use it all the time.

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Senator Scott Wiener @scottwiener.bsky.social · 10d

Literally bragging about sending gestapo into American cities with weapons of war to bust down doors & drag residents out of their beds because they’re Latino.

F*cking psychopaths

Trump Watch @trumpwat.ch · 11d

Kristi Noem has posted a Michael Bayesque video of that crazy Border Patrol raid of an apartment building in Chicago. Her caption was "Chicago, we’re here for you."

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Senator Scott Wiener @scottwiener.bsky.social · 12d

The regime’s new proposed “compact” with universities — conditioning federal funds on giving up academic freedom & free speech & throwing trans & non-US students under the bus — is unconstitutional.

Every university must reject it. It’s classic hang together or hang separately.

Opinion | Trump’s ‘Compact’ With Universities Is Just Extortion

www.nytimes.com

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