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Arseny Khakhalin

@khakhalin.bsky.social

1.1K followers 370 following 5.3K 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 · 6m

So it appears that the maximal overhang problem is still kinda unsolved?
www.i-programmer.info/news/112-the...

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 11m

It's beautiful and weird, but is it also a metaphor for something?..

Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Or Tuttnauer @ortuttnauer.com · 1h

I’ll do 4 words in one (German):

Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz

(Look it up)

Marjorie James Keenan @unenthusiast.com · 1d

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

rm -rf ~/

hammancheez @hammancheez.bsky.social · 1d

"The chancellor approved it"

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Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Grace @gracekind.net · 13h

And notably, in the case of GPT-J, we DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS DOING THIS until 3.5 years after the model was released!

Grace @gracekind.net · 13h

We did not tell LLMs, “implement addition using this algorithm.” It learned the algorithm upstream of next-token prediction

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Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Ian Coldwater 👻🌿 @lookitup.baby · 1d

as enjoyable as it is to dunk on vibe coders, this is just the nature of cloud services. they’re really expensive and they can easily cost you shocking amounts of money really fast even if you know what you’re doing! if you don’t know what you’re doing, messing with them is just asking for trouble!

cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 2d

guy in a legal advice reddit wants to know how to get out of paying google the money he owes them after vibe coding one of his apps into running 40 times a second for several days straight, but says it's not his fault bc they should have stopped him by making it harder to use

r/LegalAdviceUK u/ShavedAp3 • 3d
Join
Google want to charge me 7 k for API access what can I do as they are denying appeals
Debt & Money
Hi there and thanks for reading.
I tried to keep this brief and just ended up rambling on trying to get as much in as possible so here is my edited hopefully a lot smaller problem.
Google are charging me 7k for a mistake that I told them about within a day, the bill went from about £45 to 16k in a day! when I asked for help I was told "dont worry well reset it as a one off, you'll need to put measures in place and ill guide you through those after you agree" So i did he then said "I will monitor it for a further 24 - 48 hours and then tell you how to put the measures in place. " Less than 24 hours later the bill was now 23k and I found out how to stop it myself. Then came the long back and forth to get it reset.
Fast forward 5 months they have finally given me a 20k credit but with VAT the total bill at the time of the credit was 27k
The 20k would have cleared the costs at the time of making them aware they claim its both our responsibilities to monitor costs I feel I did that by contacting them as soon as I saw the irregularity.
I asked them to reconsider they said no the appeal has said that is their final offer so 1 now owe 7k.
Is there anything I can do here from a legal standpoint. I don't have 7k I barely have £45.
Thanks for reading I am in England if it helps.

Intentional or not, OP used either 36k (16 + 20) or 43k (16 + 27) of API credit. Obviously what API it is matters, but with google maps, 16k would equate to ten million pulls. Or two hundred thousand Gemini 2.5 calls with 1000 token input and 5k token output.
Those aren't numbers that something running correctly should run up for any average person or company. So either google screwed up something (which is unlikely that it would only happen to one person in the entire network) or OP has some app or something which isn't running properly and is sending too much to the API.
Edit: It was OP's app, polling google maps nearly 40 times a second for days.

tom_watts • 3d
According to other posts he ended up polling Google maps direction API 2300 times per minute for a few days. Looks like a combination of OP not knowing coding and asking ChatGPT to do it for him, and potentially Google's backend doing something weird in interpreting the janky code.
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Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

David Schindler @david-schindler.de · 1d

This will make the academic job market basically non-existent for non-US citizens. And job ads in Europe are down too. This will be a tough year to be on the market for many people. I encourage everyone to keep their eyes open for jobs posted in non-traditional channels.

Michael Kevane @mkevane.com · 1d

Two new colleagues fortunately had applied shortly before and received h1b. But university now apparently saying for new searches to only consider people with existing work permits/citizenship

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 1d

We are back to pre photography world in some sense. Back to complete impossibility to "do your own research", back to shared social trust in professionals and specialists remaining the only practical way to learn the truth. Which does sound almost sarcastic given your average news these days...

nilay patel @reckless.bsky.social · 1d

It was @sarahjeong.bsky.social and we’ve been pounding this drum for years - especially since all the promises of metadata to prove images are real have gone nowhere www.theverge.com/2024/8/22/24...

Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Sung Kim @sungkim.bsky.social · 2d

Use a LLM to create a new constructed language (ConLang) like Klingon, Vulcan, etc.. where an LLM designs phonology, builds grammar, generates a lexicon, creates orthography, and even writes a mini grammar book.

IASC: Interactive Agentic System for ConLangs

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Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 1d

Lots of funny results along these lines also in this paper by Alan Saji: aclanthology.org/2025.finding...

RomanLens: The Role Of Latent Romanization In Multilinguality In LLMs

Alan Saji, Jaavid Aktar Husain, Thanmay Jayakumar, Raj Dabre, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Ratish Puduppully. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025. 2025.

aclanthology.org

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Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

David Bau @davidbau.bsky.social · 1d

The lens reveals: the model does NOT go directly from amore to "amor" or "amour" by just dropping or adding letters!

Instead it first "thinks" about the (English) word "love".

In other words: LLMs translate using *concepts*, not tokens.

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2d

Yep. Sensible people just quickly learned to never correct wild takes ever. The opposite of community notes in a way.

Insensible ppl / bots never learned it. Which sounds like a bit of a lose lose :( A reasonable lesson pointed at a wrong choir.

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Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.bsky.social · 2d

aaand we are officially in the hide-your-neighbors stage

Sophie Sherry @sophiesherry.bsky.social · 2d

During a military-style raid on a building in Chicago’s South Shore, one resident heard a knock on his door.   It wasn’t the feds — it was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for help.

He let them hide in his unit for the next 3 days.

chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

Neighbor shielded 7-year-old during South Shore federal raid: ‘I didn’t want them to take her’

During the Sept. 30 raid one tenant protected a terrified girl and her mom. Remnants at the complex, including a detailed map of all the units, offer clues to what authorities may have known before th...

chicago.suntimes.com

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Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

⚡️🌙 @dystopiabreaker.xyz · 2d

i made a thing that hopefully makes this clearer or is at least fun to play with: sgd.fyi

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Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600.bsky.social · 2d

Usually I point out that most things get better over time. Some things get worse. Why for example are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US? Source: buff.ly/lUV8IE1

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Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Sebastian Raschka (rasbt) @sebastianraschka.com · 2d

Updated & turned my Big LLM Architecture Comparison article into a video lecture.

The 11 LLM archs covered in this video:
1. DeepSeek V3/R1
2. OLMo 2
3. Gemma 3
4. Mistral Small 3.1
5. Llama 4
6. Qwen3
7. SmolLM3
8. Kimi 2
9. GPT-OSS
10. Grok 2.5
11. GLM-4.5/4.6

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNlU...

The Big LLM Architecture Comparison

YouTube video by Sebastian Raschka

www.youtube.com

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2d

It has a strong bot energy tbh. Do you think most of them are bot-like people or humanoid-enough bots?

Reposted by Arseny Khakhalin

Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 2d

This paper shows that you can predict actual purchase intent (90% accuracy) by asking an off-the-shelf LLM to impersonate a customer with a demographic profile, giving it a product image & having it give its impressions, which another AI rates.

No fine-tuning or training & beats classic ML methods.

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2d

The US: cuts science funding, bans whole areas of research, abuses human rights etc.

Everyone: It's Europe's chance to shine, to woo top researchers from the US

Germany's right-wing government: That skilled immigrant fast track program created by the Greens, let's kill it, immigrants are evil! 🙈

Bundestag nixes fast-track naturalization in Germany – DW – 10/09/2025

Germany will no longer offer citizenship after three years of residency. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, of the center-right Christian Social Union, had opposed the law, effected by the previous...

amp.dw.com

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2d

Is it weird tho? Say girls always did some "A" thing that boys didn't. In the past you rewarded "A", either consciously or subconsciously as it felt proper. Then Trump came to power (i know it's Sweden, but I'm simplifying). Now you cringe from "A", you associate it with Obama. Not impossible 🤷‍♀️

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2d

So it _is_ slightly different from inflation haha, unless you consider open markets where people have to come up with the price on the spot :) For grade inflation at the level of individual teachers to happen, they have to internalize the sliding scale, which changes their perception of As and Fs

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2d

Yeah, I know, it's a response to market / career incentives, but phenomenologically it means a change in attitude (valuation) of same performance. You don't really calculate "just how much should I inflate the grades this month to hit 5% by year 2030". Your intuitive gut feeling gradually morphs.

Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2d

Grades are weird, given that they are BOTH the process, the result, the external messaging, and a misaligned promotion factor for teachers.

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2d

Either a change in teachers' attitudes, or an emergent discrepancy between teachers expectations and observed behaviors. Which would count as a change in grades, but wouldn't count as a true decline in educational outcomes.

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2d

Exactly where I'm going with this. If the biggest effect on the picture is a behavioral change _in teachers_, not in students, my first kneejerk-hypothesis would be that the sudden drop at the end has the same mechanism.

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Arseny Khakhalin @khakhalin.bsky.social · 2d

Boys' grades stayed flat, while girls' grades decreased. The abstract says "changes in grading policies are unlikely to be an explanation", but frankly how could the grades have improved so much from 2007 to 2021 to begin with? Did the kids get so much smarter? Did teachers get so much better?

Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 2d

This important paper shows a precipitous drop in girls' achievement in recent years, closing a third of the gap with boys.

Covid doesn't seem to be the smoking gun, but tiktok may be

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