James McDermott
jmmcd.bsky.social
James McDermott
@jmmcd.bsky.social
Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Galway, Ireland. I'd rather write programs that write programs than write programs.
You should try reading comments on Imgur!

Some of them want to abuse you

All of them will disabuse you (of that notion)
October 4, 2025 at 8:45 AM
[5] Synth line uses Flow (Sean Luke) github.com/eclab/flow
[6] Vocoder is Logic Pro EVOC
[7] Lyrics where the narrator dreams about a heist going wrong: Kate Bush, "There Goes A Tenner"
July 6, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Bibliography:
[1] Intro texture and fade-up: Metallica, "Orion"
[2] Drum hitch: Stone Roses, "I Wanna Be Adored" and Cranberries, "Dreams"
[3] Kick/snare inversion: The Cars, "Just What I Needed"
[4] Chord sequence played on Tonnetz (Euler, 1739) implementation at thetonnetz.com
The Tonnetz
thetonnetz.com
July 6, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Bono is an easy target and whatever about the UK, I bet a lot of Irish people would line up to say they agree with this article. I think he's brilliant.
July 6, 2025 at 10:19 PM
Scalar mappings seem wrong. I think length, volume, mass, and time all map differently.
July 2, 2025 at 11:15 AM
Maybe itinerant fish intermittently school in the intertidal zone underneath the waves of engagement
June 30, 2025 at 6:34 PM
Itinerant -> intermittent

There you go, the kind of engagement we all long for
June 30, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Ah ok. Obvious in retrospect.

Yes, I agree. Intellectual tasks turned out to be "easy" because iterating in software is so much faster.

Kind of sad, isn't it? I wanted AI to do the housework.
March 18, 2025 at 11:09 PM
Thought experiment: compare (1) an end-to-end LLM reading a problem statement and providing an answer, versus (2) translate the problem to PKN, then run formal reasoning over the PKN, then translate the result back to English.

My intuition says a good LLM will win this.
March 18, 2025 at 11:02 PM
Maybe the PKN becomes a symbolic layer, a bit like the system 2. But LLMs already have words (system 2) on top of their statistical/lower-level vectors (system 1). I'm not convinced that reasoning in PKN can do better than reasoning in LLMs.
March 18, 2025 at 11:02 PM
In a way, it's weird that we are still trying initiatives like this. We've already shown that LLMs are sufficient for a lot of reasoning, and moreover, anyway, are necessary (translating PKN to/from English is a job for LLMs, not for humans).
March 18, 2025 at 11:02 PM
What does "durable" mean here?
March 18, 2025 at 10:46 PM
Congratulations!
February 10, 2025 at 3:57 PM
I just saw Thomas Riker try to bluff his doppelgänger Will in 5-card draw, and fail dismally (TNG season 6). Not entertaining except as sadism, 2/10.
December 24, 2024 at 2:16 AM
Lots of people do dismiss concerns, and in fact two main sets of concerned people dismiss each other's concerns. The point here is that Ethan does not.

Your comment is toxic and deserves a block.
December 22, 2024 at 11:23 AM