Mark J. Nelson
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mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Mark J. Nelson
@mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
4.3K followers 470 following 3.7K posts
Comp. sci. prof. @ American University, Washington DC. AI & games researcher with miscellaneous other interests. https://www.kmjn.org/
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mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Texas is also dominating renewable energy production
chart title "Texas Leads in Wind Plus Solar" showing Texas with about 170k GWh of renewable energy production in 2024, followed by California with about 95k, Iowa with about 40k, and others clustered around 20-40k.
November 16, 2025 at 5:12 AM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Outdoor boarding! Nice to get a bit of fresh air.
a photograph of people on a ramp boarding an Air Canada Express flight
November 16, 2025 at 12:02 AM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
A weird thing about switching back to glasses (with pretty high myopia) after 20 years or so of contacts is 3d color effects, like reds on a screen in particular "pop out". Makes the AIIDE logo pretty trippy.
a 3x3 grid where some of the cells are filled with solid red
November 14, 2025 at 1:21 AM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Edmonton has an outdoor "neon sign museum"
a photograph of a brick building with many neon signs attached to the side
November 13, 2025 at 3:18 AM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
fires of Mt Doom burning particularly bright this morning
a photograph of the Edmonton skyline at dawn, with a prominent gas flare
November 12, 2025 at 2:31 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
aurora in Edmonton, though too much light pollution to see with the naked eye (this is a 4-second phone camera exposure)
a photograph of the Edmonton skyline with some hazy green and red bands visible
November 12, 2025 at 3:21 AM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Including (in the '80 volume) some cool diagrams assembled out of typewriter art and hand-drawn arrows cdn.aaai.org/AAAI/1980/AA...
A diagram showing a narrative sequence involving John, Mary, and the events: "wants to buy", "wants to buy", "buys house", "house is sold", "desires fire", "can't set fire", "desires fire", "gets fire going", "house burns down"
November 11, 2025 at 10:48 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
In a slightly different way, I think also ties in a bit to this older debate. yosefk.com/blog/redunda...
"No, seriously. Take command line parsing. You want common syntax for options, right? And you want some of them to accept values, right? And those values can be strings, and booleans, and integers, right? And integers can be decimal or hexadecimal, right? And they can be values of user-defined types, right? And they can have help strings, right? And you'd like to generate help screens from them, right? And GUIs with property pages? And read them from configuration files? And check the legality of flags or sets of flags, right?"
November 9, 2025 at 5:44 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Kind of fun results. Grid of adjective x noun; 10 images sampled from sd-turbo and averaged for each grid cell.
November 8, 2025 at 12:09 AM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Nice one-two punch in that respect in this recent article (which I thought was pretty good). www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
L.L.M.s appear to have a “seeing as” machine at their core. They represent each word with a series of numbers denoting its coördinates—its vector—in a high-dimensional space. In GPT-4, a word vector has thousands of dimensions, which describe its shades of similarity to and difference from every other word. During training, a large language model tweaks a word’s coördinates whenever it makes a prediction error; words that appear in texts together are nudged closer in space. This produces an incredibly dense representation of usages and meanings, in which analogy becomes a matter of geometry. In a classic example,
November 7, 2025 at 4:54 AM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
the best part of House of Lords reports is that you'll be reading what seems to be a serious policy document, published on a real government website, but then you get to the list of authors
Appendix 1: List of members and Declarations of Interest Members Lord Berkeley Lord Borwick Lord Drayson Lord Lucas Lord Mair (Chair) Baroness Neuberger Baroness Neville-Jones Baroness Northover Lord Ranger of Northwood Viscount Stansgate Lord Stern of Brentford Baroness Walmsley Baroness Willis of Summertown Baroness Young of Old Scone
November 5, 2025 at 6:15 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
listening to @benjaminstokes.net talk about Locally Made Civic Games
a photograph of the speaker next to his title slide
November 3, 2025 at 9:20 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Landing at DCA Monday morning like a Senator.
a photograph from a plane landing over the Potomac, heading north, on an overcast day
November 3, 2025 at 3:19 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
this Walmart educational game is actually kind of fun
photograph of a touchscreen showing a bunch of boxes of various shapes and sizes to load onto a palette
November 2, 2025 at 5:21 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Concerned
detail of a painting by John James Audubon showing a concerned looking turkey
November 1, 2025 at 7:43 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
@utopia-defer.red I'm reading the November 2025 Harper's, and uh, care to comment?
"poster going by the username Gooncultist. He was the kind of chronic social-media user who works full-time in tech and was seemingly raised by niche online-forum moderators, but who nonetheless exhibits a curious fluency in continental philosophy. (One representative tweet began: “yknow corruption/pornification kink fit really well into post-9/11 baudrillard.”) Finding him among this welter of"
November 1, 2025 at 1:20 AM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
I rarely end up on the yellow line, but it has the nicest metro view in the city
a photograph crossing the Potomac river from the inside of a WMATA yellow line train
October 31, 2025 at 9:59 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Accidentally found something I wrote when I was very mad about machine learning eight years ago. Weird to experience it as an outside observer.
Mark Nelson May 22, 2017 I mostly assume without reading that the "new phrenology" subgenre of machine learning is nonsense, but it's good someone is digging into it. This particular paper, which made a splash last fall by claiming to have 90% accuracy distinguishing "criminal" from "non-criminal" faces based on photographs, turns out to be explainable by a much more boring reason than I expected. I thought it'd be some subtle biases, but they are instead really screamingly obvious. The original pap… See more
October 31, 2025 at 7:15 AM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Reminds me of an old pedagogical functional programming language. (No word from the profs' students on whether they agree.) dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...
"The augmented typed λ-calculus is used as a programming language for a variety of illustrative examples. We christen this language Fun because fun instead of λ is the functional abstraction keyword and because it is pleasant to deal with."
October 29, 2025 at 7:16 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
A "hack" I actually used as an undergrad was to slice and dice the text into different sequences, at least when I could get my hands on plaintext. Perhaps not what you're going for here...
A screenshot of the first paragraph of Moby Dick, starting with "Call me Ishmael." There is a red X drawn through it. A screenshot of the sentences from Moby Dick extracted and sorted alphabetically, all starting with "We all..." or "We are...". There is a green check-mark drawn through it.
October 25, 2025 at 5:08 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
All the examples except "Mazes 3" scale up pretty well, even in the browser (and the viz code can deal with that). Here's a 50×50 dungeon-crawler level. You can edit the size (and other code) under the Code tab.
Screenshot of a 50 by 50 dungeon-crawler level. About 2/3 of the cells are walls, one is green ("gem"), and one is orange ("altar"). There is a path through the level from the top-left entrance to the gem, then the altar, then the exit (bottom-right).
October 22, 2025 at 9:42 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
a nice autumn day in the District
a photograph of a sidewalk with trees and a man walking away in the distance
October 20, 2025 at 7:02 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
a few more 🫣
a condo price history showing in reverse chronological order: 7/18/2025 - Price change - $234,900 7/1/2025 - Price change - $239,999 4/22/2025 - Price change - $244,900 4/11/2025 - Listed for sale - $260,000 9/20/2012 - Sold - $249,900 a condo price history showing: 7/25/2025 - Listed for sale - $435,000 9/1/2005 - Sold - $416,900
October 20, 2025 at 2:29 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Some impressive sideburns in the July 1970 issue of IEEE Transactions on Computers (incidentally, Brian Kernighan's PhD advisor).
A black-and-white photograph of a man in his late 20s, wearing a suit and tie, with prominent sideburns. The author bio reads: "Peter Weiner (M'66) was born in New York, N. Y., on January 9, 1942. He received the B.S.E.E. degree from City College of the City University of New York in 1963, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, Brooklyn, N. Y., in 1964 and 1967, respectively."
October 19, 2025 at 6:06 PM
mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
Seeing a lot of this: condos currently on the market for the same price they sold for in the 2010s, which would imply about a 30-40% decrease in real terms. Still unsure if buying is a good deal though, as in many cases the HOA/coop fee has also gone up significantly.
October 18, 2025 at 1:27 PM