Shadab Choudhury

The two-men-on-bus meme. The man on the left is staring at a depressing, dark wall, labelled "Submitted to AAAI". The man on the right is happily staring at a bright landscape, labelled "Went to COLM".

Folks on ML socials these past few weeks.

My dad's been watching instructional car videos and every other video he opens is utter slop.

I'm in the room and it's SO obvious to me that a video with generated images/panning stock photos and a steady, droning narration in numbered list format is slop. Even he can tell

But for how much longer?

This is also the cause of the "BlueSky is boring" complaining.

BlueSky gave them the power to have more control over their content and they looked at that power and had absolutely no clue what to do with it and threw up their arms whining.

Recommender systems have quite literally broken younger folks' ability to search. I'm not kidding you, the average user is utterly incapable of finding content without a recommender feeding them things. That's why forums died but reddit survived as a social platform, because forums don't use recsys.

Not can, but do!

Some of your best candidates are going to be people who know exactly how flawed the use of LLMs here are, and will see the use of LLMs here as a massive red flag for the whole company.

the tail of the y looks like it was beaten and violently contorted into that shape, damn

the real postrat

Nobody seems to have mentioned the blog post yet that dropped yesterday that 'debunks' K2-Think. Turns out, it's guilty of the classic sins of train-on-test and sketchy-comparisons.

www.sri.inf.ethz.ch/blog/k2think

Still boggles the mind how one of the dullest and most uninspiring pieces of Harry Potter fanfiction led to where we are today.

the virgin "AGI existential risk" vs the Chad Global Warming Under virgin AGI existential risk: - programmer LARP fantasy that makes coding the single most important skill for saving humanity - fake and made up - entirely based on thought experiments - Zero evidence - assumes that there's this vaguely defined concept known as "intelligence" that can be linearly increased as if it were a mathematical quantity -projects an anthropomorphic drive toward control and power onto algorithms that just do statistics to spit out words; colonialist self-report - sponsored by billionaires who want to make their technology seem more important than it is - blackmails you from the future using faulty logic; doesn't actually make any sense - "oh no, i guess we have to build the Doom Machine now. i guess the course of technological progress is inevitable, oh well" Under "the chad global warming" - incomprehensibly complex and interconnected polycrisis - verified by the entire scientific community - resists ideological simplification - will actually kill you - doesn't even need intelligence to threaten humanity's survival - divine retribution for fossil capital's greed and wanton exploitation of the natural world - reveals deep-rooted flaws with the dominant politico-economic paradigm; demands a fundamental shift of human value systems by its sheer physical existence - billionaires don't want you to think about it because it is too scary

absolutely incredible

credits: u/showermusicc on reddit

And ultimately, I'd rather be here than in a place where I have to fight for space with people who believe vaccines cause autism and windmills kill whales and horse injections cure all and if I want to actually be heard I have to pay someone who then uses my money to fund and support those beliefs

Most of our work is engineering and everyone knows that.

Thinking that any more than 10% of machine learning and AI research counts as 'science' is the real cope here.

rip openreview

Apparently 60k+ reviews was too much to handle. Hope no one's getting desk rejected at AAAI over non-submission of revieiws.

In my honest opinion, immature but good ideas belong in Workshops, Symposiums, Doctoral Consortiums, etc., not conferences

But induced demand is right. If you're competing for positions and see other applicants have 6 CVPR papers, you also (think you) need 6-8 CVPR/ECCV/ICCV papers to get an offer.

Though, frankly speaking, they really should've just gotten a much bigger venue at Mexico City. 500 attendees there is nothing given just how many people can't or won't travel to the US at the moment.

NeurIPS already has two official locations and one endorsed satellite location!

If they allowed for papers to be presented at EurIPS without being also presented at either San Diego or Mexico City, they could easily accommodate those 400 papers.

ACCV and WACV have deadlines around July and September respectively (though ACCV still has the problem of being biannual). For more specialized work, FG (faces) and 3DV (3D) also have deadlines in that same timeframe.

As far as I've found, Lumo is just a wrapper around a few external LLMs (they mention Nemo, OpenHands 32B, OLMO 2 32B, and Mistral Small 3).

Seems like Marketing fucked up and was unaware of the terminology used for AI Policy or Engineering. Still not a great look.

wait, I know econ PhD programs are batshit these days but this sounds so oddly specific-

what'd they do?

And on that note, many questions, esp in the History section, seem to be about info that simply may not exist. I.e. there is no way to get a correct answer even with human validation (unless you threw a History department a million dollar grant, I guess). How would the answers to these be confirmed?

Some of the Qs in the dataset are quite old. Is there any accounting for questions that may have been already answered elsewhere, but not updated on SE?

E.g. for Q 473, the UQ-validated answer mentions Peristan a lot. But Peristan is also mentioned in a response on Reddit to the same question.

Honestly there's a *huge* number of researchers who are "ML researchers" who will not even submit to AAAI, NeurIPS, or any other top-tier conference.

I'll put it over 500k for sure. Over a million, if you're loose enough with your definition of ML research.

Even student visas are given for a standard 5 years on paper, even if your program is only 1-2 years (your actual ability to stay or enter depends on your SEVIS status instead)

Hardware costs money to produce and distribute.

Software, especially open-source software, can be reproduced indefinitely and distributed anywhere for no cost.

Oh dang, the authors realized they were about to catch a lot of heat for diving into a controversial topic and covered after themselves.

Which actually shows a level of integrity on their part, honestly.

It's been tried but the results haven't been impressive. I've seen at least a couple, usually more, papers on this at every NLP conference in the past couple years.

All these citation managers and notetaking apps and somehow I managed to fall back on a word document with my references as

<short note on where/why I'm citing this>
<url>

😮‍💨

Zotero's great, but at this stage of writing, adding things as I find them seems to interrupt my stream of consciousness

I've seen it on Reddit since Stable Diffusion/Midjourney dropped pretty much.

I'm not disabled in a way that stops me from creating what I wait, but I've seen disabled artists pushing back strongly against this just bc it's an argument often made by abled people using disabled people as a prop.

Didn't ACL 2025 also have more than 50% of first authors based in China?

Well... it's an interesting way to ensure everyone can fit into the special session rooms, I guess.