Anand Sarwate (he/him)

TFW you open a new browser tab and your fingers automatically type "overleaf.c" + tab.

The line between satire and reality has blurred even further

Google AI search result for “was 2010 fifteen years ago?” returning: “No, 2010 was 14 years ago, not 15 years ago. The current year is 2025, and to find the number of years ago 2010 was, you subtract 2010 from 2025, which equals 14. Current Year: 2025 Past Year: 2010 Years Ago: 2025 - 2010 = 14 years”

Good news about the cutting-edge AI tools from the $3-trillion-dollar company.

Mousepad from #ISIT 1998, the International Symposium on Information Theory, in honor of Claude E. Shannon 1948 paper, "A mathematical theory of communication"

Worn, vintage yet precious to my heart. Souvenir: a mousepad from #ISIT 1998, the International Symposium on Information Theory, in honor of Claude E. Shannon 1948 paper, "A mathematical theory of communication", where I was a lucky voluntary student.

YouTube video by John Rutter & The Cambridge Singers The evening primrose from Five Flower Songs - Benjamin Britten, John Rutter, The Cambridge Singers

There is a lovely set of choral pieces by Britten, the flower songs, and The Evening Primrose is a balm:

youtu.be/fCEr1tIvDe4?...

The Banal Evil of AI Safety Chatbot companies are harmful and dishonest. How can we hold them accountable?

This. Actually this.

www.argmin.net/p/the-banal-...

The scansion doesn’t work for singing it to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Really sad to hear about their recent fire!

Evergreen! Also: "drones helping save people after natural disasters" vs. "drones killing anyone else who survived after we bombed them."

"Do you need an accelerant? Maybe some kindling?"

by applying a QR decomposition, any matrix can be written as a QR code multiplied by an upper triangular matrix

Ah posted to the wrong post, will delete.

You mean kids from 2005-2016 were not 50% smarter than everyone else???????????

Wow, my SAT score was waaaaay lower. How am I a full-ass professor?

ALIGNMENT is all that there is for you
Sorry that there's all this bullshit too
ArXiV's full of crap
So good luck finding just a scrap
ALIGNMENT's hard to waaaade through...

(h/t Nat King Cole)

A is altruism, ethically
L is large because it has to be
I is very, very, inferenc-iary
G is for the generative
N-onsense for your query

M is for the manifolds, you see
E is 'mergent (no emergency)
N is nous, it has it (don't deny it, just embrace it)
T is trite palaver, best to skip even a whit

I've created a new AI assistant called Bartleby that politely refuses to do any task you ask it to do.

Tomieinlove tweets: "(Continental philosopher): Without 5, we could not count to 6. (Me): Yes. (Continental philosopher): It could be said 6 is consequently in the 5-shadow, the forthcoming of 6 is 5-heralded, that 5 springs necessarily from the recapitulation of 6. (Me, checking my watch): Yes."

Went to go look at Grok but got distracted by this quite funny burn on Continental philosophy.

The New York Times was more skeptical of the academic qualifications of a black woman who had secured tenure and become the president of Harvard than they were of a white man who washed out of a grad program with a massive scandal and then became a white nationalist troll.

The saga of the NYT's anti-Mamdani story taken from notorious white supremacist Jordan Lasker (they call him an "academic") gets even more amazing: Lasker's only impactful paper, which claimed white people are smarter, is infamous: it misused data so badly it got his tenured co-author fired. 2/

Do I stay up until midnight AOE and hope they have their shit together or just assume they will be gracious about it? Their language suggested the former. It's a holiday weekend and I don't have the time to deal with their BS.

OpenReview's servers appear to be borked so I can't upload my already written reviews and I've planned to be off the next few days. NeurIPS appears to be very dire about deadlines but also don't have the infrastructure up.

While I've expressed a number of disagreements w Mamdani, Sen. Gillibrand's lacerating and tendentious attacks on him just cement my longstanding belief that's she's a self-seeking opportunist of the worst order. I fully respect those who think Al Franken was right to resign. But Gillibrand ...

Did you know that ICML is also the International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma?

The "AI is a cancer" jokes just write themselves!

www.icml.ch/icml/home.html

Yup, although I missed last year!

It is not yet fall but already my leaves runneth over.

(Or amok?)

Skilled immigration on the chopping block? Effects of eliminating "Optional Practical Training" in the US The White House has taken numerous steps to sharply reduce the number of immigrant workers, with or without legal status, in the US economy. These policies, so far, typically target immigrants with le...

They're terminating OPT.

Today the nominee to head USCIS stated directly: he will end Optional Practical Training, the single largest channel for high-skill immigrants to work in the US.

6 weeks ago I warned about this & summarized the research on impacts of this drastic action—> @piie.com

Visiting Bristol Uni for the week and I'm glad I'm in the Fry building (maths) and not the Abattoir.

... although I guess one might get fried after visiting the abattoir?

The trend of creating "acronyms" (I call them nacronyms) by picking random letters from the *middle* of words in the system's name is bad enough, but somehow C turned into a K as well? Don't try so hard, people.

Actually, pulling random letters and calling it "meaning" is a good metaphor for AI.

Excited to learn from @spmontecarlo.bsky.social at LSIT!