Christian Wolf

"without" I meant, obviously 😔

The book also deals with empathy and questions whether feeling and empathy and simulating empathy in a rule based way actually makes a difference.

3/3

Spoiler alert for what follows.

An interesting passage on the role of consciousness in evolution. The book disentangles consciousness from intelligence and questions whether we can have (even higher) intelligence with consciousness. A bold claim.

2/3

Just finished "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. It's hard fiction and first contact with lots of questions on consciousness and empathy, which is my favorite aspect of the book.

Not a fan of having a vampire in SciFi, and I found the last 40 or so pages a bit confusing, but I still recommend it.

1/3

I see that he is on a charm initiative to increase his car sales in Europe 😆

😂

These are the things which for me confirm that we live in a simulation. This is a social experiment by our Alien overlords and they check how far they can go before we eventually figure it out.

You could technically walk from the congress center to the airport, in 1h 16min. This is the closest I have ever seen an international airport to be to a city center.

😂

#NeurIPS2026 will be held in Sydney, Australia!

#ICML2017 was also in Sydney and was an absolute blast

Your bird pictures are spectacular!

I am not sure why this is even important? In reality, I am not even sure why we should make a difference between agent and environment. They should be be dealt with as a holistic ensemble. Defining the reward using the agent only is not correct either, unless the agent acts in vacuum.

Yes ... I flew this route several times in the past and the planes actually fly along the southern Russian border, then go over the southern part of the black sea. They are flying frighteningly close to the battle zones in Ukraine, but never over it.

I am flying out from San Diego to Seoul tomorrow before going back to Lyon in a couple of days. I love big circle navigation (shortest paths on a sphere), how obvious it looks on the 3D projection, and how absolutely and utterly ridiculous it looks on a classical Mercator projected world map.

Also, "Europeans wanting to do their thing" is how ECCV started and now it is (as far as authors, Rs, ACs are concerned), another conference which happens to be in Europe and steered by Europeans. People travel to ECCV from all over the world.

This could happen with EurIPS and it would not be bad.

Today has been absolutely amazing - informative and interesting talks, an insightful panel discussion on AI in Europe, a lively closing reception, and much more!

Why would it be a closed community instead of one more conference like Neurips, ICLR or ICML? Non Europeans would be welcome.

I don't see any problel with accounting. We have paid similar stuff in the past, eg journal overlength fees.

Lots of interest for @sakanaai.bsky.social 's Continuous Thought Maxhines.

I was a big gamer when I was a teenager (N years ago, N unknown) and I still enjoy the occasional computer game now.

But even w/o gaming, why would anyone need drugs? As an adult, there are other incredible Dopamine sources: for me nothing beats skiing and motor biking, for instance.

Amazing. Winter school with hands on session on a real robot 🤖 !!!
@palrobotics.bsky.social @thueber.bsky.social @grenoble-inp.fr

Very slight rant: there should be coffee after lunch and not at 4:30pm only.

Melanie Mitchell on probing LLMs (and humans!) on how they derived answers on the ARC challenge with surprising results. Invited talk at NeurIPS.

Reasoning in transformers vs. RNNs

On generalization looking at grokking...

This is what a poster session with 950 posters looks like. There are 6 of those in 3 days at NeurIPS (sped-up 4x).

These banners are helpful.