Tomer Ullman

the switch needs to happen without waking the dog, it's a delicate operation not unlike Indiana Jones and that Idol

my dog's favorite way to rest is plopping down on people's feet. it's cute but means the victim is trapped (unless they want to be the Bad Guy and wake up a poor puppy)

this leads to other people being summoned to tag in as feet replacement

"suppose a spherical pigeon"

"as like... an approximation of..?"

"NO"

🤔

I didn't have time to take relevant pictures so instead of that here's a car I saw that I think neatly separates people by their answer to "would a cool Batman Villain drive this car" (correct answer is Yes)

had a great time talking to the fine people at AHOI (AI+Human Objectives Initiative) at Austin, discussing loopholes and mindlessness and heading what they've been up to

I call this one, "Foreshadowing"

I wonder if in the history of editing someone intentionally made an error that accidentally got corrected that had to be pointed out, oh man that'd be sic [sick] [[sic]]

one wonders if Camus left some other ones in the drafts folder

"we must imagine Tantalus hopeful"

"we must imagine Ixion chuffed"

"we must imagine Prometheus grateful"

"we must imagine Atlas pleased"

"we must imagine Sisyphus happy" - maybe you do. That's your business.

increasing my block is exactly the right advice

feels like this store is about to do me 2x12 hit points of damage

me, murdering sleep: "Haha zounds ay! Ay!"

me, sleeping no more: "'Sblood. what devilry is this."

I played a murder mystery game last night and kept referring to "my tisane" and "little gray cells", which mostly confused and annoyed people, which is also in line with character

presenting this sequence from Poirot (1991) as a public service in case anyone needs it for something

unclear! I suspect they're watching The King's song from Hamilton

my daughter is continuing to make these little guys, who I like Very Much

The 52nd annual meeting of the SPP will be at JHU, June 17-20

📣 Submit your work by January 16! 📣

It's 2026, you'd think people would stop showing tables that simply *bold* the 'better' number and saying 'yeah so that's the winner'

any yet!

once again being driven insane by ML conference submissions

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

academic service

(daughter and I are playing a game, she loses despite early bragging)

me: oh, the hubris!

D: what's hubris?

me: it's like... being too proud of yourself, sort of. thinking you're better than the gods

D: well... that's ok then, I don't care about the gods anyway

me: bubi NO!!

זה אני רק בלי החלק של לקום אחר-כך

(רע פה הבוקר)

a project I really like, now officially out!

"Shape Guides Visual Pretense"

by Qian and me

paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

I'll walk through a quick version here

To get a sense of it, first consider:

Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

this led me to ask it to make this dog Biblically accurate

truly, Be Not Afraid

I asked nano banana to make the original homework problem "Biblically accurate" and it gave me this, which, fair

geometry homework problem, a two dimensional figure with many markings, arrows, and rotations on all sides

biblically accurate angel

staring at my son's geometry homework until I realized what it reminded me of

Kudos to Peng Qian, an extraordinarily talented researcher who led this from start to finish.

----

& as we say at the end:

we hope this works creates new directions for studying playful human expressions, and helps explain the magic that happens when a child picks up a stick and calls it a wand