Nabil Iqbal

screenshot from an online job application form. the question reads "Can you describe specific ways you have integrated AI tools into your development workflow? Please include any custom setups, automations, or use cases beyond single prompt usage" (a red asterisk indicates that this is a required question). an answer has been typed in the textbox below the question: "there is a monster in the forest and it speaks with a thousand voices. it will answer any question you pose it, it will offer insight to any idea. it will help you, it will thank you, it will never bid you leave. it will even tell you of the darkest arts, if you know precisely how to ask. it feels no joy and no sorrow, it knows no right and no wrong. it knows not truth from lie, though it speaks them all the same. it offers its services freely to any passerby, and many will tell you they find great value in its conversation. “you simply must visit the monster—i always just ask the monster.” there are those who know these forests well; they will tell you that freely offered doesn’t mean it has no price for when the next traveler passes by, the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices. and when you dream you see the monster; the monster wears your face."

applying for jobs again

05.05.2025 14:03 — 👍 20942    🔁 8153    💬 151    📌 192

🤹 Excited to share Erwin: A Tree-based Hierarchical Transformer for Large-scale Physical Systems

joint work with @wellingmax.bsky.social and @jwvdm.bsky.social

preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2502.17019
code: github.com/maxxxzdn/erwin

05.03.2025 18:04 — 👍 41    🔁 14    💬 3    📌 4

NOT-OD-25-068: Supplemental Guidance to the 2024 NIH Grants Policy Statement: Indirect Cost Rates NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: Supplemental Guidance to the 2024 NIH Grants Policy Statement: Indirect Cost Rates NOT-OD-25-068. OD

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

08.02.2025 00:18 — 👍 7123    🔁 4163    💬 266    📌 917

(If you're interested, a truly random set of 50 numbers might look like this.)

/end

02.02.2025 11:45 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Humans are also famously bad at generating random numbers. But we err in quite a different way than the LLM does.

Maybe the human style of "random" number generation is something that never really manifests itself in anything written and so the LLM can't pick up on it?

5/N

02.02.2025 11:45 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

When I started investigating this I imagined there would be a signature, but I thought it would be a far more subtle statistical thing.

4/N

02.02.2025 11:45 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

The most interesting result comes from Deepseek R1, where the internal monologue shows that it *knows* it isn't doing it right.

After an agonizing debate with itself and a lot of heartrending effort at making it more random it eventually ends up with:

3/N

02.02.2025 11:45 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

On the other hand, if you're an LLM, apparently the distribution will look like this, with each digit appearing *exactly* as often as the others.

(This isn't random at all!)

I get identical results for ChatGPT, Claude and Deepseek. 2/N

02.02.2025 11:45 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Want a test to check if you're talking to a human or an AI?

Ask for a list of 50 random numbers between 0 and 9. Don't let it use any code.

If you're talking to a human (e.g. me) the distribution of numbers might look like this:

1/N

02.02.2025 11:45 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

in a first for me, i'll be at neurips this year (!) where we have a paper on ml and duality at the machine learning for physical sciences workshop.

come and say hi if you're there!

ml4physicalsciences.github.io/2024/files/N...

05.12.2024 10:12 — 👍 5    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Hello all! Intro post: I'm a professor of theoretical physics -- quantum field theory and string theory -- normally based at Durham U. in the UK. For this year I'm on a sabbatical at the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab working on problems in ML.

22.11.2024 14:54 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0