AKA NickleDave

What I would like to remind everyone talking about Sam Altman talking about the “PhD level intelligence” of the new ChatGPT is that Sam Altman dropped out of college so he… has no experiential construct for what grad school even is.

Likening PhD holders to a (non-functional) algorithm is a form of dehumanisation & anti-intellectualism that is a bellwether for contemporary fascism. Essentially it's a typical — if not the archetypal — first step towards fascism: to dehumanise, deskill, defund, and, ultimately, fire the academics.

This was a block from my lab BTW. Me and 4 of my lab members sheltered in place for 2 hours getting repeated active shooter notifications. So I can imagine how much more traumatizing it must have been for CDC workers… and how this is exactly what the administration wants

Suspect and Officer Are Dead After Shooting Outside C.D.C. in Atlanta

A gunman opened fire on federal workers at CDC because of disinformation promoted by the right, including agency leaders, and the administration has said nothing. We knew project2025 wanted federal workers to be “traumatized”, apparently it’s also ok if they’re killed www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/u...

SimOffice

Just to give the TL;DR on this one:

*The* main purpose of the EO is to move funding priorities and decisions away from experts and career professionals over to political appointees. With the ultimate power held by Vought / OMB.

a man in a suit and tie is waving his hands in the air in a crowd . ALT: a man in a suit and tie is waving his hands in the air in a crowd .

when you get replies from Blueberrby OP it's time to mute the thread

how much "test-time compute" does GPT-5 Stinking need to search its compressed database of the entire Internet and find this guy's Bluesky post

bsky.app/profile/jman...

Excellent, thank you.
Guessing their prominence on flycatchers and kingbirds is consistent with the idea the bristles play are important for prey capture?

Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper – and why they fall short Also: another paper that seals the deal

For why we are unlikely to get LLMs that can count the number of b's in blueberry with "reasoning", as it is defined by these techcel dweebs without ever having read a cogsci book (they were too busy scanning the books to train their multi-PhD LLMs), see:

garymarcus.substack.com/p/seven-repl...

Good question. They don't tokenize letters because 1. it would be crazy expensive to train models on such long sequences and 2. tokenizing is a form of compression that *adds* info. You make your set of tokens based on things like word frequency. Also 3. some languages don't have letters

But a next-token predictor doesn't "know" facts like "blueberry has only two bs"

One way to deal with this is replace tokenization with "end-to-end" learning from bytes

bsky.app/profile/hnws...

Others involve welding "memory" and "reasoning" on to LLMs, that have their issues </rant>

3/3

Think word parts, but in practice the tokens are a set of bytes. We map each token to a continuously valued vector called an embedding. The LLM "sees" sequence of embeddings, and is fit to predict the next token.

So they do a good job of estimating "these bytes/tokens are very unpredictable!"

2/3

YouTube video by Mathelecs LLM Tokenization Issues!

It's complicated, but the main reason is what everyone else said. LLMs don't see words. But the term of art you want is "tokenization".

1/3

youtube.com/shorts/mtJYj...

Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to improve the process of Federal

Well, this is a huge Executive Order power grab...

www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

1/3

I bet. Now I want to go find some BFs and see if I can see any whiskers

New ChatGPT data just dropped

"blueberrby," Altman said.

title screen, finding a chest, intro (pac-girl in adventurer's clothing) an empty dungeon corridor #pixelart #gamedev

a dungoen map, an encounter (Blinky), a door with a horizontal sliding switch in the shape of pacman, the fairy from PacLand is a shopkeeper. Buy power pills to increase Attack or healing potions to recover HP

Another 64x64pixel game mockup.
Pac-girl as a dungeon crawler.
#pixelart #gamedev

Devastator in the palm of Shockwave's hand, looking distraught. #pixelart

Still very happy with my Transformers cover for IDW comics

I channeled some gundam/ macross into my robots. I love how badly Devastator is being manipulated in that story arc. Also still impressed that they'd take a chance at a #pixelart cover.

Andy Warhol
Water Heater, 1961

#TherapySky US folks, if your legislature doesn't have someone sponsoring a version of this bill, ask your professional organization and your regulatory body why the hell not. We need a 50-state ban on this dangerous, unproven trash.

Two TT positions at Bowdoin College, a small liberal arts college in Maine:

Neuroscientist Assistant Professor: careers.bowdoin.edu/postings/16571
Neuroscientist (AI-based research) Assistant Professor:
careers.bowdoin.edu/postings/16572

very cool. I just got this badge in Grand Theft Doody 9

good. Fuck BetterHelp and all these techbro therapy start-ups who think they can do an Uber to mental health care providers, then pull the rug by replacing their gig worker therapists with LLMs trained on all the calls they record

figure 1 of my dissertation

First-of-a-kind US class-action lawsuit would force EPA to reinstate $3bn climate program Coalition of non-profits, tribes and local governments sued EPA chief for halting climate justice grants

First-of-its-kind US class-action lawsuit would force EPA to reinstate $3bn climate program www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... via @us.theguardian.com

The highlight that the Internet Archive preserving Flash is starting to get "but flash was awful" comments but I can't hear you over the sound of 600 cooking games.

archive.org/details/soft...

By the way if you all want to read these experiments, I have 2 novellas published in Clarkesworld trying it out. Axiom of Dreams and Fractal Karma. The latter is an Ignyte Award finalist this year.

They’re a different vibe from my early stories. reading PKD & certain events changed my perspective.