James McDermott

Aha, thank you, yes I have heard it is great. Moving Pantheon to the top of my list now that Pluribus is over until the distant future (late 2027, likely post-singularity for all I know)

French cybercrime authorities search X offices French police have searched the offices of Elon Musk's social ⁠media network X, and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in April related to a widening investigation into the pla...

French police have searched the offices of Elon Musk's social ⁠media network X, and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in April related to a widening investigation into the platform, the Paris prosecutor's office said.

A (very good) drama about The Singularity sounds like it matches my preferences - reco please?

What I don't get is I thought Trump had already used and discarded Musk, had fully fallen-out with him. Why still use Grok?

I also admit I don't understand whether Trump's Greenland thing is further proof, or is disproof, of him working for Russia.

He is a first-class chaos monkey, unreadable.

This is a common pattern, where leftists pretend that people who become hateful were never talented in the first place. Another example: Graham Linehan. I say this as a concerned leftist - concerned about people's honesty. These people should re-read Aesop's Sour Grapes.

It's very interesting in the age of Claude Cowork to look back a year or two to see "sensible, anti-hype" articles which were wrong at the time but are now demonstrated to be wrong. A lesson for all people who think anti-hype is automatically sensible. Example: cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/how...

About the PhD: Audits and evaluation of AI systems — and the broader context that AI systems operate in — have become central to conceptualising, quantifying, measuring and understanding the operations, failures, limitations, underlying assumptions, and downstream societal implications of AI systems. Existing AI audit and evaluation efforts are fractured, done in a siloed and ad-hoc manner, and with little deliberation and reflection around conceptual rigour and methodological validity. This PhD is for a candidate that is passionate about exploring what a conceptually cogent, methodologically sound, and well-founded AI evaluation and safety research might look like. This requires grappling with questions such as: What does it mean to represent “ground truth” in proxies, synthetic data, or computational simulation? How do we reliably measure abstract and complex phenomena? What are the epistemological or methodological implications of quantification and measurement approaches we choose to employ? Particularly, what underlying presuppositions, values, or perspectives do they entail? How do we ensure the lived experiences of impacted communities play a critical role in the development and justification of measurement metrics and proxies? Through exploration of these questions, the candidate is expected to engage with core concepts in the philosophy of science, history of science, Black feminist epistemologies, and similar schools of thought to develop an in-depth understanding of existing practices with the aim of applying it to advance shared standards and best practice in AI evaluation. The candidate is expected to integrate empirical (for example, through analysis or evaluation of existing benchmarks) or practical (for example, by executing evaluation of AI systems) components into the overall work.

are you displeased with today’s AI safety evaluation landscape and curious about what greater conceptual clarity, methodological soundness, and rigour in AI evaluation could look like? if so, consider coming to Dublin to pursue a PhD with me

apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a...

pls repost

Items for sale by cornersbumpedbooksandantiques | eBay Shop eBay for great deals from cornersbumpedbooksandantiques!

Occasional reminder that I sell books and similar stuff on eBay. Link to my store is below.

Just reached 4100+ items for the first time. So there are categories and internal search in the storefront, which might help a bit.

www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_...

I do sometimes use a 3B model locally via Ollama. It's already magical at that small scale. I'm confident that small improvements in training will give us 3B coding models good enough to go completely off-grid, for example.

Speech versus text is a big deal, but we already have more than enough bandwidth for that (actually, we had that a century ago).

From my perspective, avatars would not add anything. LLMs at current levels of capability and current internet speeds/bandwidths are already transformational and there is a huge amount to be done with current models - no way that a lack of avatars makes LLMs flop.

Genetic Algorithms
General Evolutionary Computation and Hybrids
Genetic Programming
Learning for Evolutionary Computation
Neuroevolution
Real World Applications
Swarm Intelligence
Theory

Tracks including:

Benchmarking, Benchmarks, Software, and Reproducibility Complex Systems
Evolutionary Combinatorial Optimization and Metaheuristics
Evolutionary Machine Learning
Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization
Evolutionary Numerical Optimization

GECCO call for papers - abstract deadline Jan 21st!

gecco-2026.sigevo.org/Tracks

@skapedin.bsky.social @folivetti.bsky.social

That is provocative - why do you think it matters?

A cartoon of a strand of DNA, arm-wrestling a scientist

The HUMIES are the annual competition at #GECCO for human-competitive results created by evolutionary computation methods.

***Ten thousand dollars in prizes for human-competitive results***

Submit by Friday May 29, 2026

See www.human-competitive.org for more

Wrote a Substack on this #aras25 poll:

Catherine Connolly is surviving her scrapes - yet Heather Humphreys is within the margin of error for winning

open.substack.com/pub/gavreill...

You should try reading comments on Imgur!

Some of them want to abuse you

All of them will disabuse you (of that notion)

Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design - Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines -

New special issue of GPEM on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design!

Edited by Penousal Machado and Juan Romero

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Kenichi Morita: Reversible world of cellular automata - Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines -

New book review, freely available in GPEM:

“Reversible world of cellular automata” by Kenichi Morita, reviewed by Tomas Rokicki

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

[5] Synth line uses Flow (Sean Luke) github.com/eclab/flow
[6] Vocoder is Logic Pro EVOC
[7] Lyrics where the narrator dreams about a heist going wrong: Kate Bush, "There Goes A Tenner"

Bibliography:
[1] Intro texture and fade-up: Metallica, "Orion"
[2] Drum hitch: Stone Roses, "I Wanna Be Adored" and Cranberries, "Dreams"
[3] Kick/snare inversion: The Cars, "Just What I Needed"
[4] Chord sequence played on Tonnetz (Euler, 1739) implementation at thetonnetz.com

YouTube video by James McDermott Bad Dreams / I Wanna Be Abhorred

youtu.be/qhJrs85be64

Bono is an easy target and whatever about the UK, I bet a lot of Irish people would line up to say they agree with this article. I think he's brilliant.

GPEM journal has a new special issue on "twenty-five years of grammatical evolution"!

Edited and with an introduction by Mahdinejad, Murphy and Ryan.

Special issue: link.springer.com/collections/...

Introduction: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Scalar mappings seem wrong. I think length, volume, mass, and time all map differently.

Maybe itinerant fish intermittently school in the intertidal zone underneath the waves of engagement

Itinerant -> intermittent

There you go, the kind of engagement we all long for

Our gas cooker is an annoying sigmoid. The gas tap is either on with minimal flow, or on with full-flow, with only a tiny range - about 5 degrees of the controller's turn - giving useful intermediate values.

Next up: Massachusetts