James McDermott

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

Ah ok. Obvious in retrospect.

Yes, I agree. Intellectual tasks turned out to be "easy" because iterating in software is so much faster.

Kind of sad, isn't it? I wanted AI to do the housework.

Thought experiment: compare (1) an end-to-end LLM reading a problem statement and providing an answer, versus (2) translate the problem to PKN, then run formal reasoning over the PKN, then translate the result back to English.

My intuition says a good LLM will win this.

Maybe the PKN becomes a symbolic layer, a bit like the system 2. But LLMs already have words (system 2) on top of their statistical/lower-level vectors (system 1). I'm not convinced that reasoning in PKN can do better than reasoning in LLMs.

In a way, it's weird that we are still trying initiatives like this. We've already shown that LLMs are sufficient for a lot of reasoning, and moreover, anyway, are necessary (translating PKN to/from English is a job for LLMs, not for humans).

Plausible Knowledge Notation: "a notation and model for imperfect knowledge, such as everyday knowledge that is uncertain, context sensitive, imprecise, incomplete, inconsistent and likely to change"

w3c.github.io/cogai/pkn.html

What does "durable" mean here?

Congratulations!

European Citizens' Initiative Give your support !

Ireland! We need just 1,483 ppl who are Irish nationals to sign this EU petition to initiate a ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy* across the EU. The UN considers such ‘therapy’ to be mental torture. #SpeirGorm Please sign & share with all EU citizens that you know: eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#...

Students who can't really write in English but use LLMs to write their emails to me - should I treat them as having communicative intent? Do they intend to say the things they say, or do they intend some underlying meaning which I should charitably guess at? Or is it just empty syntax?

I just saw Thomas Riker try to bluff his doppelgänger Will in 5-card draw, and fail dismally (TNG season 6). Not entertaining except as sadism, 2/10.

Lots of people do dismiss concerns, and in fact two main sets of concerned people dismiss each other's concerns. The point here is that Ethan does not.

Your comment is toxic and deserves a block.

There are some arguments either way on the bottom line, but these Nazi IQ tests surely constitute zero evidence either way.

I think you can be heterodox / anti-woke (in a specific definition of that contested term) without going anywhere near the space lasers or the right.

Any task which is so easy for humans and so hard for computers is necessary, but not sufficient, for AGI.

It was originally just called ARC (5 years ago).

Do you mean "works" as in "produces a smaller model of same performance" (seems easy to accept) or ".. of better performance"?

Hold Radboud University accountable for the wrongful arrest of staff and students To the Radboud College van Bestuur, On Monday December 16, six staff and students from the Radboud University were wrongfully accused of property damage and held overnight in jail on the grounds of s...

Dear international colleagues, repression in the Netherlands is worsening. We can really use your support. Please join me in signing this open letter demanding accountability from our Executive Board for the wrongful arrest of six students and staff at my university docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...