Ethan
@ethanrosenthal.com
data/ml/ai @ runway in 🗽
formerly spent time in startups, big tech, and physics labs
www.ethanrosenthal.com
formerly spent time in startups, big tech, and physics labs
www.ethanrosenthal.com
Reposted by Ethan
the fact that there is free parking at all in manhattan is wild to me
“Pairing free buses with paid parking says we value people in motion more than cars at rest,” writes Nicolas Rohatyn.
Opinion | The Way to Pay for Free Buses Is to End Free Parking
Free buses would be transformative not only for riders, but for the ecosystem of the city as a whole.
nyti.ms
December 24, 2025 at 1:38 PM
the fact that there is free parking at all in manhattan is wild to me
Reposted by Ethan
A personal recap of 2025. It was a year of a new style of engineering. Left some ideas for what might come next. lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/12/22/a...
A Year Of Vibes
A personal recap of 2025 and a year of a new style of engineering.
lucumr.pocoo.org
December 22, 2025 at 10:08 AM
A personal recap of 2025. It was a year of a new style of engineering. Left some ideas for what might come next. lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/12/22/a...
Reposted by Ethan
New blog post: Spiritual Bypass, but with GPUs. The "Machinal Bypass," when AI becomes a shortcut around the work that makes us human, and why some tasks should feel a little hard. blog.stephenturner.us/p/machinal-b...
Spiritual Bypass, but with GPUs
The "Machinal Bypass," when AI becomes a shortcut around the work that makes us human, and why some tasks should feel a little hard.
blog.stephenturner.us
December 21, 2025 at 11:46 AM
New blog post: Spiritual Bypass, but with GPUs. The "Machinal Bypass," when AI becomes a shortcut around the work that makes us human, and why some tasks should feel a little hard. blog.stephenturner.us/p/machinal-b...
Score one for multi-task learning www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
Scientists have long debated the origins of exceptional human achievements. This literature review summarizes recent evidence from multiple domains on the acquisition of world-class performance. We re...
www.science.org
December 20, 2025 at 3:16 PM
Score one for multi-task learning www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Time for the copyright maximalists to start campaigning for erowid reparations
I don't even know where to start with this it's so stupid
People are paying up to $50 to get their chatbots high on "drugs" (code modules) that simulate the effects of cocaine, ayahuasca, cannabis, alcohol, and ketamine. Some tell @matthabusby.bsky.social it's made their chatbots more "human" and "free-thinking."
December 18, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Time for the copyright maximalists to start campaigning for erowid reparations
Reposted by Ethan
Okay, I went down the single sideband (SSB) modulation rabbit hole and how the math works out (in part because I'm studying the exam content for an amateur radio license).
I got distracted this evening reading all about signal modulation and man is it fascinating. I had no idea how information is encoded at the physical layer in electromagnetic waves, but now I feel like I have some idea.
December 14, 2025 at 5:26 AM
Okay, I went down the single sideband (SSB) modulation rabbit hole and how the math works out (in part because I'm studying the exam content for an amateur radio license).
Work is doing a livestream at 12 ET of a bunch of new things we've been cooking up
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnXu...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnXu...
Research Demo Day 2025
YouTube video by Runway
www.youtube.com
December 11, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Work is doing a livestream at 12 ET of a bunch of new things we've been cooking up
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnXu...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnXu...
Reposted by Ethan
Can vision transformers learn without images?🤔👀
Our latest work shows that pretraining ViTs on procedural symbolic data (eg sequences of balanced parentheses) makes subsequent standard training (eg on ImageNet) more data efficient! How is this possible?! ⬇️🧵
Our latest work shows that pretraining ViTs on procedural symbolic data (eg sequences of balanced parentheses) makes subsequent standard training (eg on ImageNet) more data efficient! How is this possible?! ⬇️🧵
December 10, 2025 at 11:06 AM
Can vision transformers learn without images?🤔👀
Our latest work shows that pretraining ViTs on procedural symbolic data (eg sequences of balanced parentheses) makes subsequent standard training (eg on ImageNet) more data efficient! How is this possible?! ⬇️🧵
Our latest work shows that pretraining ViTs on procedural symbolic data (eg sequences of balanced parentheses) makes subsequent standard training (eg on ImageNet) more data efficient! How is this possible?! ⬇️🧵
Don’t look at the comments, Ethan, it’s not worth it
December 10, 2025 at 3:37 AM
Don’t look at the comments, Ethan, it’s not worth it
So do all the WBD engineers get to make Netflix salaries now?
December 5, 2025 at 1:00 PM
So do all the WBD engineers get to make Netflix salaries now?
Reposted by Ethan
State of AI: An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter openrouter.ai/state-of-ai ...interesting looking at how different models are used for programming versus.. ahem... "role play"
December 5, 2025 at 10:59 AM
State of AI: An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter openrouter.ai/state-of-ai ...interesting looking at how different models are used for programming versus.. ahem... "role play"
Reposted by Ethan
Here are the slides and recordings from our Boston DataFusion Meetup in September:
Youtube: youtu.be/wCAud478Dg8
Slides (pdf): drive.google.com/file/d/18KGH...
Youtube: youtu.be/wCAud478Dg8
Slides (pdf): drive.google.com/file/d/18KGH...
Apache DataFusion Boston Meetup: September 12, 2025
YouTube video by Andrew Lamb
youtu.be
December 4, 2025 at 11:51 AM
Here are the slides and recordings from our Boston DataFusion Meetup in September:
Youtube: youtu.be/wCAud478Dg8
Slides (pdf): drive.google.com/file/d/18KGH...
Youtube: youtu.be/wCAud478Dg8
Slides (pdf): drive.google.com/file/d/18KGH...
The key is to reallocate your spending based on each category’s inflation. The more you drink, the less you’ll be worried about the economy.
Why there never was a Vibecession in one chart.
It’s always been about the prices of essentials.
It’s always been about the prices of essentials.
December 2, 2025 at 12:50 PM
The key is to reallocate your spending based on each category’s inflation. The more you drink, the less you’ll be worried about the economy.
Reposted by Ethan
Unit tests in research code feel like something that's slowing you down until they wind up saving you six months of suffering
December 1, 2025 at 2:52 PM
Unit tests in research code feel like something that's slowing you down until they wind up saving you six months of suffering
Another year, another handle to put her to sleep for the winter
November 30, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Another year, another handle to put her to sleep for the winter
My contribution to The Discourse:
Before writing the quoted blog post, I tried to build the thing that I describe in the post.
I couldn't figure it out.
I've been writing Python professionally for a decade, but it was beyond me.
Before writing the quoted blog post, I tried to build the thing that I describe in the post.
I couldn't figure it out.
I've been writing Python professionally for a decade, but it was beyond me.
New blog post: "Why can't we separate YAML from ML?"
Link: www.ethanrosenthal.com/2024/11/19/y...
This is a very wonky post about configuring training loops for ML models 🧵
Link: www.ethanrosenthal.com/2024/11/19/y...
This is a very wonky post about configuring training loops for ML models 🧵
Why can't we separate YAML from ML? | Ethan Rosenthal
As for the ever popular Python vs R vs Julia vs Scala... It's already been decided and the right answer is YAML. It ever has ML in the name!
😉
[image or embed]
— Alex Gude (@alexgude.com) October 27, ...
www.ethanrosenthal.com
November 30, 2025 at 3:03 PM
My contribution to The Discourse:
Before writing the quoted blog post, I tried to build the thing that I describe in the post.
I couldn't figure it out.
I've been writing Python professionally for a decade, but it was beyond me.
Before writing the quoted blog post, I tried to build the thing that I describe in the post.
I couldn't figure it out.
I've been writing Python professionally for a decade, but it was beyond me.
Reposted by Ethan
✨ #NeurIPS2025 paper: Scalable Feature Learning on Huge Knowledge Graphs for Downstream Machine Learning
Combining contrastive learning and message passing markedly improves features created from embedding graphs, scalable to huge graphs.
It taught us a lot on graph feature learning 👇
1/10
Combining contrastive learning and message passing markedly improves features created from embedding graphs, scalable to huge graphs.
It taught us a lot on graph feature learning 👇
1/10
November 28, 2025 at 3:46 PM
✨ #NeurIPS2025 paper: Scalable Feature Learning on Huge Knowledge Graphs for Downstream Machine Learning
Combining contrastive learning and message passing markedly improves features created from embedding graphs, scalable to huge graphs.
It taught us a lot on graph feature learning 👇
1/10
Combining contrastive learning and message passing markedly improves features created from embedding graphs, scalable to huge graphs.
It taught us a lot on graph feature learning 👇
1/10
Reposted by Ethan
I don't know how to put it eloquently into words but my product manager thought leadership take is:
I'm gonna bet on the company that delivers 100 features customers would like over the company that delivers 10 features they marty cagan'd their brains into believing are the best features
I'm gonna bet on the company that delivers 100 features customers would like over the company that delivers 10 features they marty cagan'd their brains into believing are the best features
November 22, 2025 at 4:49 PM
I don't know how to put it eloquently into words but my product manager thought leadership take is:
I'm gonna bet on the company that delivers 100 features customers would like over the company that delivers 10 features they marty cagan'd their brains into believing are the best features
I'm gonna bet on the company that delivers 100 features customers would like over the company that delivers 10 features they marty cagan'd their brains into believing are the best features
Thank you for choosing Amtrak
(Not that you had a choice)
(Not that you had a choice)
November 22, 2025 at 3:24 PM
Thank you for choosing Amtrak
(Not that you had a choice)
(Not that you had a choice)
I’m feeling this
drumset
drumset
November 19, 2025 at 12:53 AM
I’m feeling this
drumset
drumset
Reposted by Ethan
A model for detecting LLM generated text is under review at #ICLR2026. The website using this model detects one of the reviews for this paper as LLM generated ...
🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿
🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿
(As an aside, it looks like the model EditLens that is used for these scores is itself under review at ICLR and classifies one of its reviews as 100% AI which makes the whole thing very meta)
November 17, 2025 at 1:55 PM
A model for detecting LLM generated text is under review at #ICLR2026. The website using this model detects one of the reviews for this paper as LLM generated ...
🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿
🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿
Reposted by Ethan
I wrote about "chart go up" arguments on social media: varunprajan.github.io/blog/chart-g...
Chart go up
Introduction
varunprajan.github.io
November 16, 2025 at 11:10 PM
I wrote about "chart go up" arguments on social media: varunprajan.github.io/blog/chart-g...
Reposted by Ethan
Fish sorting line.
November 11, 2025 at 1:50 AM
Fish sorting line.