Miles Cranmer
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milescranmer.bsky.social
Miles Cranmer
@milescranmer.bsky.social
AI + Astro/Physics. Assistant Prof at Cambridge.

astroautomata.com/
grep -A/-B might be the worst flags in all of Unix. Is A=after or above? Is B=before or below? Even the alphabetical order is backwards! (A comes *AFTER* B according to grep)

I've given up and just use `grep -A {N} -B {N}` for everything
September 28, 2025 at 6:58 PM
Does anybody know the actual page limit for ICLR submissions? The author guidelines page contradicts itself:
September 24, 2025 at 10:44 PM
Cambridge Maths calls the top student in a given year the "Senior Wrangler."

Why?

Apparently this originates in Medieval examinations called "disputations," where students would literally wrangle (argue) in Latin with designated opponents.
September 15, 2025 at 12:36 PM
PolymathicAI is recruiting two postdoctoral researchers to join our team at Cambridge, to work on building and understanding large-scale foundation models for science. Please share with potential candidates!
September 4, 2025 at 9:46 AM
Cannot wait for someone to wrap SAP Concur in an MCP

It’s kind of crazy you still can’t generate expense reports from a folder of receipts!
August 2, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Really loving AR glasses for working while traveling. No squinting at my laptop + I can still enjoy the view!

These just plug into my closed laptop as an external monitor. Means I'm actually productive on planes now because I'm not hurting my neck looking down the whole flight!
July 15, 2025 at 10:35 AM
Tomorrow I get to give my favourite type of lecture to some new physics PhD students 😃
July 14, 2025 at 5:58 PM
I am a HUGE fan of Mooncake.jl github.com/chalk-lab/Mooncake.jl, a new language-level autodiff for Julia.

Most impressive is how uncompromising the devs are about correctness and reliability. It has some of the best software engineering practices I've seen in the entire ecosystem!
July 8, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Wow. Apparently some PySR users are building dedicated rigs for faster equation discovery!
May 21, 2025 at 11:47 AM
I just referred to the literal letter 'z' as 'redshift' 😵‍💫
May 15, 2025 at 1:53 PM
SymbolicRegression.jl v1.10.0 is out! It can now evolve expressions over arbitrary input types.

The video below shows it reverse-engineering a string transformation from examples.

Curious to see how people use this!
May 2, 2025 at 10:43 PM
Just released BorrowChecker.jl — a macro library that brings Rust-style ownership and borrowing to Julia!

github.com/MilesCranmer...
GitHub - MilesCranmer/BorrowChecker.jl: A borrow checker for Julia
A borrow checker for Julia. Contribute to MilesCranmer/BorrowChecker.jl development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
April 11, 2025 at 9:19 AM
You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this 😮‍💨
April 8, 2025 at 4:28 PM
We have just opened a fully-funded PhD position at Cambridge, supervised by me & Vasily Belokurov.

Topic: AI + astronomical imaging (broadly defined).
Deadline: April 16.

Please share with anyone who may be interested!

www.postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/dire...
April 2, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Very excited to share that my group in Cambridge is offering an “AI for Science” Encode fellowship on multiscale physics through Pillar VC & ARIA!

Apply by April 30th:
encode.pillar.vc/projects/mul...
March 25, 2025 at 9:08 PM
This might be the greatest bug report I’ve ever seen
March 6, 2025 at 6:44 PM
Wow, Google Colab just added Julia support!!! 🎉
March 5, 2025 at 10:27 PM
Why 'I don’t know' is the true test for AGI—it’s a strictly harder problem than text generation!

This magnificent 62-page paper (arxiv.org/abs/2408.02357) formally proves AGI hallucinations are inevitable, with 50 pages (!!) of supplementary proofs.
February 26, 2025 at 8:48 PM
Symbolic regression update—new versions of PySR & SymbolicRegression.jl just released with improvements to mini-batching. Should work much better for large datasets!
February 25, 2025 at 8:02 AM
Having used it over the past week, I do think that ChatGPT deep research mode is worth the $200 price tag—something that, for me, o1-pro hadn’t justified. It’s not perfect, but for specific tasks, it is **extremely** useful.
February 24, 2025 at 12:51 PM
Took me until today to figure out how to separate tracked/untracked files in VSCode. So much better!
February 15, 2025 at 1:11 PM
New feature! PySR v1.4 lets you define a template expression to optimize that both has learnable parameters AND learnable expressions:
February 14, 2025 at 3:22 PM
I love Cursor, but because it uses a slightly out-of-date VSCode, the extensions can have known vulnerabilities!

I did some digging and noticed that the main Python extension has a *known* remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2024-49050), and has had it for three months!
February 12, 2025 at 11:05 PM
I’ll be giving lectures on advanced ML techniques at this AI-for-HEP summer school in Lake Como, Italy, from July 14-18. Expect a deep dive into symbolic AI and beyond. Should be a great event!

Students can apply here: https://buff.ly/3WTTE8J
February 11, 2025 at 11:08 AM
Interested in feedback on this syntax idea for predefined "template expressions" in SymbolicRegression.jl and PySR.

Basically: what is an intuitive way to prescribe a fixed skeleton for a symbolic search? Ideally the syntax should be flexible and extensible too.
February 4, 2025 at 9:43 AM