Started my NLP lectures today exploring the fascinating levels of natural language.

This slide features an interesting example: Turkish, using Greek letters (orthography) on a historic tombstone from Istanbul. A poetic and meaningful common lesson transcending barriers...

Don's main distinction for a CS mentality:
- ability to jump very quickly between levels of abstraction, between a low level and a high level, almost unconsciously
- deal with non-uniform (he means mathematically dis-continuous, discrete IMO) structures

Came across a book (actually a transcript of lectures at @mitofficial.bsky.social) from a CS legend Donald Knuth, the author of The Art of Computer Programming. Not nearly as popular as TAOCP.

Love the line "Computer God talks about God" in the foreword, we'll see where it leads...

#Severance isn’t a typical tv show. It’s a sharp dive into philosophy of mind, probing identity, memory, and mind-body duality with surprising depth. Highly recommend...

Some reflections and insights after 1993 NIPS by Leo Breiman known for developing CART, bagging, and random forests.

Always find less formal writings of the pioneers more insightful.

The infamous event of "cultural generalization made by a keynote speaker" shows how bias and miss-generalization are hard problems even for humans (even if a MIT professor). So, we maybe more compassionate with LLMs trained on our data.

#NeurIPS and other major conferences should consider making presentations, at least important keynotes/highlights, publicly available.

I could easily make an argument with public fundings for research presented. Funding agencies can also support this for more open science.

GPU poor man's home setup ready for a long night...

When we're talking about learning (machine/biological) we should not forget about the giant feedback loop which we are trying to model and infer.

Folks who think AGI can be achieved from internet text with scale alone are either:
- Hyping for their personal gains
- Don't have a clue whatsoever

Along with the great lectures on MIT OCW.

RIP Gilbert. Fun fact: his favorite matrix was a basic differentiator.