Suddenly, the explanation in Solo for how Han Solo got his full name doesn't seem quite so far-fetched

New tragedy of the commons just dropped

www.bbc.com/news/article...

This result was one of the foundational ideas built upon by what has since become by far my most cited paper, so I'm really happy to see a version on arXiv where it can hopefully be preserved for posterity

I published a new post on my rarely updated personal blog! It's a sequel of sorts to my Quanta coverage of the Busy Beaver game, focusing on a particularly fearsome Turing machine known by the awesome name Antihydra.

I'm a big fan of when counterexamples to intuitive sounding theorems are so convoluted that outside of mathematics, the kind of rules-lawyering needed to construct them would be considered pedantic or even rude

youtu.be/pLgcZLysOFk?...

How do you make Minecraft spherical? A really fun read about all the problem solving that goes into transferring Minecraft gameplay onto a spherical world

www.bowerbyte.com/posts/blocky...

Really nice primer on double-descent and the bias-variance trade-off

I'm impressed by the depth that Welch Labs consistently manages to pack into their videos without sacrificing the storytelling for a popular science audience

www.youtube.com/watch?v=z64a...

Since @spmontecarlo.bsky.social shared a post about Crinkled Arcs a couple of weeks ago, I've spent a fair bit of time digging into them

This new blog post attempts to collect what I found into an interactive introduction to crinkled arcs and their relationship to Brownian Motion

A surprisingly intuitive and practical use for limit ordinals (assuming you have an infinite chess board handy)

youtu.be/CQ4Ap5itTX4?...

“Everyone knows” what an autoencoder is… but there's an important complementary picture missing from most introductory material.

In short: we emphasize how autoencoders are implemented—but not always what they represent (and some of the implications of that representation).🧵

Does anyone have a good reference for paradoxes in set theory? I'm looking for something self-contained.

Looking at the code in Hugging Face's library for the new GPT models, I was a bit disappointed by how similar they are to Llama & Mistral models, but there is one cool trick I hadn't seen before: attention sinks. These are a mechanism by which attention heads can say "I don't have anything to add"

A little etymological fact that I like is that "lemma" and "dilemma" are from the same ancient Greek origin

If you translate "lemma" as meaning a proposition, a dilemma is literally having two propositions to consider

Siamese neural networks are a neat way of doing one-shot/few-shot classification but there's something about the way they're usually implemented that felt a bit inefficient to me

Here are a couple of relatively simple tricks you can do to speed up training Siamese networks by 2.5x! 1/9 🧵

Aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are clear-cut concepts, right? ... right? 😵‍💫 In our new ICLR blogpost we let different schools of thought speak and contradict each other, and revisit chatbots where “the character of aleatory ‘transforms’ into epistemic” iclr-blogposts.github.io/2025/blog/re...

I would never have guessed it was even possible to make things this beautiful in matplotlib