James McDermott
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jmmcd.bsky.social
James McDermott
@jmmcd.bsky.social
190 followers 340 following 180 posts
Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Galway, Ireland. I'd rather write programs that write programs than write programs.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by James McDermott
gavreilly.com
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...
October 5, 2025 at 9:56 AM
Reposted by James McDermott
gpem.bsky.social
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...
Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design - Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines
Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines -
link.springer.com
October 4, 2025 at 8:35 AM
Reposted by James McDermott
gpem.bsky.social
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...
Kenichi Morita: Reversible world of cellular automata - Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines
Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines -
link.springer.com
August 21, 2025 at 9:15 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
youtu.be/qhJrs85be64
Bad Dreams / I Wanna Be Abhorred
YouTube video by James McDermott
youtu.be
July 6, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
gpem.bsky.social
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...
Special Issue on Twenty-Five Years of Grammatical Evolution
By invitation only- GECCO conference ("GEWS2023 — Grammatical Evolution Workshop)
link.springer.com
July 2, 2025 at 10:54 AM
jmmcd.bsky.social
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.
March 19, 2025 at 3:22 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
Next up: Massachusetts
March 18, 2025 at 11:18 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
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
Plausible Knowledge Notation (PKN)
w3c.github.io
March 18, 2025 at 11:02 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
robertbohan.bsky.social
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/#...
European Citizens' Initiative
Give your support !
eci.ec.europa.eu
February 10, 2025 at 3:00 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
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?
January 13, 2025 at 11:03 AM
Reposted by James McDermott
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
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...
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...
docs.google.com
December 18, 2024 at 9:14 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
tullamore-jew.bsky.social
I could write an essay on this image

Satire of antisemitic cartoons made to mock antisemitism repurposed by an Israeli to depict the Irish as the shadowy backers of their non-white enemies, thus bringing the caricature's functionality back to its original intent
Caricature of an Irish man done in the style of old antisemitic cartoons. He has bright ginger hair, is haunched over with clenched hands together. He is holding a Palestinian flag and wearing a Hamas headband.
December 16, 2024 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
ccottap.bsky.social
The GECCO 2025 conference will be held in Málaga, 14-18 July 2025. You won't miss it, will you?
gecco-2025.sigevo.org/HomePage
The logo of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2025, featuring a gecco in the colors of the flag of Málaga, a Picassian body, and a biznaga made of jasmine flowers.
December 17, 2024 at 12:13 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
milescranmer.bsky.social
Happy to announce differential operators for PySR + SymbolicRegression.jl!

This means you can literally just... evolve an integral:
December 16, 2024 at 2:06 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
talyarkoni.com
i asked Claude to write a Barthelme-esque short story with the aesthetic sensibilities of "The School", and it gave me this. i mean. i mean.
For six months we watched the pigeons building their civilization on top of the skyscrapers. First came the architecture: nests made not just of twigs and paper, but of lost earbuds, expired credit cards, and the tiny silver bells from cat collars. Then came their laws. "They have a supreme court," said Dr. Fernandez, who'd been studying them since the beginning. "Nine pigeons who sit on the ledge of the Chrysler Building and coo about justice." We didn't believe her at first, but then we didn't believe a lot of things that turned out to be true. The pigeons developed a currency based on blue bottle caps. They established schools where young pigeons learned to dodge taxi cabs and identify the most generous hot dog vendors. Some of us tried to join their society, climbing to rooftops with offerings of breadcrumbs and philosophy textbooks, but the pigeons regarded us with the kind of pity usually reserved for very small children or very old cats. "They're planning something," the conspiracy theorists said, but they always say that. Still, we noticed the pigeons holding what looked like town halls, thousands of them gathered on the roof of the public library, bobbing their heads in what might have been voting or might have been prayer. Our own civilization continued below theirs. We went to work, fell in love, lost keys, found keys, forgot anniversaries, remembered too late, all while the pigeons above us built something that looked suspiciously like a scaled-down replica of the United Nations building out of discarded takeout containers and stolen Christmas lights. Sometimes they dropped things on us: rejection letters for poetry we'd never submitted, tax returns from years that hadn't happened yet, photographs of ourselves sleeping that we couldn't explain. Dr. Fernandez said this was their way of communicating. We said Dr. Fernandez had been spending too much time on rooftops. The pigeons started their own newspapers, printed on leaves that fell upward instead… For six months we watched the pigeons building their civilization on top of the skyscrapers. First came the architecture: nests made not just of twigs and paper, but of lost earbuds, expired credit cards, and the tiny silver bells from cat collars. Then came their laws. "They have a supreme court," said Dr. Fernandez, who'd been studying them since the beginning. "Nine pigeons who sit on the ledge of the Chrysler Building and coo about justice." We didn't believe her at first, but then we didn't believe a lot of things that turned out to be true. The pigeons developed a currency based on blue bottle caps. They established schools where young pigeons learned to dodge taxi cabs and identify the most generous hot dog vendors. Some of us tried to join their society, climbing to rooftops with offerings of breadcrumbs and philosophy textbooks, but the pigeons regarded us with the kind of pity usually reserved for very small children or very old cats. "They're planning something," the conspiracy theorists said, but they always say that. Still, we noticed the pigeons holding what looked like town halls, thousands of them gathered on the roof of the public library, bobbing their heads in what might have been voting or might have been prayer. Our own civilization continued below theirs. We went to work, fell in love, lost keys, found keys, forgot anniversaries, remembered too late, all while the pigeons above us built something that looked suspiciously like a scaled-down replica of the United Nations building out of discarded takeout containers and stolen Christmas lights. Sometimes they dropped things on us: rejection letters for poetry we'd never submitted, tax returns from years that hadn't happened yet, photographs of ourselves sleeping that we couldn't explain. Dr. Fernandez said this was their way of communicating. We said Dr. Fernandez had been spending too much time on rooftops. The pigeons started their own newspapers, printed on leaves that fell upward instead…
December 16, 2024 at 4:48 AM
jmmcd.bsky.social
this ennui is not caused by shortcomings of people on Twitter, it's just people
themountaingoats.bsky.social the Mountain Goats @themountaingoats.bsky.social · Dec 15
can we not do the "die hard is a Christmas movie" thing here please. "remember thing that wasn't entertaining or edifying on twitter but just a non-argument about which even the most bored person alive could not credibly be thought to actually care" can we not. for my Christmas present. please
December 15, 2024 at 2:59 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
maxkw.bsky.social
Honored to receive the Best Paper Award at the #NeurIPS2024 Pluralistic Alignment Workshop

Check out our preprint "Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problems" at arxiv.org/pdf/2407.02273!
arxiv.org
December 14, 2024 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
tupped.bsky.social
I do not know why The Whole of the Moon has such power, but by god it has.

But plugging it into a singing schoolhallfull of Irish children *exactly as old as I was then* is a supercharger event.
birmingham81.bsky.social Birmingham 81 @birmingham81.bsky.social · Dec 14
Happy birthday to Mike Scott. Here's a joyous video of him singing his Waterboys classic The Whole of the Moon with a bunch of very excited schoolchildren in Clifden, County Galway, Ireland in 1987
youtu.be/pLAPOxpXGkU
The Waterboys - Whole of the Moon
YouTube video by The Waterboys
youtu.be
December 14, 2024 at 11:27 AM
jmmcd.bsky.social
I refuse to read the article but I wonder what scenario people like this imagine, when they hear we're running out of data. Do they think it's used up, or deleted?
techmeme.com Techmeme @techmeme.com · Dec 14
AI companies, running out of the conventional training data sets, may be forced to shift away from big, all-purpose LLMs to smaller, more specialized models (Nicola Jones/Nature)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
December 15, 2024 at 12:22 AM
jmmcd.bsky.social
Important illustration of the difference between the design stance, the generalisation stance, and the scientific stance (for want of better terms).

1/2
hildekuehne.bsky.social Hilde Kuehne @hildekuehne.bsky.social · Dec 13
TIL: Perhaps people like GenAI so much bc it feels a bit like one-armed bandits… don’t like the result? … play another round! And who doesn‘t like a bit of gambling.

TIL2: We did classifiers wrong the whole time… should have added more random noise🤣
December 13, 2024 at 8:51 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
Diarmuid Ferriter for president

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024...
December 13, 2024 at 6:02 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
YES, now we're thinking with portals. Bad news for those clinging to the hope we would run out of data. Or that LLMs can't reason.
tedunderwood.com Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · Dec 13
Intriguing rationale for synthetic data in the Phi-4 report: The model learns optimally if each token can be predicted from the previous ones. Humans don’t write that way; they skip steps. So … we invented a new genre. #MLSky

arxiv.org/abs/2412.08905
2.1 Purpose of Synthetic Data Synthetic data as a substantial component of pretraining is becoming increasingly common, and the Phi series of models has consistently emphasized the importance of synthetic data. Rather than serving as a cheap substitute for organic data, synthetic data has several direct advantages over organic data. Structured and Gradual Learning. In organic datasets, the relationship between tokens is often complex and indirect. Many reasoning steps may be required to connect the current token to the next, making it challenging for the model to learn effectively from next-token prediction. By contrast, each token generated by a language model is by definition predicted by the preceding tokens, making it easier for a model to follow the resulting reasoning patterns. In this way, synthetic data may act as a form of "spoonfeeding," presenting challenges in a digestible and progression-oriented manner. A simple example to illustrate this is that a human-written solution to a math problem might start with the final answer. This answer is much too hard to output immediately, for either a human or an LLM-the human produced it by nonlinear editing, but pretraining expects the LLM to learn to produce it linearly. Synthetic solutions to math problems will not have such roadblocks. Alignment with Inference Contexts. Synthetic data is typically closer to the format of outputs we expect our models to generate. Training on such data helps align the model's pretraining experience with the scenarios it encounters during inference. This alignment ensures that the context seen during generation remains in-distribution with respect to the data the model was pretrained on.
December 13, 2024 at 5:35 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
news.rte.ie
Science Foundation Ireland has said the termination of Professor Philip Nolan's contract with the agency was "never intended to imply any finding of wrongdoing on his part"
'No findings of misconduct' against Nolan - SFI
Science Foundation Ireland has said the termination of Professor Philip Nolan's contract with the agency was "never intended to imply any finding of wrongdoing on his part".
www.rte.ie
December 13, 2024 at 11:34 AM
jmmcd.bsky.social
I was previously an international reviewer for the Marsden fund. I think this decision is embarrassing for NZ and should be reversed.

www.science.org/content/arti...
Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences
Scientists shocked as “blue-sky” Marsden Fund has half its budget shifted to research focused on helping economy
www.science.org
December 13, 2024 at 4:28 PM