James McDermott
jmmcd.bsky.social
James McDermott
@jmmcd.bsky.social
Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Galway, Ireland. I'd rather write programs that write programs than write programs.
Reposted by James McDermott
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
December 16, 2024 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
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
December 17, 2024 at 12:13 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
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
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.
December 16, 2024 at 4:48 AM
this ennui is not caused by shortcomings of people on Twitter, it's just people
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
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
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.
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
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?
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
Important illustration of the difference between the design stance, the generalisation stance, and the scientific stance (for want of better terms).

1/2
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
Diarmuid Ferriter for president

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024...
December 13, 2024 at 6:02 PM
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.
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
December 13, 2024 at 5:35 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
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
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