jmmcd

James McDermott, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science in University of Galway, Ireland. I'd rather write programs that write programs than write programs. Was twitter.com/bleepbeepbzzz

jmmcdjmmcd
2025-12-19

The HUMIES are the annual competition at for human-competitive results created by evolutionary computation methods.

***Ten thousand dollars in prizes for human-competitive results***

Submit by Friday May 29, 2026

See www.human-competitive.org for more

A cartoon of a strand of DNA arm-wrestling with a scientist
jmmcd boosted:
2025-10-04

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

jmmcd boosted:
2025-07-02

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

Papers follow:

jmmcdjmmcd
2023-10-04

@shaknais the other main thing is language

jmmcdjmmcd
2023-10-04

@StompyRobot @helvetica the good thing about Twitter is a person from Google search showed up in the thread to explain how confused and wrong the Wired writer is.

jmmcd boosted:
2023-10-04

Spawning salmon were trapped in this lake in the Yukon by a landslide long ago. After thousands of years, and thousands of generations, they still migrate from one end of the lake to the other, trying to reach the sea.
.
I still feel a strange urge when the leaves start to turn, like I'm trapped and need to go outside.

Golden aspen on the shores of a lake with a craggy mountain on the far shore.Golden aspen on the shores of a lake with a craggy mountain on the far shore. Grey driftwood logs in the foreground.
jmmcdjmmcd
2023-02-12

My son (9) has the memory of a large distributed and multiply-redundant system of elephants

jmmcd boosted:
2022-12-21

Does anyone manage to make #Chatgpt succeed at this kind of riddles? I've been giving it quite a hard time!

jmmcdjmmcd
2022-12-20

@lisperati hi! Are you going to post dog bunny puzzles on here?

jmmcdjmmcd
2022-12-20

@niemanlab However, I think the "friendly-fire" uses of ChatGPT will be just as influential as adversarial uses.

A lot of people who currently write derivative blog posts with little quality control will now have a slightly easier way to do the same. But gaining attention becomes harder, and *stable online reputation* more valuable. Posting vague or unreliable GPT-text does little damage to reputation now but that will change, I hope.

jmmcdjmmcd
2022-12-20

The Future of Trust: "we will see ChatGPT and tools like it used in adversarial ways that are intended to undermine trust in information environments, pushing people away from public discourse to increasingly homogenous communities"

Janet Haven, @niemanlab

niemanlab.org/2022/12/chatgpt-

jmmcdjmmcd
2022-12-20

@mshanahan the paper tries to be neutral perhaps, but IMO that's not sustainable! Because some of the distinctions the paper draws, putting current LLMs on the "no REAL understanding" side of the line, can be so easily bridged.

jmmcdjmmcd
2022-12-20

It's 2048. A busy time in the PI business. It's Friday night, and you're a quarter way through the bottle under the desk. In walks a tall, well-dressed dame-bot. She sits down and lights up. It's been a long week. But you mostly work weekends.

youtube.com/watch?v=0h_dOBKOCWs

jmmcd boosted:
2022-12-19

My new paper is a critique of the way we talk about large language models.
arxiv.org/abs/2212.03551
I argue that LLM-based systems are "simultaneously so very different from humans in their construction, yet ... so human-like in their behaviour, that we need to pay careful attention to how they work before we speak of them in language suggestive of human capabilities and patterns of behaviour"

jmmcdjmmcd
2022-12-19

@mshanahan

For example: the VLM (just needs an unfrozen distribution) and the LLM + wiki lookup system.

Separately: "But if we stuck with a pure LM, the only way to fully trust the arguments it generated would be by reverse engineering it and discovering emergent mechanisms that conformed to
the faithful reasoning prescription." - but then how can we trust human arguments? Don't we just evaluate them line by line?

jmmcdjmmcd
2022-12-19

@mshanahan I enjoyed this paper. I found myself disagreeing a lot, but probably if you'd written the opposite in many cases I'd still be disagreeing.

As a general comment, in several places the distinction you draw between current models which don't "really" understand and similar models which *would* is a very fine one which could be bridged with a few lines of code! So you see "real" understanding as imminent?

jmmcd boosted:
kvnukr
2022-12-19

I've bieng playing around with pixel sorting and it's super fun.

Thanks to IPython, I'm able to change values around and fine-tune at low resolutions!

A manipulated image of a golden sunset through coconut treesPython notebook screenshot showing widgets for intensity, direction and condition.
jmmcd boosted:
fly4datfly4dat
2022-12-19

Anyone thinking that things are better planned at Tesla needs to have their brains checked.

$TSLA $TSLAQ
---
RT @ericfreyss
Any attempt to remove my tweets that link to my other social media accounts, not violating any law, would actually make an editorial media, and no longer a social media platform, with civil and criminal liability for *any* illegal content therein. help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-
twitter.com/ericfreyss/status/

jmmcd boosted:
Miles CranmerMilesCranmer
2022-12-18

It would be great if mastodon displayed mutual followers under accounts (“this person is followed by ___ people you follow”). It’s quite helpful for finding interesting people to follow, and also checking if someone is who you think they are or just shares the same name.

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst