https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVLSA8YGvM8

https://catcolab.org (https://github.com/ToposInstitute/CatColab)

This is mind-blowing! 🤯

A collaborative (as in Google Docs) notebook for defining and simulating a range of "logic"/diagram notations starting with purely descriptive ontologies and up to quantitative stock-and-flow diagrams (which define a system of differential equations).

Implemented in Rust and TypeScript offloading the heavy-lifting of actual processing to AlgebraicJulia and Julia's differential equations ecosystem. All based on Double Category Theory.

Gordon Plotkin writes that Rod Burstall recently passed away. 😞

As you can see from the Wikipedia page, among great many other things Burstall was a doctoral advisor for Thorsten Altenkirch, Mike Gordon, Conor McBride, Plotkin himself and other well-known researchers.

https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/jobs/jobs

Do you love building rock-solid code with uncompromising correctness? Do you enjoy hacking in Agda or Coq for hours, squeezing the most out of (dependent) types, and pushing proof assistants to their limits? Does it give you a warm, fuzzy feeling to know that what you are building comes with high-assurance machine-checkable guarantees? If so, we have the perfect PhD position for you!

We offer a fully funded PhD position, including a travel budget, under the supervision of Dominique Devriese and Steven Keuchel in the DistriNet research group of the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. You would work on scaling up our efforts in mechanizing the verification of security properties in critical low-level code.

Sounds sexy. 😏

Closing date for applications: March 16, 2025.

https://www.andreipopescu.uk/MGS_Sheffield/MGS2025.html
Midlands Graduate School in the Foundations of Computing Science 2025
University of Sheffield, 7-11 April 2025

https://spli.scot/splv/2025-edinburgh/
Scottish Programming Languages and Verification Summer School 2025
University of Edinburgh - 21st to 25th July

https://www.codingfont.com/

Pick your favourite coding font by a tournament between them! 😁

Funny enough, for me won the font I actually use everywhere.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00663
Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time
Ali Behrouz, Peilin Zhong, Vahab Mirrokni

One of the last papers of the last year. 😏

Didn't read and most likely wouldn't, but the abstract sounds curious.

Another BOB conference is coming March, 14 2025:
https://bobkonf.de/2025/en/program.html

Among the speakers are:
— Annette Bieniusa
— Andres Löh
— Gillaume Allais
— Manuel Chakravarty
and many others.

TIL: https://logic.math.su.se/seminar/

From there I've learned of https://sinhp.github.io/groupoid_model_in_lean4/

And there are other curious links...

https://www.pm.inf.ethz.ch/research/verifythis.html

Another VerifyThis Competition is coming May 3rd and 4th, 2025.

Online participants are welcome: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScOhK5tMG5q5DMb36yrTQ8itUwvJ2EN8IG_kgjsX6HQZ6dDhw/viewform

The use of AI-based tools is allowed.

По подсчётам во рту осталось 26 зубов, но половина всё равно запломбированная...

https://www.fused.io/workbench

Huh, pretty nice and impressive. It makes possible writing, visualizing and debugging pretty sophisticated GIS functions in Python. Look at the catalog.

An illustration of my training goals and largely my training program... 😂

https://x.com/davidtolnay/status/1883906113428676938

The future is (quietly and unevenly) here: an "AI-maintained" library. In Rust in this case. And yep, it exhibits all the traits of an "AI-maintained" you can expect at present day and age. Including segfaults. In Rust. Yeah, that's the true staple of advanced AI.

But I blame YAML. It's such a pile of smelling garbage no sane human would willingly maintain a library to handle it. And those who attempt inevitably go insane. Only AI stupid enough yet to dive into.

https://corticallabs.com/cl1.html

A brain in a vat, but unironically... 🥴

I'd like to attract your attention to one funny observation.

The seminal "Gopher paper" of 2021 (so old!) among great many things investigated (sections G.3.3 and G.3.4) initialization of a new LLM weights by weights on a existing pre-trained LLM.

Basically, this is the direct knowledge transfer from one "mind" to another, like SciFi writers dreamed about last 70 years or so.

There are other methods of pretty direct "knowledge transfer" of course: model "merging", "patching", etc. It's so mundane for ML nobody even trying to make a fuss...

Utrecht University seems to be very serious about Differential and Probabilistic Programming — they have three (3) PhD positions open:

https://www.uu.nl/en/organisation/working-at-utrecht-university/jobs/phd-position-in-programming-semantics-and-category-theory

https://www.uu.nl/en/organisation/working-at-utrecht-university/jobs/phd-position-in-dsls-for-high-performance-computing

https://www.uu.nl/en/organisation/working-at-utrecht-university/jobs/phd-position-in-probabilistic-and-differential-algorithms

Category Theory, HPC DSLs and Algorithms... In Utrecht, The Netherlands... 😊

Application deadline is 21 April.

— место в жизни
— место в жизе
— место в жиже

https://designer.microsoft.com/

A quite little thing from Microsoft. Reminds me of postcards and booklets templates in PowerPoint. At some point I even employed that to make a couple of postcards... Now it uses AI of course. 😊

https://gemini.google/overview/canvas/

The Gemini Canvas landing promises (among other things) to make you interactive (as in "HTML/JS app") quizzes for your studies. Coincidentally I was flipping through an extended lecture notes/lightweight textbook (80+ pages, pretty comprehensive thing), which has many multiple-choice tests for self-assessment. In particular, it has an entry test for pre-course assessment.

So I figured, I'd upload the PDF into Gemini and ask it to make an interactive quiz for the pre-test specifically. And it did!

Though, at first it simply extracted the test from the PDF into a Markdown document, but at least it was the right test, nothing added, nothing subtracted. And after I asked about an interactive app it generated HTML/JS for the quiz which Canvas can show inline.

Funny enough, one of the "correct answers" in the PDF was pointing to the fifth answer for a four-answer question, and Gemini corrected it to the right one. 😁

Yeah, these LLM become not only fun but also useful and usable. 😊

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umy7hsw7pF0

A beautiful video on New Zealand's nature and its history.

Overpass API + YOLOv11 + SAM2 + Colab + HuggingFace

"Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged"

I'm frightened by the fact I know what that means and how that came to be...