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# The Shape of Inference ## Watch the film 18 seconds In 1964, two radio astronomers in Holmdel, New Jersey, were losing a war with pigeons.
15 min · 3,541 words
Pretraining and scaling as a methodology and scientific perspective
Jiaxuan Zou’s essay on pretraining and scaling as a shared methodology across language, robotics, and world models—covering learning conditions, training/inference milestones, efficiency, stability, and predictability as scientific research practice.
11 min · 2,627 words
OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki reflects on increasingly capable AI, alignment challenges, and why stronger safeguards and international coordination matter as models grow more alien in capability.
14 min · 3,149 words
Graft, Metatron, and the two kinds of context coding agents need
Pavel Kerbel contrasts Graft’s recoverable WHAT/WHERE code maps with Metatron’s reviewed WHY/WHY NOT engineering memory, arguing stronger models still need both layers—and proposing a factorial eval to prove it.
9 min · 2,075 words
Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
Daniel W. Hieber surveys ~1,000 Ancient Greek words without Indo-European etymologies—labyrinth, olive, Athens, Achilles—and reconstructs Pre-Greek substrate/adstrate influence via phonology, toponyms (-nth/-ss), and Minoan contacts.
3 min · 618 words
Ryan Orbuch proposes Natural General Intelligence: a planetary 'nature model' grounded in Earth observation data to predict environmental responses and support stewardship—not just automate knowledge work.
64 min · 14,646 words
Seohong Park reproduces four real-robot behavioral cloning quirks in sim: overfitting can help, open-loop beats closed-loop, policies need huge MLPs, and feature scaling still matters under infinite data—all driven by test-time distribution shift.
13 min · 2,876 words
A personal essay on hedging vs boosters in scientific writing after generative AI: relative use of words like could fell even as raw counts rose with more published text.
4 min · 817 words
Noah Smith on what it means when AI becomes better at mathematics than any human—how “hero” mathematicians shaped culture, and how post-heroic math and science might look when machines own the frontier.
14 min · 3,242 words
AI and Math in 2026: a non-mathematician's read
xlr8harder synthesizes recent AI math results for non-specialists: real progress with a different strength profile than humans, formalization cliffs, and why “math nearly conquered” remains overhyped.
3 min · 750 words
The UV index is not the warm sensation of sunlight on bare skinWhy sunburn risk and how hot the sun feels on your skin diverge—backed by numbers.
A clear, numbers-first essay explaining why the warmth of sunlight is a poor proxy for UV-B sunburn risk: cloudy cool days can still burn, and scorching morning heat may not, once you separate infrared heating from the UV index.
3 min · 727 words
Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote
Janet Davis highlights four CHI 2026 papers she wishes she had written, reflecting on research themes and why each piece of HCI scholarship stood out.
13 min · 3,021 words
Jens Egholm Pedersen argues modern science is synonymous with open-source software: why reproducible code matters as much as papers, and what researchers should do next.
7 min · 1,517 words
lcamtuf argues that electronically controlled working memory—not Babbage—was the real bottleneck unlocked on the path to modern computers, tracing early registers, delay lines, and RAM.
8 min · 1,775 words