A paper showing that social media algorithms foster political polarization and societal division. Who knew?? Sarcasm aside, the real value of the paper is showing that by modifying those algorithms we could quickly have positive effects. Most of the participants didn't even notice they changed how they perceive others.

Excellent news! It is long overdue that such organisations switch to open access.

I had a few moment like this in my life. I definitely recommend it. I've never been more productive than isolated in a mountain with only books, notebooks and pens.

The title is a bit misleading in a way (and I almost didn't click through for a start). That said, it is an interesting essay dealing with the topics of intelligence, problem solving etc. I'm not sure I agree with everything in it, but that's still good food for thought.

I'm happy to see I'm actually very much aligned with one of the "Attention Is All You Need" co-authors. The current industry trend of "just scale the transformer architecture" is indeed stifling innovation and actual research. That said I find ironic that he talks about freedom to explore... well this is what public labs used to be about, but we decided to drastically reduce their funding and replace that with competition between startups. It's no surprise we have very myopic views on problems.

A very good essay which reminds us we can't really reason in terms of absolute right or wrong.

An important essay in my opinion. It reminds us quite well what the core drive of scientific research is about.

There are indeed fields where this matters a lot. It is far from being an easy problem to solve though.

Maybe it's just me but I find that fascinating.

We already had reproducibility issues in science. With such models which allow to produce hundreds of "novel" results in one paper, how can we properly keep up in checking all the produced data is correct? This is a real challenge.

A nice little explanation of scientific work and enquiry.

Or how the current neural networks obsession is poisoning scientific fields. There was already a reproducibility crisis going on and it looks like it's been getting worse. The incentives are clearly wrong and that shows.

Nice video which gives a glimpse on how our brain constantly tries to build a coherent picture of the reality around us. This is quite a feat since our senses are ill equipped to produce such a picture. Of course we don't even notice all those processes when we go about our days.

Interesting class of data structures with funny properties. Looks like there's a lot to do with them.

Friendly reminder that AI was also supposed to be a field about studying cognition... There's so many things we still don't understand that the whole "make it bigger and it'll be smart" obsession looks like it's creating missed opportunities to understand ourselves better.

A neat little introduction to an important field in computer science. Lambda calculus is often too little known but it has very important ramifications in several fields.

Of course I agree with this piece. You need enough culture in your field to know about a breadth of topics. It will definitely help pick up the next one you don't know about yet or help you build parallels for the tougher problems you encounter.

I mostly agree with this piece. There's lots of room for optimization still so we might see a temporary drop in the energy consumption of those systems. That said, longer term energy consumption is indeed the main leverage to improve performance of those systems. It can only get us so far, so new techniques will be needed. Hence why my position is that we'll come back to symbolic approaches at some point, there's a clear challenge at interfacing both worlds.

Wondering what a Ph.D. is about? This is a good illustrated summary.

This is an amazing example of the brain plasticity. It's also great to have a patch for increased quality of life with a training of only a few weeks.