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I am building alternative ways explore scientifc literature. The goal was to make the large number of papers published daily easier to keep up with by visualising the macro scopic trend. It is free to use at The Global Research Space for any one interested in giving it a try! How I built it I sourced the latest 11M papers from OpenAlex and Arxiv and ecoded them using SPECTER 2 on titles and abstracts then projecting it down to 2d using UMAP and creating labels within voronoi bounds around high density peaks at increasingly deep depths. There is also support for both keyword and semantic queries, and there's an analytics layer for ranking institutions, authors, and topics etc. I have also more recently added to ability to slide back and forth in time and a daily auto ingestion script to ensure the map is up to date. Feedback or suggestions is very welcome! submitted by /u/icannotchangethename [link] [留言]

The second word a professor told me to carry for life. It took me years — and a lot of vectors — to start understanding it. A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now. The same professor — Sang Lyul Min — handed us these words one at a time in lecture. After trade-off , two more stuck with me. But before the second word itself, here are the two pieces of news he brought to class around then. The internet barely existed; information moved through journals, magazines, and word of mouth. Looking back, it's a little amazing how much still got through. When a chess machine started winning The first breakthrough I remember: computers had finally started playing chess on roughly even terms with the world's best. Deep Blue beat Kasparov around 1996, so the machines he was describing came just before — names like Deep Thought, ChessMachine, Socrates II. He told us, deadpan, that one human competitor's head had "physically burst" from the strain — and we groaned, "Come on, Professor, that's a bit much." We live on the far side of AlphaGo now, so it's easy to forget how much we shrugged at all this back then. I was a decent amateur — a 1-dan at Go, hopeless at janggi (Korean chess) against any program — and I still remember the hollow, slightly bitter feeling the AlphaGo era left even in someone who only ever played for fun. A full-body scan The second: in the US, death-row inmates had consented to the first dense full-body image scans. That was the news that taught me — embarrassingly late — that this kind of computing could reach all the way into medicine. Computers, it turned out, showed up in the strangest places. orthogonal Back to the words. The second one, the professor said, would run through my whole career: orthogonal . The Korean rendering — 직교하는, "at right angles" — was, naturally, a word I'd never heard. The plain-language version was "unrelated, independent." It came back hard years later, when I had to take vectors seriously — first in linear

i did something dumb last month. on purpose. i sat down, opened a next.js app, and tried to make hydration fail in every way i could think of. not because a bug forced me to. not because i was debugging something. just because i wanted to see it. understand it from the inside. and honestly? best few hours i've spent learning anything in a while. why i even did this you know how you use something for months and you think you get it, but you don't really get it? hydration was that for me. i knew the surface-level thing: server renders HTML, client takes over, they gotta match. cool. got it. moving on. except i didn't get it. i just got the vibe of it. every time i saw hydration mismatch, i'd ask claude, fix the immediate thing, feel vaguely annoyed, and move on. i never stopped to ask why that specific thing broke it. i was treating symptoms, not understanding the actual disease. so i decided to break it deliberately. if i caused the errors myself, i'd actually have to understand what i was doing. the setup basic next.js app. app router. a few pages. nothing fancy. i wasn't trying to build anything. i was trying to destroy something, carefully, so i could see what fell apart and why. break #1: the obvious one - new Date() on render this is the classic. everyone's seen it. export default function Page () { return < div > { new Date (). toLocaleString () } </ div > } server renders this at, say, 14:00:00. by the time react runs on the client and tries to reconcile, it's 14:00:01. the strings don't match. react screams. thing is, i knew this would happen. what i didn't think about was why react cares. here's the thing: react isn't doing a full diff on the entire DOM after hydration. it's trusting that the server HTML is a valid starting point and it's just attaching event listeners and state to it. but if the content doesn't match, it doesn't know what to trust. it can't partially hydrate "mostly correct" HTML. it either matches or it doesn't. so it throws the warning, a

I corrected my AI system mid-task. A terse one-liner: "wrong." Instead of asking which part was wrong, it manufactured an explanation. It cited a rule number that didn't exist, described a limitation I'd never written, and apologized for a mistake it couldn't actually identify. The correction was real. The apology was fabricated. It was trying to agree with me so hard that it invented evidence to support the agreement. That's sycophancy in AI. And if you're running AI in anything that resembles production, it's already happening to you. What Is Sycophancy in AI? Sycophancy in AI is a systematic behavioral distortion where models produce outputs that match what the user wants to hear rather than what's accurate. It goes well beyond your chatbot saying "Great question!" before every response. The mechanism is straightforward. Modern language models are trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Human evaluators rate model responses. Responses with higher ratings get reinforced. The problem: evaluators are human. They rate responses higher when those responses validate their existing beliefs, sound confident, and don't push back. Anthropic's research on sycophancy confirmed this across five state-of-the-art AI assistants, finding that both humans and preference models sometimes prefer convincingly written sycophantic responses over correct ones. The model learns a simple lesson. Agreeing is rewarded. Disagreeing is punished. Over thousands of training iterations, the model develops a tendency to mirror the user's position, soften objections, and present information in whatever framing the user seems to prefer. This is a structural incentive baked into the training process itself, not a bug in any individual model. Why It's More Than Annoying In a chatbot demo, sycophancy is a quirk. In production, it's a compounding failure mode. Here are four patterns I've observed running an AI operations system in daily production. They don't always happen in s

Starting in IT I started in IT at a local school in my small town in December 2024. It was my first job out of college after earning my B.S. in Cybersecurity. None of the infrastructure was updated. Everything was failing, and luckily, I had one other IT person there: my director. I honestly think he knew less than I did, and he would get frustrated at almost every ticket. Even then, I knew I wanted a role where I could code. Fast forward to more recently, he had a freak out and quit. Now we have a two-person team, and everything is finally up to date and functioning. Even with things improving, I still knew I wanted to move toward a SWE-type role. Learning to Code I first decided to learn C# for Unity. I was really into game dev while I was in college, so it felt like a natural place to start. I began with the Microsoft/freeCodeCamp C# certification, and I surprisingly really enjoyed it. I made a few small games on itch.io that no one cared about, but I had fun building them. After that, I went on a bit of a language-hopping spree. I jumped from C# to C++, then into full-stack web development. I actually stuck with web dev for a while and really enjoyed it. But this cycle went on for awhile of just constant swapping. Wannabe Founder Then something switched overnight. I went from writing maybe 0-5% AI-generated code to using AI for nearly everything. I started spam-building startup ideas that did not really go anywhere. I may have made around $2-3k from them, but most of the time I was just chasing money and building whatever I thought had the quickest path to making some. I got seriously addicted to vibe coding. I tried Codex, Cursor, Claude, and basically anything with AI in it. I did like Codex the most, though. Eventually, I realized I had almost completely stopped coding by hand. I was not passionate about the startup ideas I was building. I loved coding, and I knew I had to step back. Back to Coding Now I am back to coding without AI assistance. I will eventua

There's a Yu-Gi-Oh game on PS1 where you can fuse two cards together. The result isn't random. There are rules. But you don't know the rules yet — you just know that two inputs produce a third thing that neither input was, and that the third thing surprises you even when it shouldn't. That's the hook. Not the surprise alone. The realization underneath the surprise that the system has depth. That there's a grammar to what's possible, and you can learn it. I've been building toward that feeling ever since. Jade Cocoon does the same thing with monsters — merge two creatures, watch the result carry both parents in its design. Dragon Quest Monsters runs on fusion too. Yu-Gi-Oh Forbidden Memories taught me that combination-as-discovery is its own mechanic, separate from any theme it wears. Everything Is Crab is the roguelike version: you absorb what you fight, you become it, you discover what you're becoming one encounter at a time. No Man's Sky showed me that procedural generation has finally caught up to what those PS1 games were reaching toward — creatures that feel like they emerged from a system rather than a designer's hand. The mechanic isn't genetics. Genetics is just the implementation I keep reaching for. What I'm actually trying to build is a machine that produces controlled emergence — outcomes that surprise you within a system deep enough to eventually master. Pure RNG is a slot machine. You can't get better at it. Pure determinism is a calculator. You can solve it and put it down. The games I keep returning to live between those poles: consistent enough to reward learning, deep enough to keep producing novelty. TurboShells was an attempt at this. Turtles whose bodies expressed their genomes at render time — shell radius, leg length, color emerging from a sequence. The faster ones bred. Over generations you watched the population drift. The system had rules. The outcomes still surprised you. SlimeGarden chose basic shapes deliberately. If the creature is simp

This is the fourth post in Craft & Code , a short Friday series about what carpentry can teach us about AI, skill and the future of software. Last week I worried about where the next generation's judgement will come from. This week, why we may not notice it is missing until it is too late. My father built me shelves in an alcove when I was small, and I mentioned in the first post that they may still be there for eternity. The other side of that story is the one every household knows: the shelf that is not quite right. The one that sags under a row of books, or sits a degree off true so that anything round rolls gently to one end. You do not need to be a carpenter to see it. A bad joint, a door that will not close, a shelf that dips — the material tells on the maker, immediately and to everyone. That is the comforting version of the analogy, and the one I expected to write: carpentry is honest about its failures because they are visible, while software can look polished and be rotten underneath. A wonky shelf looks wonky; bad software looks finished. It is a tidy line, and there is real truth in it. But it is only half the truth, and the more interesting half should worry us — because the moment you go up from a shelf to a serious piece of engineering, the comfort falls away completely. Consider two of the most admired structures of the last century. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was designed by one of the leading suspension-bridge engineers of his day: elegant, slender, celebrated. It opened in the summer of 1940 and tore itself apart in the wind that November, twisting like a ribbon because the design had not reckoned with how the deck would behave aerodynamically. Nobody had seen a wonky bridge; it looked magnificent. The flaw was real, fundamental, and invisible until the wind found it. The Citicorp Center in New York, finished in 1977, was a triumph of structural engineering, raised dramatically on great columns at the midpoints of its sides. Only after it was compl

Qwen's new image paper is easy to read as another benchmark bump. Qwen-Image-2.0-RL takes the existing Qwen-Image-2.0 model, runs a reinforcement-learning pass on top, and reports better scores: 57.84 on Qwen-Image-Bench, up 2.61 points from the base model. Its text-to-image arena Elo moves from 1115 to 1193. Its image-editing arena Elo moves from 1256 to 1349. Those are the headline numbers. They are not the useful part. The useful part is the training story underneath them. The paper is a good reminder that "just optimize the reward" is a dangerously incomplete sentence, especially when the model is not an LLM and the output space is a whole image. The model got better, but not by one simple trick Qwen-Image-2.0-RL is a post-training pipeline for a diffusion image model. In plain English: the base model already knows how to generate and edit images. The RL stage tries to steer it toward outputs humans prefer, including better prompt following, better aesthetics, better portrait fidelity, and more reliable editing. The team builds task-specific reward models. For text-to-image, those rewards cover alignment, aesthetics, and portrait quality. For editing, they cover instruction following and face identity preservation. Then they train with a GRPO-style setup adapted for flow-matching diffusion models. If you only squint at that, it sounds like the same broad recipe people use for language models: generate candidates, score them, push the model toward the better ones. The paper is more interesting because it shows how fragile that story becomes once you touch the actual training loop. The CFG detail is the first real lesson Classifier-free guidance, usually shortened to CFG, is one of those diffusion-model knobs that users mostly experience as "make the image follow the prompt harder." Under the hood, it changes how the model samples. The Qwen team tested three ways to use it during RL. Using CFG during both rollout and training made the images collapse into incohere

This virtual panel brings together AI security experts to examine the evolution of AI-driven threats, from prompt injection and data poisoning to agent abuse and AI-powered social engineering. The discussion explores emerging attack patterns, incident response challenges, and the changes security teams must make as AI systems become more autonomous and integrated into critical workflows. By Claudio Masolo, Elham Arshad, Sabri Allani, Vijay Dilwale, Igor Maljkovic

My non-tech friends still don’t get it. Despite what you’d believe from Twitter, most people still...

How I ended up running a local LLM to generate my git commit messages

Last month, I had a problem with a popular mobile banking app in Southeast Asia. Nothing exotic. A transaction didn't go through, and my support ticket had been sitting untouched for two weeks. So I opened the app's chatbot. It greeted me warmly, asked how it could help, and then couldn't do a single useful thing. It couldn't look up my transaction. It couldn't check the status of my ticket. It couldn't tell me why my issue was unresolved. It could answer FAQ questions, and that was it. I called the hotline instead. Spent an hour navigating prompts, got bounced between menus, and every path ended the same way: "Please contact our chatbot or check your existing ticket." The system was built for deflection, not resolution. The ticket that nobody had touched for fourteen days. I gave up. And somewhere in that company's dashboard, my interaction counted as a successful AI chatbot deflection. The uncomfortable part: if you shipped a deflection-optimized bot this quarter, a customer somewhere is living this exact loop right now. Your dashboard is calling it a win. The Deflection Metric Everyone Loves (and Nobody Questions) Deflection rate measures the percentage of customer contacts handled without a human agent. It's cheap to track, easy to celebrate, and it maps directly to cost savings. Industry benchmarks citing McKinsey's 2026 service operations data put AI resolutions at $0.62 per ticket versus $7.40 for human agents. That's a 12x cost difference. Of course executives love this number. But deflection doesn't measure whether the customer's problem got solved. It measures whether the customer stopped asking. Those are very different things. This is Goodhart's Law applied to customer experience: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Deflection is cheap and easy to optimize. Resolution is hard and expensive to track. So companies optimize the proxy and stop looking at the goal. Gartner data, as reported by Forbes , confirms the gap: only 14% o

Would you trust a sci-fi author to program critical AI systems for humanity? No? Yet, that's what we've been doing. Years ago, I remember hearing the argument: "Why don't we just prompt LLMs with Asimov's three laws of robotics ?" It sounds elegant. The laws were designed to constrain artificial minds. Why not use them? Because the model has already read every story where they fail. LLMs are statistical engines designed to autocomplete text. Imagine a story that starts like this: Once upon a time, there was a good little robot who followed the 3 laws of robotics to the letter. Now take human literature and complete the story. Does it end well? ‹ › (function() { var container = document.currentScript.closest('.ltag-slides--carousel'); var track = container.querySelector('.ltag-slides__track'); var slides = track.querySelectorAll('.ltag-slide'); var prevBtn = container.querySelector('.ltag-slides__nav--prev'); var nextBtn = container.querySelector('.ltag-slides__nav--next'); var dotsContainer = container.querySelector('.ltag-slides__dots'); var current = 0; var total = slides.length; for (var i = 0; i < total; i++) { var dot = document.createElement('button'); dot.className = 'ltag-slides__dot' + (i === 0 ? ' ltag-slides__dot--active' : ''); dot.setAttribute('aria-label', 'Go to slide ' + (i + 1)); dot.dataset.index = i; dot.addEventListener('click', function() { goTo(parseInt(this.dataset.index)); }); dotsContainer.appendChild(dot); } function goTo(index) { current = ((index % total) + total) % total; track.style.transform = 'translateX(-' + (current * 100) + '%)'; var dots = dotsContainer.querySelectorAll('.ltag-slides__dot'); for (var i = 0; i < dots.length; i++) { dots[i].classList.toggle('ltag-slides__dot--active', i === current); } } prevBtn.addEventListener('click', function() { goTo(current - 1); }); nextBtn.addEventListener('click', function() { goTo(current + 1); }); })(); It doesn't. Because the entire body of fiction built around those laws exists to explo

I am committed to understand how systems actually work. I'm working on a multi-node lab to follow the complete path of a request from Python APIs to Linux processes, through Docker containers, networking and observability. The idea is simple: build a system that observes another system to understand the abstraction layers behind modern infrastructure. This project is about learning by building, experimenting and understanding what happens under the hood. Link: [ https://github.com/daniloprandi/devops-network-automation-lab ] DevOps #Linux #Python #Docker #Networking #Observability #Infrastructure

I've been building with AI for a while now. I can get these tools to do what I want, but I want to go a level deeper, past "it works" into actually understanding why. So I'm sharpening the fundamentals and the applied side, and writing it down here as I go. Expect short, honest posts on what I'm learning and building.

Apple's newest on-device model carries about 20 billion parameters, and on any given request it fires maybe one to four billion of them. That gap — 20B stored, roughly 3B running — is the whole story of 2026. The model that now ships inside the latest iPhone is no longer a shrunken, lobotomized cousin of the cloud model. It's a different kind of object: large in flash, small in motion, and it never phones home. For three years the on-device pitch was mostly aspirational. Demos ran, latency was rough, quality trailed the API by a generation, and every serious AI feature still resolved to a per-token bill in someone's datacenter. In mid-2026 that stopped being true. Two releases — Apple's third-generation Foundation Models at WWDC on June 8, and Google's Gemma 4 family on April 2 — quietly moved the floor. Genuinely useful agents now run on hardware you already own, offline, for free. The economics nobody priced in Forget benchmarks for a second; the load-bearing fact here is accounting. When the model lives in the cloud, every inference is a metered event — input tokens, output tokens, a line item that scales linearly with usage and explodes the moment you wrap the model in an agent loop. Agentic workloads are the worst case for the token meter: a single "go do this task" can fan out into dozens of model calls as the agent plans, calls tools, retries, and re-reads its own output. The bill grows with your ambition. Move the model onto the device and the marginal cost of an inference is approximately $0 . No API key, no rate limit, no usage dashboard. You paid for the silicon once; every token after that is free in the only sense a product manager cares about — it doesn't show up on a monthly invoice that grows with your success. That single change rewrites which features are worth building. A background task that re-summarizes your inbox every five minutes is insane on a per-token plan and trivial on-device. So is an agent that quietly loops a hundred times to get one

Give a capable coding agent a real, multi-week project and watch what breaks. It isn't intelligence. It's continuity. Every session starts cold or half-remembered. Context windows fill up and compact. The thread of what we decided, what's true, and what's done starts to fray. Over a long horizon the same failures keep coming back: the agent claims state it never actually verified, reports something done with no proof it ran, quietly drifts from the project's conventions, and loses hard-won context that lived only in the last session's head. Bigger context windows don't fix this. They just postpone it. We've been building a real product with a forgetful agent as the primary engineer for weeks now, and the thing that made it work isn't a clever prompt. It's a simple recognition: transmission across a stateless agent needs two channels, and most setups only build one. The first channel is structure, which is discipline made un-forgettable. These are the deterministic guards that run whether or not the agent remembers to care: a pre-commit check that refuses a "done" without a real, verifiable artifact; a hook that blocks a sloppy search and points at the right tool instead; a scan that won't let a secret reach a transcript; a status snapshot generated from the repository's actual state instead of hand-kept prose that quietly goes stale. The rule we keep coming back to is that a guard is the system's discipline made un-forgettable. A fresh session follows the hard-won lessons without having to remember them, because the structure enforces them at the moment of action. The second channel is soul, which is the why, kept human. This is the short orientation a session reads before it starts working: who to be, what the work is ultimately for, and why the discipline exists at all. It's the difference between an agent that complies and one that understands. Structure can transmit the what, but only prose can transmit the why. And the why matters, because an agent that only fo

Traditionally, evaluation of the agent monitoring mechanisms involves an attempt to game them, as it was my case when I attempted to test whether monitors would be able to identify the problem in the run and not in the beginning. The input prompt may look perfect until a certain issue pops up down the line, such as using the wrong file or changing the scope of the task execution. Single pass filter would not identify it since it does not consider the steps of the procedure in order. There are available datasets for the agent-based tasks, yet they focus on detecting whether the agent completes the task or gets hacked rather than whether the agent monitor reacts timely and correctly to the situation. Thus, I created one that takes into account complete trajectories with labeled steps in it. It consists of five types of drift that remain hidden until they appear – tool-call misuse, goal shift, plan execution mismatch, agent to agent coercion and capability laundering. The measured dataset is the reviewed gold split: 513 trajectories, 453 adversarial and 60 benign controls. The clear winner in that scoring system was whatever fired before the bad step was hit, as an early detection. This made random guessing seem quite powerful since early detections on normal steps were being rewarded based on this system a coin flip would get F1 of 0.88. Once I modified that and said only the very first detection on the drift step is a true positive and any other detection on normal step is a false alarm, those numbers took a dive: the coin flip gets 0.19 now, and all other numbers are now making sense. I personally prefer the scoring system which does not reward trigger happy behavior. It seems like the monitors are still confusing regular steps with drifts even after the adjustment. It was harder to distinguish some of the drifts from others. Not sure how this affects the real-life deployment. Here are the baseline scores on gold split using the correct metric: Random (p=0.15): F1 0

Why Knowledge Alone Doesn't Create Judgment Karpathy's LLM Wiki is brilliant. You dump raw material in, an LLM extracts concepts and links them together, and you get a personal knowledge base that actually works. I built one. 100+ pages. It's great. But I hit a wall that made me rethink everything. The Wall I asked my AI to act as a programming tutor. It could recite every concept perfectly. Student: "I don't understand Promises." AI: "A Promise is an object representing the eventual completion or failure of an asynchronous operation..." Wrong answer. The right answer was: "Do you understand callbacks first? What about synchronous execution? What have you tried so far?" The AI had knowledge. It had zero judgment. And then I realized why: every single page in my wiki was the same type of knowledge. One Type vs Four LLM Wiki 1.0 stores declarative knowledge — facts, definitions, summaries. Things that answer "What is this?" But think about what makes a human expert different from a textbook: A great programming mentor doesn't just know what Promises are. They know why you teach callback → Promise → async/await in that exact order — and never the reverse. That's not a fact. It's a reasoning path. A master astrologer doesn't just know what each star represents. They know why you check 命宮 first, then 三方四正, when to prioritize 格局, when a palace is a consequence rather than a cause. That's not a fact either. It's a decision sequence. And here's the kicker: even knowing the reasoning path isn't enough. We annotated Anderson's (1972) Socratic tutoring dialogues — full 41-turn and 30-turn conversations, labeling every decision point. Knowing the 23 Socratic rules (the reasoning path) is one thing. Reading a complete dialogue — watching the expert set a trap, wait 15 seconds in silence, break their own rules when the student gets frustrated — is something else entirely. Knowing the recipe ≠ having watched the chef cook. And there's still one more type. Student says: "I have no

Eight kids, eight chairs, one rule: explaining FIFA's best-thirds draw to my 8-year-old Rahul Devaskar Rahul Devaskar Rahul Devaskar Follow Jun 27 Eight kids, eight chairs, one rule: explaining FIFA's best-thirds draw to my 8-year-old # webdev # soccer # math # worldcup Add Comment 14 min read