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phd student in comp neuroscience @ mpi brain research frankfurt. https://twitter.com/janhkirchner and https://universalprior.substack.com/
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TL;DR: What is slop, and why? Is it fundamental? Is it in the room with us right now? And, most importantly, how do we exorcise it? Previously in this series: This Week In Fashion and On Automatic Ideas A potential post for this Substack starts when I pick up an...
TLDR: Arnold Schwarzenegger probably shouldn't exist. The math behind why he does might also tell us something about whether AI alignment goes well. I keep coming back to thinking about Arnold Schwarzenegger. He isn't just the most famous bodybuilder of his era, he is a quadruple threat: a top-of-field athlete,...
This came to me as a flash of insight in the shower and I knew it had to exist, so I made Claude write it. This one goes out to the three of you who know what this is a mashup of.[1] Previously in this genre: The Tale Of Gandhi...
Previously in this series: Elementary Infra-Bayesianism 1. There’s this paper Earlier last week I got nerd-sniped by a paper called Condensation: a theory of concepts (Eisenstat 2025). It’s the kind of paper where the abstract makes a claim so clean you assume you must be misreading it: roughly, there is...
TL;DR: IAN v1 died expensive TPU death, IAN v2 rises from markdown ashes. Personal AI assistants, knowledge graphs, and the alignment problem when the AI is you. A vacation in 2021 Back in 2021, I used a two-week vacation to > [finetune] a large language model on the text I...
Update February 21st: After the initial publication of this article (January 3rd) we received a lot of feedback and several people pointed out that propositions 1 and 2 were incorrect as stated. That was unfortunate as it distracted from the broader arguments in the article and I (Jan K) take...