Naomi Saphra
@nsaphra
Waiting on a robot body. All opinions are universal and held by both employers and family. ML/NLP professor. nsaphra.net
btw for this passage Claude kept trying to get me to add ”I got the milk”. The third time it reminded me: “the Harlow section still never cashes the milk — the bottle is built into the apparatus and the call’s functional success is never named as milk.” Perfect “maxim of quantity” demo.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Vast and Trunkless Leg of Stone, Standing in the Desert from classic poem Ozymandias.
if you're curious about my process, these are some bits of the exchange. Even if I ignore the LLM's boring ideas and vacuous phrasing suggestions, it tells me if my current draft is missing anything I'd previously mentioned wanting to include, and where those missing bits might fit
I'm interested to know what signatures felt that way to you. For what it's worth, automated tools disagree with your intuition. I wonder if the unsettling tone, which was deliberate because it expressed how I feel as well, collided with your paranoid sense of the uncanny.
12. A Series of Unfortunate Events only gets more clever on rereading as an adult.
11. All I knew going in was this was an “Oprah’s book club” book and historical fiction about racism from 1982. Probably assumed some kind of misery porn? Honestly, going in with no clue about the plot beats or where it was going was an incredible experience.
9. This question is too hard. I shouldn’t have picked it. That’s ok. Piranesi struck a chord during lockdown but is actually about the isolation that comes from severe illness and disability, and how to celebrate a life we never chose.
8. When a bad guy was good all along, but second place is hiveminds. Leech is a fave, narrated by a parasitic hivemind that controls every doctor in the world.
5. The subject that will get me to sound most like an unhinged crank is growing up at the peak period of childhood bipolar disorder diagnosis, at its epicenter. The categories we use for the variation in minds are neither the "natural" categories nor the most useful to people.
4. "There is the condition of feeling like a city that is most interesting for its ruins." - Anne Boyer, The Undying
3. I routinely quote the park ranger in Fuzz on the subject of "bear proof" garbage bins: "There's a lot of overlap between the smartest bears and the stupidest tourists."
2. To my dismay, my father was assigned to bedtime duty when I was 6. He read from Gormenghast every night. I remember parts that taught me new words: The cook’s teeth were like “tombstones”, the butler spun like a “gyroscope”, the “wetnurse” killed herself.
1. “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” got me into both nature writing and illness memoirs
I had fun with that questionnaire but upon reflection it’s a bit blah but I want to do more of it anyway so I made a better one. 1 like, 1 answer
18. Not especially into historical fiction. I’ve read a few I really loved, most notably Red Plenty by Francis Spufford. I read some history nonfiction too, but not a big genre. I have gotten very into reading about nuns lately so maybe I’ll try more historical novels soon.
15. “Record of a Spaceborne Few“ is Becky Chambers’ greatest book to date. It doesn’t require reading the other Wayfarers. Beautiful, I view it as a response to the last page in The Dispossessed, which asks how spacefaring anarcho-syndicalists with scarce resources should handle immigration.
8. The Princess and the Dragon by Audrey Wood. A feminist masterpiece for kindergartners
Since the series started with a retelling of Fall of the House of Usher, I thought each would retell a horror classic and was disappointed that book 2 was just inspired by broad eastern european folklore. But book 3 actually retells Ng gur [Zbhagnvaf bs Znqarff] as Appalachian mining horror!
If you're heading to #ICML2026, you should definitely go meet my collaborators and check out our work! Highlight 🧵 for 2 main track papers, 2 position papers, and 2 workshop preprints!
Classical learning theory describes a bias/variance tradeoff in which a model with enough parameters to memorize would fail to generalize. It took years to theoretically understand why that didn't happen. Conceptually they were in the start of the "double descent" curve.
There were interesting facts about individual variation, but when he has to address any political controversies, it kind of falls flat. Either he misunderstands how people justify bigotry, or he doesn't believe his own disclaimers.
This one was fun! I still think it's worth working towards space settlement. There is intrinsic value to acting as though we believe the future can be different from the past. But also, going to have to be careful that we don't make a space autocracy that destroys Earth.
Another quick light read! (Because I'm reading a chunky nonfiction tome as my main read now.)