Backfill, September 2026
What was added, expanded or split on the site in September 2026.
Read More Backfill, September 2026Author: Chris
Data Scientist, AI Strategist, and now apparently AI researcher. Perpetual student, and also conference/workshop-surfer.
LAcon V, and the Hugos with Brutus
LAcon V in Anaheim, August 2026: Worldcon panels on writers and AI, and the Hugo Awards ceremony.
Read More LAcon V, and the Hugos with BrutusBrutus and I Went to Indianapolis
I presented a poster asking how much of a Transformer’s apparent reasoning is actually learned. Indianapolis, August 2026, at a conference where Chomsky’s branch of NLP turned out not to be dead.
Read More Brutus and I Went to IndianapolisA third time in Philly, for the mathematicians
July 2026, the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, the first time in nearly half a century it has assembled in the United States. Four Fields Medals, an itinerary built by an agent, and a Chern lecture on formalising quantum field theory.
Read More A third time in Philly, for the mathematiciansBrutus at the Duke photonics lab, second stop
The second stop of a summer tour of photonics labs, and the thinnest page on this site. I went, I know I went, and the detail I came home talking about belongs to the other end of the Research Triangle.
Read More Brutus at the Duke photonics lab, second stopI skipped CVPR for an interferometer in a box
A week in the Research Triangle instead of Denver: the Quantum Machine Learning Workshop at NC State, the Duke photonics lab over in Durham, and a teaching kit that packs a whole interferometer into a box.
Read More I skipped CVPR for an interferometer in a boxThree Marches in San Jose, and the line that beat me
GTC24 felt academic and epochal, GTC25 felt like twenty five thousand people making deals, and by GTC26 Nvidia was consolidating an industry it had already won. Three years on the same block, and one overnight queue I refused to join.
Read More Three Marches in San Jose, and the line that beat meMidnight in Paris, mapped to the latent space of Savannah
A book festival, one free day, and a field test: 51 scenes from the opening montage of Midnight in Paris, handed to Gemini and re-scouted around Savannah. What a multimodal model can shortlist, and what it still cannot decide for you.
Read More Midnight in Paris, mapped to the latent space of SavannahTrip 2 to the Rocket City, and the writers who will not budge
An AI conference at the NASA Space and Rocket Center, then back to Marshall for the NASA AI Symposium. The Saturn V, a Genie cat that will not stay put, and Bruce Holsinger on why artists hold the greatest inertia toward these tools.
Read More Trip 2 to the Rocket City, and the writers who will not budgeA porch in San Diego, and an entire arm of talks about creativity
December 2025, NeurIPS in San Diego. A year earlier I skipped it entirely and spent the week arguing with a text to video model instead. This time I went, and the thread I could not shake was creativity, and the writers who want nothing to do with any of it.
Read More A porch in San Diego, and an entire arm of talks about creativity