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Blair Johnson

@blrjohnson.bsky.social
112 followers 616 following 14 posts

ML Ph.D. Student @ Georgia Tech, Research Engineer @ GTRI, I work on symbolic pattern discovery in graphs.

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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Most models these days are perfectly competent agents, and my daily frustration is that they are all completely inept communicators. Remember when labs were trying to solve Diplomacy? It feels like they've completely forgotten that there's a human on the other end that needs to understand sometimes.
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Treeview apps are my favorite way to clean up storage. There are other ways to get the same information, but something about seeing it visually makes the process so much easier. "Huh, what's this repeated pattern that's taking up so much space?" seems to be pretty powerful.
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I haven't read your article yet, but I believe that thesis. When I have to write software that I have no background in (usually web or ui stuff) I have a much harder time producing high quality results, and I don't think that I'm learning much along the way. I think part of that is lack of interest
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
~7 as a student, ~4 of that working full time as a research engineer. I write a lot of research software; which is probably a very different experience from being a swe.
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Shortening the latency between making an architectural decision and encountering the consequences of that decision has taught me a lot about software development that I think would take a long time to learn otherwise.
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Maybe "to a model that can't experience it" is a better way to put this
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
I consistently underestimate how difficult it will be to write anything with a GUI using a language model. You immediately end up inside the hot loop trying to articulate why everything feels bad and looks weird to a model with no intuition for those ideas.
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
I've found that the default cloud environment often gets stuck in an unrecoverable state. The UI shows a stop button and neither returns control to the user, nor makes any progress. There aren't any obvious ways to hard-reset and continue.
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
o1-preview beat my family zero-shot at Codenames when paired with the weakest guesser. Clues weren’t amazing when picking word pairs for itself, but very impressive ability to relate words when given a collection and asked for a clue that relates them all.
Laptop and codenames board game on a table. The board shows that the game is over and the laptop shows o1-preview’s final clue (clock, 1).
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
jax.config.update(“jax_explain_cache_misses”, True) is an extremely useful tool for figuring out what parts of your Jax program are getting recompiled and why.
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
Did a quick experiment similar to this last year and observed that you can definitely bias the distribution of response lengths to a given prompt. github.com/Blair-Johnso...
github.com
GitHub - Blair-Johnson/tokens-to-completion: Experiment related to controlling LLM output length
Experiment related to controlling LLM output length - Blair-Johnson/tokens-to-completion
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
A research idea that I would love to see someone take further is “reverse” positional encodings that count down to an EOS token. The training setup is easy and it could offer an interesting way to bias the length+style of LM responses at runtime. Want ~100 token response? Count down from 100.
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Had a great week at SC24! Very exciting to see the ways that diffusion and other ML algorithms are transforming scientific computing. The tooling community also seems to be making big strides to make HPC more accessible to a broader scientific community. Look forward to next year!
A balcony view of the Atlanta aquarium atrium. The atrium is decorated with holiday lights and foliage. The far wall says SC24, Atlanta GA, HPC Creates. People are milling around as this was taken at the conference closing reception.
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Do you know of a good source that documents some of these tricks in detail? The Jax docs are very good IMO, but I would be interested in some lessons learned from a user’s perspective.
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