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Mark J. Nelson

@mm-jj-nn.bsky.social
4.8K followers 551 following 5K posts

Comp. sci. prof. @ American University, Washington DC. AI & games researcher with miscellaneous other interests. www.kmjn.org

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Reposted by Mark J. Nelson
boarders.bsky.social @boarders.bsky.social · 14h
if you are interested in the question of how one can believe that a formal verification (in lean or otherwise) does in fact verify what someone claims it does, then I recommend this classic paper 'How to Believe a Machine-Checked Proof'
brics.dk
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I've been attempting to distill tabular RL into a minimal set of lecture notes that can be introduced after random policy search but without the MDP formalism. Here's what I have so far (thread, with a Colab nb later on).
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
The lengths people will go to to justify forking a Linux distribution
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Reposted by Mark J. Nelson
Ai2 @ai2.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
We’re hiring across Ai2 👋 A few roles we’re especially excited about right now: • Senior Software Engineer, Agent Frameworks buff.ly/XUFFR08 • Senior Research Engineer, Olmo + Molmo buff.ly/FzOnCCQ 🧵
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Are you a Bluesky mutual with a blog/newsletter that has an RSS feed? I would like to add some more to my reader! Going to start by posting some that I know about in this thread. (Mine is: www.kmjn.org/notes/)
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Something I've started doing the past few semesters in Intro to AI that works pretty well (imo) is random neural policy search as the first "RL algorithm" we study. Has a bunch of nice features and provocations imo. Like: is this a "learning curve"? It has all the formal features of one!
a plot of iterations vs (cumulative) reward for random policy search on CartPole-v1 from Gymnasium
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
We have an opening for a tenured Professor / Associate Professor of Interactive Media "with an emphasis on interactive storytelling, worldbuilding, and/or playful design in the public interest". I'm on the hiring committee and happy to answer questions.
american.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
Associate or Full Professor of Interactive Media Film and Media Arts School of Communication
American University is a student-centered research institution located in Washington, DC, with highly-ranked schools and colleges, internationally-renowned faculty, and a reputation for creating meani...
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Reposted by Mark J. Nelson
Marco @mcognetta.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
🚨 [Token][ization] Paper Alert 🚨 Tokenization is a wildly understudied area of language modeling despite it having effects across all of NLP. Over the past ~8 months, 32 (!) tokenizer researchers put together the most comprehensive survey of the field. Check it out!
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
New interactive/listenable blog post from me, exploring the expressive range of cat vocalizations in text-to-audio models. www.kmjn.org/notes/text_t...
kmjn.org
Text-to-meowdio models
Expressive range of AI cats
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Obituary for Paul Tarau.
logicprogramming.org
In Memoriam: Paul Tarau – Association for Logic Programming
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Rice University's history department hiring an Assistant/Associate Professor in the History of Artificial Intelligence!
apply.interfolio.com
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Subskeet of The Discourse: I wasn't an engineering major but took Eng 101 because it was in the required core for all majors. Admittedly Claremont Colleges are an unusual place but it's certainly possible, and I think a good idea. Everyone interacts daily with engineering regardless of field!
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I like AI, but still, is this what I want to see at the Amtrak station
an electronic billboard reading: 

Google Public Sector

U.S. DOT is empowering its staff with Google Al, so they can build safer, more efficient transportation systems.

A new era of American Innovation

publicsector.google/ai
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
someone's spying on me in the office
a photograph of a deer with antlers looking in through an office window
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
thanks to generative AI, my computer currently has upwards of 2000 cat meows on it
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Our journalism program is hiring an Assistant or Associate Professor of quantitative/data journalism.
american.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
Assistant Professor / Associate Professor of Journalism in Data Science and Quantitative Methods
American University is a student-centered research institution located in Washington, DC, with highly-ranked schools and colleges, internationally-renowned faculty, and a reputation for creating meani...
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Alright I guess I will do this too.
A collage of 9 game covers, showing: Minesweeper, Desktop Tower Defense, Universal Paperclips, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, F-Zero, Master of Orion II, Secret of Mana, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, Pontifex
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Amtrak window selfie
a photograph of a reflection of a man wearing glasses taking a photo out the window while holding a horizontal smartphone
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Hey, here's a 1994 paper explaining why undergrad differential equations classes are often not that useful (unfortunately, still true in 2026). www.jstor.org/stable/2687502
What It means to Understand a Differential Equation
John H. Hubbard

Newton invented differential equations in order to describe the motions of bodies under gravity, and his vision of differential equations as the appropriate language in which to state physical laws and to construct models pervades all the sciences. There is a dismaying discrepancy between this view of differential equations as the link between mathematics and science and the standard course on differential equations, which often seems to consist of a sequence of tricks to find formulas for solutions. This is unfortunate for many reasons. Most differential equations do not have solutions that can be written in elementary form, and even when they do, the search for formulas often obscures the central question: How do solutions behave?
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Spent the day at Google's DC office. But the purpose as stated on the visitor-badge machine was "social" rather than "business", so nothing to report. 🤫
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Mario Draghi thinks Europe is unlikely to be competitive in AI models or chips, but does have the potential to be competitive in data, though it'll need to catch up on datacenters for that. www.ft.com/content/f054...
"Europe’s potential zone of AI sovereignty is narrow. Its frontier labs cannot at present compete financially with their American and Chinese competitors, and leading-edge chip production is far behind. But data is the one area where Europe can still be sovereign, and it is also the area with the greatest potential to generate growth.

The continent sits on a wealth of public-sector data, such as decades of health records and data collection by statistical offices. Its highly automated manufacturing sector generates a deep well of machine-readable industrial information. European Commission estimates put Europe’s data economy at over €800bn, or more than 5 per cent of GDP, by 2030.

But this creates the next tension. To exploit these assets, Europe needs to have control over their storage and processing. This means it needs large-scale AI data centres."
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Got a good 96gb-VRAM local LLM harness going and can't believe I used to just... put up with the garbage latencies that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google serve up.
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Reposted by Mark J. Nelson
Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
p(earthquake) as an analogy for p(doom).
argmin.net
The Chances of Earthquakes
How much precision do we need in seismological odds?
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Reposted by Mark J. Nelson
Lynn Cherny @arnicas.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
DeepMind is hiring a gameplay engineer in London. They have also hired an excellent narrative designer.
google.com
Gameplay Engineer, Games, DeepMind
As a Gameplay Engineer and Prototyper in Inception, you will build interactive experiences, blurring the lines between game development and AI research. Your mission is to move beyond traditional game engineering to show what is possible when generative models and agentic workflows become core mechanics. You will be a key bridge between research and design, moving fast to stand up 0-to-1 prototypes, crafting expert pipelines when necessary, and finding novel technical solutions to creative problems. You will work in a cross-functional environment where every project involves significant experimentation, rapid iteration, and close collaboration. Artificial intelligence will be one of humanity’s most transformative inventions. At Google DeepMind, we are a pioneering AI lab with exceptional interdisciplinary teams focused on advancing AI development to solve complex global challenges and accelerate high-quality product innovation for billions of users. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, ensuring safety and ethics are always our highest priority. We are pushing the boundaries across multiple domains. Our global teams offer diverse learning opportunities and varied career pathways for those driven to achieve exceptional results through collective effort.
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
An observation this piece makes I hadn't quite considered: recent cohorts of university students shared a lot of pre-pandemic, pre-LLM context with profs because they'd also "planned to go to university in a different time and then the world changed around them", which won't be true going forward.
generativehistory.substack.com
No More Muddling Through
Why the détente between students and professors over AI will end in 2026.
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
buried in this article: the new-to-me information that MrBeast owns a payday loan app
thebaffler.com
Paid Phones | Daniel Kolitz
More and more Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Albert, Cleo, Brigit, and Dave are here to help—but terms and conditions apply.
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Reposted by Mark J. Nelson
hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Do large language models actually understand the world, or are they just very good at pretending? Does it even matter? Our recent Royal Society special issue explores this: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/issue/3...
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Recent mechanized-proof news makes it interesting imo to revisit this paper from just a few months ago: Martens et al. "Is truth futureproof? On the possible futures of mechanized proofs". PLATEAU '26.
khoury.northeastern.edu
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
There's a huge increase in single-author papers being submitted by early-career researchers in AI/ML. Leaving aside other issues, from a purely CV-maxxing perspective do these even help? I think on a hiring committee I'd give them mixed to negative weight in many cases.
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
An interesting development on the local-models front: one of the largest U.S. law firms is going to start fine-tuning and hosting its own LLMs in-house.
ft.com
Latham & Watkins buys Nvidia servers to set up in-house AI systems
Law firm is customising open-weight models as alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic
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Reposted by Mark J. Nelson
Shriram Krishnamurthi @shriram.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Super excited to share "A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await". How differently does async/await behave across today's languages? (More than you might expect!) And what *is* "structured concurrency"? Check out our ~interactive~ blog post introducing the paper: cel.cs.brown.edu/blog/design-...
cel.cs.brown.edu
A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await
Every language pitches async/await as synchronous-looking code, and the same two keywords appear everywhere. But behind the shared syntax hide nine independent design decisions, and no two of seven mo...
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
spotted my first Halloween decorations of the season
two plastic skeletons sitting in lawn chairs on a sunny day
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I had missed that a few weeks ago was the 20th anniversary of the academic blog I started in grad school. Have 77 posts so far, or just under four a year.
kmjn.org
Notes and essays | Mark J. Nelson
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Re-upping this thread because I finally finished the port and an initial benchmark, and the whole thing is online now (github repo + 3-part blog post series).
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Kearny Generating Station from the PATH train
a photograph of Kearny Generating Station framed by a rectangular train window on a sunny day
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Recently learned that Günter Rudolph passed away
evolution.sigevo.org
Volume 19, Issue 2 – SIGEVOlution
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Found this searching somehow, Cognizant posted a video where my collaborator Elliot Meyerson talks about our paper on Language Model Crossover
youtu.be
AI Research | Harnessing Language Models for Smarter Optimization
YouTube video by Cognizant
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Most intense lightning storm I've been in in a few years! Just continuous flashing for like 20 minutes.
a screenshot of the windy.com radar view of Washington, DC showing it covered in rain and lightning strikes
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Eamonn Keogh noticed that 1920s-era Statistical Process Control beats recent deep-learning algorithms on the most widely used benchmark in time series anomaly detection. Possibly says more about that benchmark than anything, but indicative imo of modern ML scholarship being weak on baselines.
reddit.com
From the MachineLearning community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the MachineLearning community
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
missed the lunar eclipse yesterday due to clouds, but the (almost) full moon today is still pretty good
photograph of a skyline at night with a partly cloud obscured full moon and a moon reflection in water in the foreground
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
A 2026 update to my Institutions Active in Technical Games Research ranking, which looks at who publishes in the conferences and journals run by & for the CS-and-games community (AIIDE, CHI Play, FDG, IEEE ToG, etc.).
kmjn.org
Institutions Active in Technical Games Research
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Reposted by Mark J. Nelson
AIIDE @aiide.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
What about AIIDE 2027 in your city? The call for host proposal for AIIDE 2027 is open! Deadlines (11:59 PM AoE): - Proposal Deadline: October 2nd, 2026 - Proposal Notification: October 16th, 2026 Learn More: sites.google.com/view/aiide20...
sites.google.com
AIIDE 2026 - Call for AIIDE 2027 Hosts
The AIIDE 2026 organizing committee hereby invites proposals to host the 23rd AAAI Conference on Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2027), to be held some time during the months of September to ...
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
We've been kinda doing this, and it's amazing how many people can't really discuss their own papers, even pre LLM. I remember a senior faculty candidate who made it to the campus interview stage but got nixed because he couldn't answer pretty basic questions about his lab's (many) papers.
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Discovered a new-to-me type of wine I didn't know I like: Lambrusco di Sorbara. Tastes remarkably like a good sour beer.
a photograph of a bottle of Paltrinieri Radice
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Reposted by Mark J. Nelson
Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Microconferences: A modest proposal for alternative systems to generate, evaluate, and share knowledge.
argmin.net
Microconferences
A proposal to create alternative systems for generating, evaluating, and sharing knowledge
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Cool new curated Vintage Artificial Intelligence collection from the Internet Archive
archive.org
Vintage Artificial Intelligence
A curated collection of early computer software claiming some aspect of artificial intelligence as a primary feature, allowing the early interactions of humans and machines before things got a little ...
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Apple Macintosh ad, 1984: "We could, as they say in computerese, dump another Gigabyte (write another 50,000 or so pages) on Macintosh."
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Had an unexpected need to print something same-day in a location where I don't have a printer. Spent some time looking for options until I realized I was in walking distance of a public library. Great experience. Hurrah for the library. 1/2
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Tip for people stuck in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem: the Copilot AI search sidebar is a huge improvement! Largely because almost anything is better than Outlook search (it won't find emails that have the verbatim search term in the subject!). But still, now there's working search. Ty AI boom.
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
An intra-model-family split, Prompt: is NBER pronounced "en-berr" or "en bee ee are" Google AI Overview always answers "en-berr", while Gemini in the app always gives the opposite answer.
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