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Peter Bloem

@pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy
399 followers 41 following 982 posts

Assistant prof. at the Learning and Reasoning group, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Not an AI pusher, I promise. I just think we need a better class of criticism. 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mathstodon.xyz/@pbloem, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026
It's nice that we're at least going back to installing heat pumps, but it's frustrating to see that heat pumps with a reversing valve so that they can also cool are not part of the discussion. I get that we're trying to avoid adding even more peaks on an already full grid, but heat waves are […]
mathstodon.xyz
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026
Has anybody let AI loose on graph isomorphism yet? Given how close Babai came, it may be the machines can just put it squarely in P (or at least finish his proof for him).
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026
I think we (the AI community) need to start getting a lot more specific about both the good things and the bad things real quick. www.theguardian.com/technology/2026…
theguardian.com
Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
Boss of OpenAI calls for a regulatory light touch because of the ‘good stuff’ the technology can deliver
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026
Safewords for chatbots. This is not evidence of subjective experience, but it's still an interesting phenomenon. I think I'll add this to my Claude instructions just to see if it ever fires in normal conversation […]
mathstodon.xyz
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026
We should listen to Bill Gates on AI. Nobody knows more about holding back technology than he does.
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Reposted by Peter Bloem
Profane tmesis @ptmesis.writing.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026
A new story! This one's a quick read at 3000 words. It's old-school sci-fi, for these troubled times. profane-tmesis.info/ad-profundum
profane-tmesis.info
Per Aspera ad Profunda
Tree duty today. Hard work. We know they're not trees. Just like the fungus isn't moss, and the bugs aren't wolves. But it helps to use familiar names for things. We're all homesick here. It comes with the job.
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Reposted by Peter Bloem
Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026
🥖 A new blog post! 🥖 (Yes another one.) The question of AI coding is usually seen as a binary choice. You buy in or you don't. It's not, and it's important that we move the discussion on from that. Vibe-coding is terrible. It creates sloppy code in drifting, unmaintained code bases, it rapidly […]
mathstodon.xyz
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
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Reposted by Peter Bloem
Greg Jenner (Historian) @gregjenner.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The panopticon encroaches yet further — this sounds truly horrible www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
Teachers at Euan Blair firm report ‘horrendous stress’ after AI used to rate their work
Exclusive: Instructors at tech training company Multiverse hit out at ‘remorseless’ and ‘unnerving’ monitoring system
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Reposted by Peter Bloem
Anthropy @anthropy.mastodon.derg.nz.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026
look, I don't care how righteous you think you are, if you're boosting un-CW'd violence onto my feed you are getting perma-muted and/or unfollowed. For the sake of everyone with PTSD, fucking stop that shit, your violence is not 'good' just because it aligns with your political goals. And […]
mastodon.derg.nz
Original post on mastodon.derg.nz
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026
Oh man, two mainstream android browsers are both unsupported and I have no alternative but to download the Teams app? What are the odds? What an unfortunate coincidence.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026
My coping mechanism for the rise of the far right is to imagine that we're slowly inoculating Europe bit by bit. You let these people in power for a bit and people do eventually realize that they are as horrible as people are saying, while largely also incomletent clowns. It takes a few years […]
mathstodon.xyz
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
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Reposted by Peter Bloem
Ionica Smeets @ionica.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026
RE: mstdn.social/@Voxweb/11720021875885… 'Zo geldt voor AI hetzelfde als voor andere fraudezaken: het komt neer op bewijs wegen en eventuele alternatieve verklaringen onderzoeken.'
mstdn.social
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026
🥖 A new blog post! 🥖 (Yes another one.) The question of AI coding is usually seen as a binary choice. You buy in or you don't. It's not, and it's important that we move the discussion on from that. Vibe-coding is terrible. It creates sloppy code in drifting, unmaintained code bases, it rapidly […]
mathstodon.xyz
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026
I'm migrating instances. New account: mathstodon.xyz/@pbloem
mathstodon.xyz
Peter Bloem (migrating instances) (@pbloem@mathstodon.xyz)
0 Posts, 0 Following, 0 Followers · Assistant prof. at the Learning and Reasoning group, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Not an AI pusher, I promise. I just think we need a better class of criticism.
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Reposted by Peter Bloem
Pozorvlak @pozorvlak.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026
My commentary: - This was not a case of "they told it to hack, it hacked, gosh, what a surprise". The test involved hacking, but instead of hacking the target machine the model instead pulled off a much more difficult series of hacks to get the answer sheet, because that's the most reliable way […]
mathstodon.xyz
Original post on mathstodon.xyz
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026
haggstrom.substack.com/p/can-we-ple…
haggstrom.substack.com
Can we please treat this as the warning shot it is?
On the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026
I'm seeing a lot of people here (predictably) saying that the "OpenAI containment breach" thing is (a) just hype and (b) OpenAI relying on its soft guardrails for security. Let me quote the original blogpost: "Our benchmarks run in a highly isolated environment, with network access constrained […]
sigmoid.social
Original post on sigmoid.social
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/07/2026
RE: mathstodon.xyz/@oantolin/1169506538… Claude's internal monologue as it verifies the counter example to the Jacobian conjecture.
mathstodon.xyz
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026
The "hard problem of consciousness" is entering the discourse in a big way. Here's my favorite way of highlighting the weirdness of consciousness. Imagine that the universe is a kind of Mandebrot fractal. There's a tiny program that you can run on a Turing machine that actually simulates all […]
sigmoid.social
Original post on sigmoid.social
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026
Very strange behavior from Claude (Fable). It corrects itself at the last minute from making a false claim. I've seen this a few times. It's fine, but I wonder if this is intended behavior. You'd think it could get rid of this during the thinking phase.
Claude screenshot: 4. The mask update lags one block. mask[:seen] = True then seen += block means at iteration ibl you mark blocks 0..ibl−1 — the block you just encoded is excluded, so training never sees the most recent block. Prequentially you're allowed to train on everything encoded so far, including the current block. Increment first, then mark (this also matters for the bpd display, which currently divides current-block cost by a count that... actually the bpd is fine since you divide after incrementing, but the training mask is off by one).
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026
I happen to be in London in a few weeks. I thought I might go and see The Odyssey at the BFI IMAX. Turns out it's sold out for two months flat.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026
Oh dear. I may need to stay off Mastodon for a while until people have processed that decree from Torvalds. Not sure I can handle the discourse this is going to generate.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026
It's hard to explain why I'm so wary of scientists who explicitly want to use science to "make the world a better place". It seems an uncontroversial thing to say. I think the key is that if you have a shallow idea of what a "better place" is, you will almost certainly make things worse. And […]
sigmoid.social
Original post on sigmoid.social
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026
google in 2015: We can get smart glasses to work technically, but the social problems are insurmountable meta in 2026: Maybe now that the technology has moved on, that has all changed.
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Reposted by Peter Bloem
Emily @emily.xoxo.zone.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2026
Just making sure you know the bear cam is super active right now www.youtube.com/live/J7ZrIDvqlic Extremely good. So many bears. Hello, bears!
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Reposted by Peter Bloem
Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 12/07/2026
I’ll listen to anyone who’s astonished. Do you believe AI is going to wreck the economy and ruin culture? Plausible; I’ll listen. But if you’re not also astonished your eyes just aren’t open.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/07/2026
So much for sycophancy...
A Claude screenshot: "Your intuition is backwards for this workload, and the difference is large: this search is almost entirely small-array numpy, which does not parallelize internally at all."
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026
This is why I've been pushing back (and yes reply guying) on people confidently claiming that AI is glorified predictive text. Not because I'm an AI pusher. Not because I love AI and I think everybody should embrace it. Because it's a wrong mental model, and […] [Original post on sigmoid.social]
Are you worried about AI?

We were asked this question on a small-publishers panel at the World Fantasy Convention in 2025. Our Managing Editor, C.L., remembers answering pretty confidently. AI is glorified predictive text. It can produce words that technically hang together, but it cannot innovate, cannot imagine, and will never write anything worth reading.

He still believes that. We still believe that. Mostly.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026
Farage's bid to call for an election in order to secure a stronger mandate reminds me primarily of Theresa May and Edward Heath doing the same thing. Are there any examples of this ploy actually working? #ukpol
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026
On the left, some typesetting in the TMLR/JMLR standard template (Times and PC Modern, I think). On the left, the same in Charter and Euler. I think journals need to open up the opportunities to use different typefaces. PC Modern is an unreadable mess.
A bit of mathematical typesetting in the typefaces Times and PC Modern.A bit of mathematical typesetting in the typefaces Charter and Euler.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/07/2026
#til en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
en.wikipedia.org
Dunkelflaute - Wikipedia
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2026
I'm going to keep a running thread of AI writing tropes.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2026
me: Ha, look at these poor saps at Meta, hand-writing training data for the next generation of AI models. Thank god I stayed in academia. Now, to write some careful feedback on this thesis draft. student: Hey Claude, here's what my supervisor said. Please process the feedback and update the […]
sigmoid.social
Original post on sigmoid.social
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/07/2026
It appears that the ArXiv header bar is one of those UI elements that cannot change. Not without making me feel like I'm in a parallel universe. This is going to take a long time to get used to,.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/07/2026
No Claude, the word "load-bearing" should not appear when someone asks you to write an explanation of a joke.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026
unix.foo/posts/last-people-who-know…
unix.foo
The Last People Who Know How It Works · unix.foo
You only ever know the things you can lose to.
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Reposted by Peter Bloem
Jess👾 @jesstheunstill.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2026
Just to note: When you take a self assessment for ADHD or Autism and it asks something like: "do you have difficulty with ABC?" And your response is "I don't have difficulty with ABC. I've developed a System that I use to deal with ABC, and when I follow the System, I can do ABC. So it's not […]
infosec.exchange
Original post on infosec.exchange
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026
I've been asked to talk about AI in some popular science live thing, and they asked me for three songs that I like to play in the break. Of course, I'm massively overthinking it, and trying to come up with song that somehow capture the current moment we find ourselves in. I have a few ideas […]
sigmoid.social
Original post on sigmoid.social
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2026
RE: mstdn.social/@hkrn/1168241914438015… Read the room, guys.
mstdn.social
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2026
Neat! cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare_rele…
cauenapier.com
Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other
Comments
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Reposted by Peter Bloem
David Penfold :verified: @davep.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026
Edward Norton watching the USA v Turkey match on his own.
Edward Norton and Brad Pitt at the match. 

Nicked from r/footballcliches
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Reposted by Peter Bloem
Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 26/06/2026
I'm afraid one thing I've learned lately is that I enjoy being negged. Starting to get gooseflesh whenever Opus tells me my framing needs to be sharpened.
You've answered 1 and 2 correctly, but let me sharpen the framing, because the sharper version makes the circularity vanish more completely than "two separate questions" does — and it also tells you exactly what to do for 3.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026
My advice to students on using AI at the moment is that everything basically involves two stages: doing and checking. You write an email, you proofread it, you write a some code, you test it for bugs, etc. If you must use AI, use it for one stage but not the other. It's not reliable enough to […]
sigmoid.social
Original post on sigmoid.social
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026
I have written two emails. Surely that's enough for a day like today...
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026
Double descent, here we go. Any minute now.
A validation loss curve that is going down and then back up again.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/06/2026
The title is a bit sensationalist, but this is an interesting read. Claude can play Civ 6 through a text-only API. www.lwilko.com/blog/i-gave-an-ai-a-…
lwilko.com
I Gave an AI a Civilization to Run. It Built a Nuke.
Either AI is ready to help run a country, or it can't be trusted with a board game. The honest answer is both.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026
The yak shaving is is off the chain today.
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/06/2026
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBlmcwfiGTU
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Peter Bloem @pbloem.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/06/2026
RE: mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116755… Any day now.
mastodon.social
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