iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Not an essay, but at Humanoids in 2013 Ron Arkin gave a talk where for every task in the newly announced DARPA Robotics Challenge he showed a clip from Terminator doing the task. Driving a car: Terminator driving through the police station wall, using a hand tool: pumping a shotgun, etc.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

We call the label maker in our lab the 1D printer.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Bahnwärter Thiel but the stepmom is an LLM.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Mine recently sat down at my wife's desk and told me "I'm working. I'm going to say hi to the beep boops." While slapping the keyboard.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

The LLM as "word calculator" is an analogy I've been using for a couple years now, most often in discussing their use for code generation and teaching CS.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Sadly history won't have access to my version of the sad boy scientist letters to colleagues as my department uses an unpaid slack instance.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

I've used conda/mamba for years but my coding agent always asks about trying virtual environment, is our relationship doomed?

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

They'd also learn about how much time is wasted discussing things we'd better off not having to think about, like health insurance! The money we'd just in academic Senators and committee members getting more research done would pay for universal healthcare in no time.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

Fall break 2005 coming back from Montreal with my college rugby team they had a lot more questions, including about the Labatt Blue sign that still had nails in it after being ripped off a bar wall, but still no passports! All under the watchful eyes of a Dick Cheney portrait.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

The Utah/MIT hand in 1986 was probably better than any hand available today in terms of dexterity and control. Sensors are better but still not generally integrated in a way to make a real difference. I want the hand from 86 covered in tactile sensors.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Getting this coding agent to simplify some code just now really felt like bullying.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

I guess the head fake effect is strengthened by the more conventional gendered band names, e.g. Illuminati Hotties, The Beth's, girl in red?

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Absolutely, quizzes are documented to help with retention. I’ve been doing approximately weekly quizzes for a decade. Recently I’ve just increased their grade weight, but I still grade quite leniently to reduce pressure on students.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

It's just REINFORCE but I say a coding agent invented it.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

Well at least I still have EZPO

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

We did one page for RSS last year and it was great. Authors and reviewers both liked it.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

Ours will also sometimes say "my turn" when she wants to do it on her own.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Why have an "Answer now" button if literally every time I click it an error is thrown?

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Covariate shift is too fancy, now we just say out of distribution which really means nothing when every distribution your model uses has infinite support!

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

I don't think this can really be classified as "AI hate". It's more annoyance with tech execs who: (1) push a system on users who say they don't want it, and (2) have an overly inflated idea of what AI chat bots are: "new kind of sentience". Conflating these two hurts promoting good AI uses.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

There is research on this specific topic: e.g Domestic Robots for Older Adults: Attitudes, Preferences, and Potential - pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

We are hiring in AI and NLP at Utah! Please apply if interested and share with folks you know are looking for faculty positions, especially if they like to ski, hike, climb, or bike! utah.peopleadmin.com/postings/190...

utah.peopleadmin.com

Assistant Professor for The Kahlert School of Computing

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

I would like to see far more screening of short, say 2-3 page, proposals and then only if that passes a review panel does the full proposal and all accompanying documents need to be prepared. It would decrease writter and reviewer time.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Makes me feel better about being 68, while Kelly was half that at 34!

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

We've sat at the tree and pointed at and named all the ornaments every night since we put it up.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Reminding me of Voldo from Soulcalibur

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

I've been vibecoding demos for class this semester, stuff I would historically just draw by hand is now much more precise, like PID control for simple unicycle models. I find it to still be fairly interpretable since it's not building massive codebases on its own.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Reading groups were maybe my favorite part of grad school! I've been able to convince my group they are great off and on over the past 10 years, but it's never seemed to capture the magic of my youth.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

I too prefer the no presenters version and we go around the table and have everyone make a comment about their impressions before jumping into the details.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Confidence based on the original stopping criteria or the updated analysis from this year?

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Reposted by Tucker Hermans

Ben Jones @drbenjones.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

Come be my colleague! utah.peopleadmin.com/postings/188... . Our school (we're bigger than a department) is an awesome place to work. Our faculty are excellent across the board. Pay and benefits are good. SLC is a nice place to live. Happy to answer any questions

utah.peopleadmin.com

Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in Computing

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

A junior colleague wanted to list me as co last author on a paper from their group as thanks for helping advise, and I had to say no. It was the first I’d heard people were doing this. This was just in the past month.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

This was big at the tail end of the learning with kernels era that ended about 10 years ago. I’m curious what you think we can learn from it for neural nets beyond use latent states or RNNs, asking because I am dissatisfied with that answer myself!

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

I still love reading textbooks! Especially when the authors release the PDFs :)

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

I had a student ask me after class how he could get more in details than the lecture. I asked if he'd been reading the text book and he said "Oh yeah, I should do that." Much better than last year: student missed 2 weeks of class and I suggested the textbook, he said "I'm not fond of reading"

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

I wrote my statement of purpose for grad school apps on using RL and transfer learning to learn team level strategy in 2008. Things went a very different way for me, but that would be fun to get back into, especially with quadrupeds as I miss the Aibos we won RoboCup with.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

The semester started, I doubt that explains it all, but maybe from profs? I’ve barely logged on since classes started up

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

I agree it helps understand more clearly what was actually done, but I feel that math is helpful to justify that what was done is correct, reasonable. We should of course also just publish the code which could sometimes substitute for the pseudocode in the paper if cleanly structured.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

LOL, I just had to double check, but yeah the papers I’ve written with you have way leas math and more pseudocode than my typical paper.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

I think you're right that it's rare. Pre 9/11 I think there was a lot more "America is the federal government and we are weary of them" type sentiment and that was still the view post 9/11 for some. I don't have as great a sense of things now having left 20 years ago, but those folks are MAGA.

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Tucker Hermans @thermans.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Having grown up in Texas I definitely knew people who put Texas before America, but they were essentially neo-Confederates.

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