How a 180-year-old diagnosis explains what AI is doing to work, meaning, and identity in 2026 Part 5 of a six-part series using science fiction as a lens for understanding AI, work, and power in 2026. Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread. Studs Terkel, Working, 1974 Studs Terkel (an American writer and historian among other things) spent three years interviewing Americans about their jobs. What he found was a story about […]

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arXiv:2601.19942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the emergence of multi-step reasoning in deep Transformer language models through a geometric and statistical-physics lens. Treating the hidden-state trajectory as a flow on an implicit Riemannian manifold, we analyze the layerwise covariance spectrum of activations, where $C^{(ell)}=mathbb{E}[h^{(ell)}h^{(ell)top}]$, and track deviations from a random-matrix bulk. Across model scales (1.5B–30B), we observe a sharp reduction in effective dimensionality consistent with a phase transition: an order parameter based on sparsity/localization, $Omega(h)=1-|h|_1/(sqrt{d}|h|_2)$, exhibits a […]

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Many large language model applications require conditioning on long contexts. Transformers typically support this by storing a large per-layer KV-cache of past activations, which incurs substantial memory overhead. A desirable alternative is ompressive memory: read a context once, store it in a compact state, and answer many queries from that state. We study this in a context removal setting, where the model must generate an answer without access to the original context at inference time. We introduce GradMem, […]

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Hi all, I’m training a quadruped robot (Isaac Gym / legged_gym style) and trying to achieve a policy that switches between: – command = 0 → stable quadruped standing – command = 1 → stable bipedal standing (hind legs only) However, I’m facing several issues that seem related to reward scaling and interference between reward terms. Current reward components: – zero linear/angular velocity tracking – projected gravity alignment – quadruped base height reward – bipedal base height reward […]

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arXiv:2603.26751v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remote sensing scene classification has experienced a paradigmatic transformation from traditional handcrafted feature methods to sophisticated artificial intelligence systems that now form the backbone of modern Earth observation applications. This comprehensive survey examines the complete methodological evolution, systematically tracing development from classical texture descriptors and machine learning classifiers through the deep learning revolution to current state-of-the-art foundation models and generative AI approaches. We chronicle the pivotal shift from manual feature engineering to automated […]

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Leveraging representation encoders for generative modeling offers a path for efficient, high-fidelity synthesis. However, standard diffusion transformers fail to converge on these representations directly. While recent work attributes this to a capacity bottleneck proposing computationally expensive width scaling of diffusion transformers we demonstrate that the failure is fundamentally geometric. We identify Geometric Interference as the root cause: standard Euclidean flow matching forces probability paths through the low-density interior of the hyperspherical feature space of representation encoders, rather than […]

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We love Haskell, but we also love learning new languages. In this article, we want to show how to use your Haskell knowledge to write Rust code. We’ll go through the concepts familiar to most Haskell developers, present a few gotchas, and cover these questions: To what extent is FP possible in Rust? (On the scale from Java streams to doing Lambda Calculus on paper.) Which Haskell concepts map well to Rust, and which don’t? Are there monads […]

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Here’s a mildly dystopian prompt I’ve been experimenting with recently: “Profile this user”, accompanied by a copy of their last 1,000 comments on Hacker News. Obtaining those comments is easy. The Algolia Hacker News API supports listing comments sorted by date that have a specific tag, and the author of a comment is tagged there as author_username. Here’s a JSON feed of my (simonw) most recent comments, for example: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,author_simonw&hitsPerPage=1000 The Algolia API is served with open CORS […]

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arXiv:2603.06722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models often take into consideration the alignment between a protein sequence and its textual description. However, they do not take structural information into consideration. Traditional methods treat sequence and structure separately, limiting the ability to exploit the alignment between the structure and protein sequence embeddings. In this paper, we introduce a sequence structure contrastive alignment framework, which learns a shared embedding space where proteins are represented consistently across modalities. By training […]

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arXiv:2601.08881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unified image generation and editing models suffer from severe task interference in dense diffusion transformers architectures, where a shared parameter space must compromise between conflicting objectives (e.g., local editing v.s. subject-driven generation). While the sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm is a promising solution, its gating networks remain task-agnostic, operating based on local features, unaware of global task intent. This task-agnostic nature prevents meaningful specialization and fails to resolve the underlying task interference. In this […]

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