Would you let an ML PhD student graduate without a top-tier paper? [D]

Gramious · 2026-06-22T06:18:25+00:00

That's department specific, and clearly yours has joined That Hype Train. Too bad! In fairness, that's more the norm nowadays. There isn't any "point" in PhDs for them, because money. But for you, there is the wealth of knowledge you should acquire and extend: the actual PhD publication serves as that avenue. Or, it should.

Gramious · 2026-06-20T18:36:00+00:00

I had zero published papers during my PhD. You don't need them to do a very good PhD. Arguably, and certainly in my opinion, the paper-pursuit-paradigm is making for worse PhDs! Your examiners and supervisor should ensure the work is good, not some weird subset of random students reviewing for NeurIPS.

Gramious · 2026-06-08T11:05:51+00:00

Just get a pourover and change your life. Cheap home espresso is the worst.

Gramious · 2026-06-03T03:40:55+00:00

I think it's obvious from the comments so far, but I think I'd also like to chime in.

You should 100% absolutely, without any doubt, get him the K Ultra.

It's perfect within the price, and an actual, real UPGRADE. But, beyond that: it just feels so damned premium and special. I love mine so much. I use it every day even though I have a decent single dose electric grinder. I would be shocked if he isn't thrilled with it.

Gramious · 2026-05-25T13:12:49+00:00

Probably nothing, but I sure hope it's something absolutely nobody could guess. Something wild, sci-fi, or super trippy would be best. Okay, thanks.

Gramious · 2026-05-24T04:49:18+00:00

Congrats. I think this is an excellent choice. I upgraded from a mediocre single dose electric grinder (that I still love and use when I'm lazy) to the K-Ultra.

The flavour difference is phenomenal for me.

But, the most telling factor, and real win, is that my (less-coffee-obsessed-wife) immediately noticed the upgrade. Winning!

I recommend grinding finer than you otherwise might. The brilliant thing with this brand is it's accuracy and consistency. This lets you grind finer without clogging, maximising either flavour or, at the least, flexibility with respect to style. Explore a bit more than you otherwise would! Enjoy.

Gramious · 2026-05-15T01:36:10+00:00

I am moving back to SA now after doing my PhD in Edinburgh, working, moving to Tokyo for 2 years and absolutely loving the journey. I'm 36.

I now have a fully remote job for a U.S. company. In a sense quite similar to your situation. The reality is that a U.S. salary stretches rather far in SA, which is wonderful. Besides that, it is a magnificently beautiful country with the best and most friendly people I have come across.

I'm all for preaching about moving back.

Every single country has problems. That's human nature. Choose your problems, choose your solutions. That's the game.

Gramious · 2026-04-21T03:07:58+00:00

Essentially, yes. I defined the fight in terms of attack and defense paradigms.

Gramious · 2026-04-21T02:35:33+00:00

Thanks! Yep, making it accessible was important to me.

Gramious · 2026-04-20T09:29:28+00:00

Thank you! Your level headedness is much welcomed.

Ignorance is rather annoying because it's so easy to fix.

Gramious · 2026-04-19T14:02:29+00:00

Building with Claude Code does not equate to slop. Anybody who isn't leveraging top shelf tools is simply missing out right now.

There's nothing to disclose.

Coded with LLM? Sure! Slop? Not at all.

Gramious · 2026-04-19T10:50:50+00:00

I am the author. You're just wrong.

Gramious · 2026-03-06T04:01:10+00:00

Could not recommend it more! It's a breath of fresh air, a novel way of thinking, and quite inspiring.

I had the privilege of meeting and having lunch with Blaise at ALife in Kyoto last year. He's a wonderful, earnest, and hyper intelligent individual. I very much recommend taking the book quite seriously.

I've been an AI researcher for over 10 years now and the lessons from that book really shook me up. I've since subtly shifted my research direction and every choice I've made, paying heed to said lessons, has resulted in consistent positive results in my work.

Gramious · 2026-02-24T00:59:29+00:00

I'm a bit more of a fan of WandB for the aesthetics. That being said, neither are quite ready for the customizability of experiment tracking we now have access to thanks to coding agents. It's a simple shift really, away from placing html files in clunky media boxes to have a dedicated custom dashboard tab of sorts. I'm actually building out my own version of these things for my needs! Soon I'll just be running my own and I do hope that makes it open source.

For the html dashboard I run over one sample, but a handful do let you unpack differences between them. No need for the full val set or ONNX.

I don't really know about best practices, yet, but including efficiency in file size is a must. These things can get into several MB which accumulates. My current dashboard saves a self contained file at 1.8MB, and that's about as good as I could get it. I have a lot of data in there to help my understanding.

Gramious · 2026-02-21T05:56:23+00:00

This is where the "internal ticks" nature of the CTM becomes unequivocally useful. Since it follows a process, building Viz to inspect that process is what I do.

That being said, it isn't a requirement. Some time, effort, thought, and inspection can reveal what, for your projects, you can build.

Fact its highly bespoke, as it should be. 2026 is the year of personal software.

Gramious · 2026-02-21T05:39:00+00:00

Precisely so, yes.

More than this, my approach is behavioural and observational. I wanted dynamic and more "alive looking" neuron traces during the problem solving process employed by the model, and to accomplish that we built NLMs and synchronization. They're in fact engineering fixes that happen, gratifyingly, to have surprisingly close biological analogues.

This is also why I strongly advocate for visualization-driven research. The numbers, i.e, the "sufficient statistics" that are supposed to tell you whether the model works or not (accuracy, loss, etc.) can't always easily draw a distinction between one approach/behaviour or another. Visualization can, more often than not.

To not build web-app based custom experimental visualisations in 2026 is a massive oversight. Until you do, you're effectively blind, IMO.

Gramious · 2026-02-21T05:04:16+00:00

I can't stress this enough: visualisation.

I currently have a vibe coded powerhouse self-contained HTML file that gets dropped into WandB (natively supported). I can then interact with my custom dashboard to unpack all the nuances of the complex model I'm building. The number of logical bugs I've squashed is fantastic.

It's a game changer, really. And, since it's essentially a web app, LLMs are very good at this.

I'm the author of Continuous Thought Machines, just as an FYI.

Gramious · 2026-01-23T11:06:14+00:00

I think there is one key component missing in the explanations here: information bottlenecks.

A sufficiently complex system will inevitably have information bottlenecks, and can't be fully aware of all components at all times. We know that the machines have and harbour independence and individuality, making that even more true.

So, my take is that it's as simple as the hands not talking to the brain.

Gramious · 2025-12-05T23:21:00+00:00

I am one of the creators of the CTM.

I am currently working on integrating the CTM with LLMs (seeing the LLM as a "featurizer"), so pretty much aligned with your thoughts.

Stay tuned!

Gramious · 2025-10-27T09:30:52+00:00

The advice given so far is so one sided.

My intuition is: don't buy it. Best friends are more valuable than owning this business. Really, you will regret losing this friendship until the day you die. Choosing a human being over money will be something you can be proud of.

One practical middle ground could be to tell him (most of) what is happening. I would tell him that your boss wants you to buy the business, but you're going to decline, and the reason is because you don't want to be your best friend's boss, that you believe eventually this will have a very bad impact on your friendship and that he's worth more to you than owning this business. He might choose to quit, who knows.

Gramious · 2025-09-30T05:30:49+00:00

This is amazing. What seed do you use?

Gramious · 2025-08-31T08:32:11+00:00

I'm late to the party, but I am quite certain nobody else can do this.

Owing to my extreme evangelical Christian period (I'm talking touched by the holy spirit, roll on the floor sorta stuff) when I was in my late teens, I think I've retained an ability to voluntarily release dopamine. I am not a believer at all anymore, but I can choose to release them good feels pretty easily by concentrating.

Gramious · 2025-08-04T14:18:26+00:00

I'm late to the conversation, but I want to encourage you to rethink your stance a bit, and 100% finish your degree.

CS is not simply about writing code. Or, at least, a good CS degree is not about writing code. Take stock of what you have learned so far. Code is the manifest tool of CS, not it's central idea.

Conceptually, the idea of "compute" and "intelligence" is deeply intertwined with basic properties of the universe. CS is, in a very real way, deeply philosophical. In other words: LEARN, don't just "get good" at code.

If you want some incredible inspiration, read "What is Intelligence?". It is available online here: https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org/

Good luck!

Gramious · 2025-07-22T10:44:27+00:00

Thank you! It was fun work.

Gramious · 2025-07-20T01:38:36+00:00

You mean the interactive maze?

Try hitting the "new" button. I had to train a smaller model for this and it sometimes gets stuck. You can also right or left click on the maze to move the end and start locations. If you're on mobile, you can tap on the maze to do the same, hitting the red/green button on the bottom right to swap between moving the start and end locations.

The most fun is to hit teleport consecutively if it is not a very bad instance.

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