B Tenge

This is the 7th time in his career Shohei Ohtani has had a scoreless start and hit a home run in the same game, including postseason That breaks a tie at 6 with Bob Gibson for the most such games since at least 1900

Transmission of #Ebola is being debated yet again. In the catastrophic West African epidemic in 2014, health workers were forced to work in surgical masks and many got infected. Medical journals refused to publish us, instead, publishing articles saying "less PPE is better". A nursing journal published us, because #nurses are at the frontline 1/2 sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Literally no Ebola expert ever said “less PPE is better”. Workers were forced to wear surgical masks because they didn’t have access to respirators. They are forced to do so again because USAID cut funds, not because of this silly invented controversy

OMG IMPORTANT 🥺😭

Finally! I spent 10 years of my scientific research time on ME/CFS, these are such neglected diseases, in fact were not even considered “real disease” just a decade ago! We and others showed how massive biological disruption is in ME/CFS and similar chronic diseases.

What a wonderful bunch

Actually the idea of generating on the continuous embedding space is not new. Our ICML'26 paper CCDD has already done so: arxiv.org/abs/2510.03206 ELF can be viewed as a special case of CCDD where the discrete schedule is set to such that all tokens are decoded at the last step.

I'm a simple man, I see a Kaiming He paper, I click. ELF: Embedded Language Flows This is very interesting, getting continuous diffusion models working for text! "Unlike existing DLMs, ELF predominantly stays within the continuous embedding space until the final time step, where it maps to discrete tokens using a shared-weight network." @sedielem you might like this one!

I for one am surprised and shocked.

You do not hate the DOGE people enough. They were boys with toys breaking things they were too arrogant and lazy to understand.

I love this quote "Science is about understanding things that go beyond our intuition." It reminds me how probability theory was developed to counter perfectly intuitive gambler's fallacies.

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

A more recent version, showing the universality of the dynamics

20 years ago this week, as a new PhD, I presented a talk at Caltech on how the interplay of gravity between the sun, planets, and moons create low-energy pathways for spacecraft travel throughout the solar system.

I am one of those whose research points to the conclusion that the mind is computable. Sentience is an exquisite consequence of the laws of physics. I see no evidence that requires the supernatural; I find panpsychism to be a god-of-the-gaps fantasy; I see no requirement for any quantum pixie dust. What I do see is that evolution has led the cosmos through billions of years of experiments and mistakes and failures, eventually bringing forth artifacts with intelligence, with consciousness, with sentience, with life itself, by growing and combining very simple things then morphing them into extraordinarily complex ones. An underlying challenge in all this discourse, of course, is that these words represent ineffable concepts that human language strains at and fails to define crisply, and so we end up talking past one another, with emotion rather than rational and informed dialog. That notwithstanding, it is the ultimate hubris to conclude that only we humans can be conscious or sentient: a multitude of creatures living among us possess those properties to varying degrees (and we already treat multitudes of them with questionable ethical consideration). It is hubris to demand that the intelligence and consciousness and sentience we experience is its only form. It is hubris for we humans to assert that at this moment are at the cusp of building sentient artifacts. My understanding and experience suggests that while some individual elements are within our understanding, there are many others we do not know that we even know we need to know. Moreover, there exists a problem of systems architecture at extreme scale, and that we are a long way from understanding how to engineer that. But I predict that some day we shall. This is not that day, nor is it a day in the lives of any of this present generation. I expect that embodiment will be necessary (all contemporary approaches are deeply impoverished with regard to building things in and of this world, with sensing and acting now only a tiny fraction of what organics experience in all its noise and ambiguity). I posit that in this journey, we will co-evolve, compelled to reconsider what it means to be human. I know that we will find value from the things we create, but I also know that there exist fundamental and unavoidable risks that will harm us. I fear most the wealthy and privileged few who assert they alone know the way and should be trusted to bring humanity to this new digital promised land; I fear the organizations and nations who seek to use these things for greater power and control. I suspect that some strive to build artificial super intelligence (because they want to be gods) while others reject the possibility (because they cherish our uniqueness). And yet, I am hopeful, and confident in the resilience of the human sprit to endure, and in the end, be better for the journey. What an extraordinary time to be alive.

We tested one of the most common prompting techniques: giving the AI a persona to make it more accurate We found that telling the AI "you are a great physicist" doesn't make it significantly more accurate at answering physics questions, nor does "you are a lawyer" make it worse.

Viruses emerge in all sorts of unpredictable ways. Could be rodents on the ship or human to human transmission enabled by cruise ship environment. Effective responses require functioning health systems that are prepared for anything. We’ve never been less prepared globally.

Happy Star Wars day! What does Star Wars mean to you?

May the 4th be with you 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿✨

Happy #StarWarsDay #MayThe4thBeWithYou