James McDermott
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jmmcd.bsky.social
James McDermott
@jmmcd.bsky.social
210 followers 350 following 200 posts
Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Galway, Ireland. I'd rather write programs that write programs than write programs.
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Reposted by James McDermott
news.rte.ie
French police have searched the offices of Elon Musk's social ⁠media network X, and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in April related to a widening investigation into the platform, the Paris prosecutor's office said.
French cybercrime authorities search X offices
French police have searched the offices of Elon Musk's social ⁠media network X, and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in April related to a widening investigation into the pla...
www.rte.ie
February 3, 2026 at 10:38 AM
jmmcd.bsky.social
It's very interesting in the age of Claude Cowork to look back a year or two to see "sensible, anti-hype" articles which were wrong at the time but are now demonstrated to be wrong. A lesson for all people who think anti-hype is automatically sensible. Example: cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/how...
cacm.acm.org
January 15, 2026 at 12:31 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
abeba.blacksky.app
are you displeased with today’s AI safety evaluation landscape and curious about what greater conceptual clarity, methodological soundness, and rigour in AI evaluation could look like? if so, consider coming to Dublin to pursue a PhD with me

apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a...

pls repost
About the PhD: Audits and evaluation of AI systems — and the broader context that AI systems operate in — have become central to conceptualising, quantifying, measuring and understanding the operations, failures, limitations, underlying assumptions, and downstream societal implications of AI systems. Existing AI audit and evaluation efforts are fractured, done in a siloed and ad-hoc manner, and with little deliberation and reflection around conceptual rigour and methodological validity. This PhD is for a candidate that is passionate about exploring what a conceptually cogent, methodologically sound, and well-founded AI evaluation and safety research might look like. This requires grappling with questions such as: What does it mean to represent “ground truth” in proxies, synthetic data, or computational simulation? How do we reliably measure abstract and complex phenomena? What are the epistemological or methodological implications of quantification and measurement approaches we choose to employ? Particularly, what underlying presuppositions, values, or perspectives do they entail? How do we ensure the lived experiences of impacted communities play a critical role in the development and justification of measurement metrics and proxies? Through exploration of these questions, the candidate is expected to engage with core concepts in the philosophy of science, history of science, Black feminist epistemologies, and similar schools of thought to develop an in-depth understanding of existing practices with the aim of applying it to advance shared standards and best practice in AI evaluation. The candidate is expected to integrate empirical (for example, through analysis or evaluation of existing benchmarks) or practical (for example, by executing evaluation of AI systems) components into the overall work.
January 15, 2026 at 11:55 AM
Reposted by James McDermott
vaguery.bsky.social
Occasional reminder that I sell books and similar stuff on eBay. Link to my store is below.

Just reached 4100+ items for the first time. So there are categories and internal search in the storefront, which might help a bit.

www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_...
Items for sale by cornersbumpedbooksandantiques | eBay
Shop eBay for great deals from cornersbumpedbooksandantiques!
www.ebay.com
January 13, 2026 at 8:14 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
GECCO call for papers - abstract deadline Jan 21st!

gecco-2026.sigevo.org/Tracks

@skapedin.bsky.social @folivetti.bsky.social
January 12, 2026 at 12:02 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
The HUMIES are the annual competition at #GECCO for human-competitive results created by evolutionary computation methods.

***Ten thousand dollars in prizes for human-competitive results***

Submit by Friday May 29, 2026

See www.human-competitive.org for more
A cartoon of a strand of DNA, arm-wrestling a scientist
December 19, 2025 at 6:45 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
gavreilly.com
Wrote a Substack on this #aras25 poll:

Catherine Connolly is surviving her scrapes - yet Heather Humphreys is within the margin of error for winning

open.substack.com/pub/gavreill...
October 5, 2025 at 9:56 AM
Reposted by James McDermott
gpem.bsky.social
New special issue of GPEM on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design!

Edited by Penousal Machado and Juan Romero

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design - Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines
Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines -
link.springer.com
October 4, 2025 at 8:35 AM
Reposted by James McDermott
gpem.bsky.social
New book review, freely available in GPEM:

“Reversible world of cellular automata” by Kenichi Morita, reviewed by Tomas Rokicki

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Kenichi Morita: Reversible world of cellular automata - Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines
Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines -
link.springer.com
August 21, 2025 at 9:15 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
youtu.be/qhJrs85be64
Bad Dreams / I Wanna Be Abhorred
YouTube video by James McDermott
youtu.be
July 6, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
gpem.bsky.social
GPEM journal has a new special issue on "twenty-five years of grammatical evolution"!

Edited and with an introduction by Mahdinejad, Murphy and Ryan.

Special issue: link.springer.com/collections/...

Introduction: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Special Issue on Twenty-Five Years of Grammatical Evolution
By invitation only- GECCO conference ("GEWS2023 — Grammatical Evolution Workshop)
link.springer.com
July 2, 2025 at 10:54 AM
jmmcd.bsky.social
Our gas cooker is an annoying sigmoid. The gas tap is either on with minimal flow, or on with full-flow, with only a tiny range - about 5 degrees of the controller's turn - giving useful intermediate values.
March 19, 2025 at 3:22 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
Next up: Massachusetts
March 18, 2025 at 11:18 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
Plausible Knowledge Notation: "a notation and model for imperfect knowledge, such as everyday knowledge that is uncertain, context sensitive, imprecise, incomplete, inconsistent and likely to change"

w3c.github.io/cogai/pkn.html
Plausible Knowledge Notation (PKN)
w3c.github.io
March 18, 2025 at 11:02 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
robertbohan.bsky.social
Ireland! We need just 1,483 ppl who are Irish nationals to sign this EU petition to initiate a ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy* across the EU. The UN considers such ‘therapy’ to be mental torture. #SpeirGorm Please sign & share with all EU citizens that you know: eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#...
European Citizens' Initiative
Give your support !
eci.ec.europa.eu
February 10, 2025 at 3:00 PM
jmmcd.bsky.social
Students who can't really write in English but use LLMs to write their emails to me - should I treat them as having communicative intent? Do they intend to say the things they say, or do they intend some underlying meaning which I should charitably guess at? Or is it just empty syntax?
January 13, 2025 at 11:03 AM
Reposted by James McDermott
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Dear international colleagues, repression in the Netherlands is worsening. We can really use your support. Please join me in signing this open letter demanding accountability from our Executive Board for the wrongful arrest of six students and staff at my university docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Hold Radboud University accountable for the wrongful arrest of staff and students
To the Radboud College van Bestuur, On Monday December 16, six staff and students from the Radboud University were wrongfully accused of property damage and held overnight in jail on the grounds of s...
docs.google.com
December 18, 2024 at 9:14 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
tullamore-jew.bsky.social
I could write an essay on this image

Satire of antisemitic cartoons made to mock antisemitism repurposed by an Israeli to depict the Irish as the shadowy backers of their non-white enemies, thus bringing the caricature's functionality back to its original intent
Caricature of an Irish man done in the style of old antisemitic cartoons. He has bright ginger hair, is haunched over with clenched hands together. He is holding a Palestinian flag and wearing a Hamas headband.
December 16, 2024 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
ccottap.bsky.social
The GECCO 2025 conference will be held in Málaga, 14-18 July 2025. You won't miss it, will you?
gecco-2025.sigevo.org/HomePage
The logo of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2025, featuring a gecco in the colors of the flag of Málaga, a Picassian body, and a biznaga made of jasmine flowers.
December 17, 2024 at 12:13 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
milescranmer.bsky.social
Happy to announce differential operators for PySR + SymbolicRegression.jl!

This means you can literally just... evolve an integral:
December 16, 2024 at 2:06 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
talyarkoni.com
i asked Claude to write a Barthelme-esque short story with the aesthetic sensibilities of "The School", and it gave me this. i mean. i mean.
For six months we watched the pigeons building their civilization on top of the skyscrapers. First came the architecture: nests made not just of twigs and paper, but of lost earbuds, expired credit cards, and the tiny silver bells from cat collars. Then came their laws. "They have a supreme court," said Dr. Fernandez, who'd been studying them since the beginning. "Nine pigeons who sit on the ledge of the Chrysler Building and coo about justice." We didn't believe her at first, but then we didn't believe a lot of things that turned out to be true. The pigeons developed a currency based on blue bottle caps. They established schools where young pigeons learned to dodge taxi cabs and identify the most generous hot dog vendors. Some of us tried to join their society, climbing to rooftops with offerings of breadcrumbs and philosophy textbooks, but the pigeons regarded us with the kind of pity usually reserved for very small children or very old cats. "They're planning something," the conspiracy theorists said, but they always say that. Still, we noticed the pigeons holding what looked like town halls, thousands of them gathered on the roof of the public library, bobbing their heads in what might have been voting or might have been prayer. Our own civilization continued below theirs. We went to work, fell in love, lost keys, found keys, forgot anniversaries, remembered too late, all while the pigeons above us built something that looked suspiciously like a scaled-down replica of the United Nations building out of discarded takeout containers and stolen Christmas lights. Sometimes they dropped things on us: rejection letters for poetry we'd never submitted, tax returns from years that hadn't happened yet, photographs of ourselves sleeping that we couldn't explain. Dr. Fernandez said this was their way of communicating. We said Dr. Fernandez had been spending too much time on rooftops. The pigeons started their own newspapers, printed on leaves that fell upward instead… For six months we watched the pigeons building their civilization on top of the skyscrapers. First came the architecture: nests made not just of twigs and paper, but of lost earbuds, expired credit cards, and the tiny silver bells from cat collars. Then came their laws. "They have a supreme court," said Dr. Fernandez, who'd been studying them since the beginning. "Nine pigeons who sit on the ledge of the Chrysler Building and coo about justice." We didn't believe her at first, but then we didn't believe a lot of things that turned out to be true. The pigeons developed a currency based on blue bottle caps. They established schools where young pigeons learned to dodge taxi cabs and identify the most generous hot dog vendors. Some of us tried to join their society, climbing to rooftops with offerings of breadcrumbs and philosophy textbooks, but the pigeons regarded us with the kind of pity usually reserved for very small children or very old cats. "They're planning something," the conspiracy theorists said, but they always say that. Still, we noticed the pigeons holding what looked like town halls, thousands of them gathered on the roof of the public library, bobbing their heads in what might have been voting or might have been prayer. Our own civilization continued below theirs. We went to work, fell in love, lost keys, found keys, forgot anniversaries, remembered too late, all while the pigeons above us built something that looked suspiciously like a scaled-down replica of the United Nations building out of discarded takeout containers and stolen Christmas lights. Sometimes they dropped things on us: rejection letters for poetry we'd never submitted, tax returns from years that hadn't happened yet, photographs of ourselves sleeping that we couldn't explain. Dr. Fernandez said this was their way of communicating. We said Dr. Fernandez had been spending too much time on rooftops. The pigeons started their own newspapers, printed on leaves that fell upward instead…
December 16, 2024 at 4:48 AM
jmmcd.bsky.social
this ennui is not caused by shortcomings of people on Twitter, it's just people
themountaingoats.bsky.social the Mountain Goats @themountaingoats.bsky.social · Dec 15
can we not do the "die hard is a Christmas movie" thing here please. "remember thing that wasn't entertaining or edifying on twitter but just a non-argument about which even the most bored person alive could not credibly be thought to actually care" can we not. for my Christmas present. please
December 15, 2024 at 2:59 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
maxkw.bsky.social
Honored to receive the Best Paper Award at the #NeurIPS2024 Pluralistic Alignment Workshop

Check out our preprint "Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problems" at arxiv.org/pdf/2407.02273!
arxiv.org
December 14, 2024 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by James McDermott
tupped.bsky.social
I do not know why The Whole of the Moon has such power, but by god it has.

But plugging it into a singing schoolhallfull of Irish children *exactly as old as I was then* is a supercharger event.
birmingham81.bsky.social Birmingham 81 @birmingham81.bsky.social · Dec 14
Happy birthday to Mike Scott. Here's a joyous video of him singing his Waterboys classic The Whole of the Moon with a bunch of very excited schoolchildren in Clifden, County Galway, Ireland in 1987
youtu.be/pLAPOxpXGkU
The Waterboys - Whole of the Moon
YouTube video by The Waterboys
youtu.be
December 14, 2024 at 11:27 AM