11/1/2025

 wow i noticed that people are actually clicking on this blog... so there have been 200+ combined views across all posts... um oops. happy new month! 

your regular dose of random articles

small samples can poison an llm of any size. we might be cooked! "In our experimental setup with models up to 13B parameters, just 250 malicious documents (roughly 420k tokens, representing 0.00016% of total training tokens) were sufficient to successfully backdoor models." still there's post-training and other defense mechanisms that makes this sort of poisoning impractical in real life.

using ai to simulate cells. customizable to patient and can reduce expense of experimentation. previous non-ai models were very limited and required high compute. an early cell foundational model was called geneformer that apparently helped identify a molecule that could cure a type of heart disease which was confirmed by irl experiments. another model TranscriptFormer was really good at classifying different types of cells which had used zero-shot learning. main limitations of virtual cells include lack of data (would be nice to have something like protein data bank that helped with alphafold) and how the most primitive models seem to be performing better than these specialized foundation models. there's currently a challenge going on to build the best virtual cell, so hopefully this will help researchers!! 

ai models and linguistics. they're really good at finding sentence structure (sentence diagramming!), recursion, and phonological processes. or maybe these linguistical aspects are not as unique to the human language as we would've thought.

how good are llms at text-based video games: cool benchmark that shows long-context reasoning and dynamic thinking. bigger models seem to perform better on such "exploratory" tasks. 

staying literate

sometimes

i wish

my l e t t e r s ,

my hodge podge of incomprehensible words

could be...

beautiful.

poetic.

unrigid. malleable. gliding across your mind.

a quick scan across

to make you

feel

something.

yeah idk how to do poetry. i also can't understand poetry that well (ap lit flashbacks). so i installed this app called poesie and it's super cool, motivating you to read a poem everyday and understand its analysis!  

i finished two books!! yippee. first was mother night by vonnegut. the top vonnegut book is still sirens of the titan in my opinion, but this one was pretty good. premise is this american who was sent to become a spy during ww2 and posed so well as a nazi that he became really disgraced, having to change his identity and whatnot. when there's no one who can believe you're in the right, and you start to believe you're in the wrong too; when strange actions are used to help you live, but then the world starts to bring up your trauma again, and when it's suppressed again immorally... "Goodbye, cruel world! Auf wiedersehen? but nah trust life shd get better in the end... hey i mean look at fox 8, his poor pal fox 7 died because these human scumbags think it's funny to kill animals who are starving because they decided to pursue that scary consumerism and turn the foxes' habitat into a mall... but he ended up meeting a new group of foxes! just forget his old fox friends, and everything was technically all right... yeah fox 8 by george saunders was a fun little book, pretty sad as well, but it was endearing how the fox-yooman language was kept up throughout. we always tell each other to stand in others' shoes to gain empathy, but where is our empathy for animals? 

scary things

my homeroom at school did our door decoration based on consumerism (with a simpson theme since our teacher looooves the simpsons), so while trick-or-treating (yes i did this since it's probably going to be my last time in a while) i just kept on thinking about how consumerist everything was lol. like i was purely going trick-or-treating for the fun of it, to catch on a trend--did i really need all that candy? no. a lot of it wasn't good candy either. same with the decor--it was really cool, but all that electricity jeez! (we went to steve job's house lol... waited two hours in line to get jumpscared by scare actors for a couple minutes and then receive giant sea salt caramel milk chocolate bars.) but that's always how the world has been, operating on our little strange desires to consume consume consume. so scary indeed.

another scary thing is college applications!! time to start regular decision essays!

music

im going to see artms on 11/28 🥺there were 3 new solos released for odd eye circle (kim lip: can you entertain?, jinsoul: ring of chaos, choerry: pressure) and they're all bopsss. i also delivered a presentation on the LOONAverse in my multiverse fiction class, and thanks to some reddit answers i'm also getting into billlie (since their lore is also tied to the idea of parallel universes :P). some other good music include the whole blue valentine album by nmixx (outro on the title track is so goood).