Links from September 2025: subliminal LLM learning; cancer "go or grow"; animal communications

Utopia, with solar panels
The New World
"...solarpunks envisage a photon-powered society emerging, in which not only our energy production but also the rhythms of our lives follow the sun and its light." The book Designing Hope is from the same author. (The theme reminds me of the novel News From Gardenia.)

Compression causes cancer cells to start spreading [...in Zebrafish]
Nature
Another reminder that biology will sense whatever it needs to from the world. Here are cancer cells switching from "grow" mode to "go" mode when they sense compression. New word unlocked: mechanobiological.

It's Owl in the Numbers: Token Entanglement in Subliminal Learning
Via the Royal Statistical Society newsletter
"For instance, when a [large language] model that 'likes owls' generates sequences of numbers, a model fine-tuned on these sequences also develops a preference for owls". What the hell? WHAT THE HELL?!

Projections at the Frontier: Decoding Bio Snapshot 2025
Decoding Bio
Part review of recent biotech advances, and part speculation ("emerging themes"). It's a 97 page PDF, but the link above is the summary.

AI is helping to decode animals’ speech. Will it also let us talk with them?
Nature
What's interesting are the examples of the skills of animals. For example, bird call sequences can have their own meaning, and swapping the order can produce quite different behaviour. I especially liked this: "By training crows [...] to peck at open and closed brackets in the appropriate sequence on a touch screen [scientists] found evidence that the animals are mentally capable of recursion".

Rust LLM from Scratch
"A complete Large Language Model implementation in pure Rust with no external ML frameworks."

Britain’s real immigration scandal is not the one you think
The New World

“There are two reasons that small boats started arriving en masse in 2020. The first is a renewal of conflicts that displaced millions of people, often leaving them looking for sanctuary in Europe. The second is Brexit – once the UK’s exit deal was finalised, it was no longer party to the Dublin procedure, which allowed for the extradited return of asylum seekers to the first EU nation in which they entered.” The use of the Dublin procedure is a bit more complicated than the article makes out.

The Davis Downside Dossier
Yourshire Bylines via Mike Galsworthy
Press-reported downsides of Brexit. They gathered 2,000 before they gave up capturing them all.