82.5° N · above the Gakkel Ridge · under the aurora
Xiaoyu Li
What does it mean for AI to help a person?
I’m trying to understand myself and the world I find myself in. Mathematics, art, and philosophy are ways I explore it. PhD student · UNSW Computer Science and Engineering.
Dive ↓Scroll to go down. In the dark, your light follows the pointer; press P or tap PING for sonar.
0 – 200 m · Sunlit zone
The question
Where light still reaches.
Purpose
What should AI help people pursue?
How can people express, revise, and refuse goals? Learning a preference is not permission to act.
Agency
When does help empower rather than replace?
Does assistance increase a person’s ability to understand and act? People should be able to choose how much to delegate and take back control.
Evidence
How do we know the help was real?
What observations justify a claim of benefit? When do guarantees survive connections between models, tools, and people?
200 – 1,000 m · Twilight zone
Essays
The last of the light. Lanternfish make their own.
- The New Eight-Legged Essays and the Smiling, Proud Wanderer新八股与笑傲江湖
- Why Is the Golden Snitch Worth 150 Points?金色飞贼为什么值150分？
- Can't Learn It? Is It the Concept, or the Teaching?学不会，是概念太难，还是讲法错了？
- Werewolf with a Million Players: 674 Wolves Are Enough一百万人的狼人杀，674 只狼就够了
- Why Don’t We Design Slower Algorithms?
- You Didn't Learn Badly. You Were Taught Too Well.你不是没学好，是被教得太好了
- Why You Always Lose at Tetris俄罗斯方块，为什么注定会输
- Chess on an Infinite Board无穷棋盘上的国际象棋
- Above Infinity无穷之上
- A Question with No Answer一个答不出的问题
- Counting Past ω数到 ω 之后
- I See It, but I Don't Believe It我看见了，但我不信
- Infinities Come in Sizes无穷也分大小
- The Universe Did Not Include a Progress Bar
- Isn’t It Just Math?不就是数学嘛？十个箭头，和箭头背后的东西
- 722 Math Papers Land on GitHub Overnight722 篇数学论文，一夜上了 GitHub
- AI Can Prove Theorems Now. Why Are We Still Writing Math?AI 都会证明了，我们还写数学干嘛？
- Is English the Best Programming Language?英语是最好的编程语言吗？画家、钟表匠和巫师
- Why I Asked AI to Build a PEFT Atlas
- What Changes When AI Helps Us Write?
- Does Dota 2 Armor Really Diminish?DOTA2 的护甲，到底递不递减？
- In 48,000 Tang Poems, What Did Poets Write About Most?四万八千首唐诗里，诗人最常写的是什么？
- From the Four Color Theorem to Navier–Stokes从四色定理到 NS 方程：机器证明的五十年
- Reason and Feeling: Really Opposites?理性与感性，真的是对立面吗？
- Hofstadter’s ABCD: Between Creation and Discovery侯世达的 ABCD：在创造与发现之间
1,000 m and below · Midnight zone
Papers
No sunlight at all. Everything that shines here, shines on its own.
Technical report · 2026
A Categorical Atlas of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning: Cones, Orbits, and Gauges
Hundreds of fine-tuning methods, viewed through one mathematical framework.
arXiv:2606.14688 · 2026
Flood and Harvest: The Provable Necessity of Trivia for Generating Valuable Mathematics via the Lens of Language Generation in the Limit
Discovering unseen valuable mathematics requires infinitely many correct but worthless statements.
arXiv:2607.13003 · 2026
Watermark Forensics for Generative Models: An Information-Theoretic Perspective
We quantify the cost of user attribution, payload recovery, and watermark localization.
arXiv:2608.26187 · 2026
When the Canonical Completion Is Wrong: Formalizing and Measuring the Jump in LLMs
We formalize and test whether LLMs can leave a canonical default when constraints demand a different structure.
arXiv:2609.06862 · 2026
Feature Superposition in Neural Networks: From Theory to Practice
We review how neural networks encode more features than dimensions and how to recover them.
arXiv:2609.38446 · 2026
What Pretraining and Midtraining Make Learnable from Rewards?
Task-independent prediction can teach computations that rewards alone leave undetermined.
3,000 m · Down by the ridge
Works
Strange lights. Follow one.
- Interactive atlasA Categorical Atlas of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
- Film · 17 min · narratedA Categorical Atlas of PEFT: the film
- InstrumentThe golden flower
- Illustrated essay · Six drawingsThe Universe Did Not Include a Progress Bar
- Essays in Chinese and EnglishEssays from Chinese social media
- VideoVideo collectionscoming soon
- OpenNot yet imaginednot yet imagined
3,888 m · Aurora vent field
Say hello
Black smokers under the Arctic ice, first filmed up close in 2021. Warm water, and life where you would least expect it.
Other ways in: the arcade · the book · the game world · the theorem · the voyage · plain text
Depth zones after standard oceanographic usage. The Aurora vent field: Ramirez-Llodra et al., “Hot Vents Beneath an Icy Ocean,” Oceanography 36(1), 2023.