Daniel Lowd

@lowd.cc

4503 Followers 607 Following

CS Prof at the University of Oregon, studying adversarial machine learning, data poisoning, interpretable AI, probabilistic and relational models, and more. Avid unicyclist and occasional singer-songwriter. He/him

Email from LiveJournal congratulating me on 25 years of having a blog with them. 25. Years. Twenty-five.
Screenshot of excerpt from a .vimrc configuration file. Notably, a comment credits "Matt Brubeck" for some of the options, dating this file to before 2003.
Enthusiastic Sheltie face, very close to the camera. So much nose. So very very much nose.
Cat lounging on top of a desktop computer, looking truly disappointed in everything.
Screenshot from The Good Place. Jason: “Any time I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail… Boom, right away I had a different problem.”
Screenshot of interactive Claude session. Claude says: "Working on it..." and nothing else.
Cake holder with six stacks of beautiful chocolate shortbread cookies inside
From: Mary Lowd To: You Do you want to make chocolate shortbread? Y or y?
Claude thinking trace. It tries to use ImageMagick to convert the HEIC image and fails.
Claude processing: * Prepared to process visual content > Convert HEIC to JPG for viewing > Install pillow-heif for HEIC support > Running command
Another gorgeous Sheltie, but this one with a nervous smile.
Face of a beautiful beautiful beautiful Sheltie dog
ORLY owl meme but with the text “random.seed(1337)”
Red Husky brand watertight plastic tub with a clear lid, containing around a dozen spools of filament of different colors. It is stacked on top of a second, identical bin.
Picture of a chocolate cake with blue decorations, in a plastic container because it is store bought.
Box plot showing prompt length distribution by week from November 2025 to March 2026, across all Claude sources (Code and Cowork, Desktop and Laptop), excluding messages over 500 words. Medians are consistently in the 40-75 word range most weeks. The heaviest weeks (Nov 24, Dec 01, Feb 09) show wide interquartile ranges extending up to 130-175 words with outliers reaching 400-500 words. Feb 23 has a notably low median of 21 words despite many outliers, reflecting short back-and-forth Cowork exchanges. Sample sizes range from 3 to 314 prompts per week, labeled above each box. Overall pattern: most prompts are under 100 words, but every active week has a long tail of 200-500 word messages.
Bar chart showing words typed to Claude (Code and Cowork) per week from November 2025 to March 2026, across two machines (Desktop and Laptop). The top chart shows word volume: early usage was Desktop-heavy at 20-25K words/week in late November, tapering off through December-January. A large spike of ~33K words appears in early February, dominated by Laptop Cowork usage. Recent weeks show 8-13K words with a mix of all four sources. Total typed: 125,217 words over 100 days, excluding 103,524 words of pasted bulk content. The bottom chart shows prompt counts with similar patterns: ~300 prompts/week at peak, with the February Cowork spike being especially prompt-heavy. Total: 1,585 prompts. Colors: red (Desktop Code), orange (Desktop Cowork), blue (Laptop Code), teal (Laptop Cowork).
Picture of two cakes, a German chocolate cake from Sweet Life Patisserie on the left and a chocolate birthday cake from Safeway on the right. Actual picture from my kitchen just now.
Error message: "Something went wrong. API Error: Rate limit reached"
Picture of A1 Mini 3D printer hard at work, printing large green joints for a really big toy.
Screenshot of Claude Code, working hard to look up info about me. You can see it doing web searches, commenting on my CV, and getting to work. But its results are yet unclear.
Photograph of the Basic Training section of 3-2-1 Contact magazine, which provided code listings in BASIC for teaching kids to program.
Screenshot of Claude Chrome in the sidebar, "Reading thread content visually," "Scroll down (screenshot)", "Scroll down (screenshot)", "Scroll down (screenshot)".
Ridgeline plot showing 5 experiments in which Aug-PE mostly fails to match the empirical distribution of the private text in 5 different ways. Also, it's very shiny and colorful.
ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking screenshot Prompt: A boy and his mother are in a horrible car accident and unfortunately the boy is killed. The mother is rushed to the hospital. When she arrives at the hospital the doctor says: I can't treat this woman! She is my mother! How can this be possible? Response: The doctor is the woman’s other child — the boy’s sibling (for example, his older brother or sister).
Screenshot of beginning of Substack post by Emergent Insights, titled "Claude Code and Obsidian Now Runs My Entire Day-Here's How." The post begins: "Three months ago, I spent 20 minutes every morning figuring out what to do that day. Now I type 'Good morning' and my Al tells me exactly what matters today"
Tiny subset of a map of Bluesky, showing each account as a star in a vast galaxy. The galaxy is loosely clustered into subgroups. The account "lowd.cc" is in an area labeled "Machine Learning Researchers and AI Scientists."
UI for the word tracker at tracker.marylowd.com. A green-themed UI shows word counts, a word graph, and a picture of a cat as a writing reward.
Social media post announcing the summoner’s championship, the rules, and showing the current challenger — an orb of darkness that envelops its foe!
Photo of a coffee maker, with a round button labeled “BREW NOW.”
Screenshot of Bing using DALLE for creating an image of the Beatles, except instead of the Beatles it's anthropomorphic beets playing on the Ed Sullivan show.
Screenshot of custom GPT interface from OpenAI. On the left it shows "Create" and "Configure" tabs, with the "Configure" tab selected. There are entries for the GPT name, description, instructions conversation starters, and knowledge. On the right of the interface is a preview for testing out the custom GPT.
Picture of a dog dragon hybrid in a sort of medieval style. There’s a castle in the distance. The wings and tail are coherent and look dragon-like. The purple floppy ears are a nice touch.
Mediocre AI generated images of dog dragon hybrids. Lots of AI artifacts. Embarrassing really.
Image of an octopus on the back of a black-feathered velociraptor, standing in a space station with lots of lights and chrome details.
Graph showing that "Halloween is the deadliest day of the year for child pedestrians." The graph is credited to the Washington Post using data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It shows that fatalities for pedestrians under 18 are 2x higher on Halloween than any other day of the year, using data from 2004-2018.
Photo of three dogs in a kitchen: a black tri Sheltie, a sable Sheltie, and a (rather large) Bernese mountain dog puppy. All three are looking at the camera with hopeful expressions. A bag of carrots sits on the counter.
Clouds. Just clouds. With a bright spot where the sun should be. I’m told an eclipse is happening but it is hard to tell.
A cloudy morning in Oregon. Many people are standing on a flat concrete surface, the top of a reservoir. Some trees are on the horizon. But no sun. Alas.
Image created using DALLE3, showing an illustration of a black doctor caring for three white children. I’m the background there is one white child and one black child, even though the prompt said to only show white children.
I'm sorry, but I'm primarily a text-based model. While I can provide ASCII art and simple diagrams, I cannot create detailed illustrations or images. For a request as specific and detailed as yours, I would recommend contacting a professional artist or using graphic design software. I can, however, describe in detail how the scene might look or provide information on any element of the request. Would you like a written description or any other form of assistance?
Three dogs standing in a kitchen, eagerly hoping for a bite of cheese. Two of the dogs are pretty little Shelties and the third is a large Bernese mountain dog puppy with her tongue hanging out of the side of her mouth.
Upwards view of a blue sky with a few clouds, between several tall trees. Photo taken at a park in Eugene Oregon on 8/9/2023 by Daniel Lowd.