alt Hacker NewsWhy do people keep calling this a paper?
It's a blog post which received feedback from collaborators.
It hasn't gone through the academic paper lifecycle ... the authors themselves refer to it as a post and as preliminary.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, but can we be precise when talking about work of this form? It started with referring to arXiv pre-prints as papers, and now we're at blog posts with an academic template as papers.
A paper is a fucking paper: something which has been vetted by the scientific community, with at least some form (often, a few rounds) of anonymous review from people outside your circle of collaborators
This is not there yet, and clearly so due to the various feedback from people (including the two pushback posts on HN) critiquing the lack of discussion about the existence of these techniques in mech interp, etc?
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Like you said, in the AI space a pre-print on arXiv is massively more likely than anything that's been through peer-review.
I called it a paper here because it's by people with an academic affiliation and is of comparable quality (if not better than) many of the other "papers" we see.
I also like it when a paper isn't a PDF. PDFs are a bad way of communicating information.
(I will note that the authors themselves didn't call it a paper, their own BibTeX reference calls it a "blog post":)
@misc{takehi2026weightspace,
title = {{Sparks of Weight-Space Programming: LLMs can natively read \& write neural network weights}},
author = {Takehi, Rikiya and Teoh, Jayden and Zhang, Alex and Khattab, Omar},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
howpublished = {\url{https://rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-space-programming/}},
note = {Blog post}
}It's not considered a paper until it's vetted by others?
Because nobody actually reviews papers anyway so it is irrelevant. That might have happened when you only had 12 papers a year and they were things like “gravity exists”, but when you get a million papers a day on topics like “the ethnocentric illusion of west-canadian yarn spinning”, nobody has time for that.