alt Hacker NewsLike 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}
}Replies
Sure, I agree with point (3).
But for (1, 2), just to point out, neither of your criteria would pass muster in the scientific communities who are ultimately responsible for vetting this work, right?
The ideal is: we don't accept papers at NeurIPS (or wherever) because of affiliation, and the badge of "quality" is bestowed by peer review, from other scientists.
> is of comparable quality (if not better than)
But the posts that you refer to in your own post point out several ways in which the quality is not good ...
But, in any case, I find it a bizarre choice to call it a paper when the authors themselves do not refer to it as such. We can agree to disagree, but just offering feedback.
> PDFs are a bad way of communicating information.
They have the strength of one PDF being frozen & (mostly) treated online as immutable - compared to a webpage which might change, or a blog post which might be edited. If a PDF needs to be replaced there'll be a notice.
And the single-file nature of PDFs makes them more likely to sit in an archive not managed by the author (vs a blog) so they tend to live as long as the archive rather than the author's blog.
For something that needs to Be referenced by others those are useful properties - I'd argue they outweigh how good PDF is at communicating information.