Alexandra Shipilova

i am a strange loop

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

Hi San Francisco neighbors ! Do you or someone you know have dementia, Parkinson's, a stroke, or something that impacted your speech/language?

I'm a medical speech pathologist and I would love to start regular support groups for you and your loved ones in SF. Groups would be for adults and focus support on dysarthria, aphasia, and cognition.

Before booking the space, I'd love to hear:

1) For what speech/language condition are you and/or your loved ones in need of?

2) What time of day and days of the week work best for you?

3) If there are any barriers to you getting support, what are they?

Send me a message and we can bring support to the SF community together!

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

I’m running the Golden Gate Headlands Marathon on April 4, 2026, for something close to my heart: voice.

As a speech-language pathologist, I work with people whose ability to communicate, to connect, is impaired. This year I worked with patients with ALS (pALS) and spent time learning about this disease. I want to bring awareness and relief to those pALS fighting every day. To me this is more than a race, it’s a vow to keep fighting for communication, autonomy, and dignity.

ALS robs the body. Team Gleason is an organization that helps give something back through speech devices, mobility tech, and the tools people need to live meaningfully. I’ve named this fundraiser vowels4pALS because vowels are the breath of language, and this run is a breath for those who are fighting.

Help me raise $2,000 to bring tech, care, and connection to pALS. Every mile I run, I run for someone who deserves a voice. Thank you for joining me!

https://t.co/s6Ls9oapBp

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

@hipearlrose Making me homesick. Just wishing for a blue line delay and a red line single tracking 💔

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

@flowersslop Several years ago I named it Gustavo

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

-Apply sunscreen to each other,
-pick out fun sunglasses and UV protective clothing for the other to wear,
-partner yoga,
-diaphragmatic breathing session,
-walk the hills of SF and take each others’ pulse,
-get a tooth cleaning together and schedule the next in the appropriate six months so she knows you’re committed to your oral hygiene and to her

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

@paulg Huge issue in certain healthcare systems

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

@rtwlz You’re my hero.

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

@fabianstelzer For a second, I thought beloved teuthologist Dr. Sarah McAnulty had gone rogue!

But seriously, follow her, text her for squid facts, she’s incredible. 🦑🦑🦑

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

Neuroscience explainer for Transience

In the neuroscience of memory, persistence and transience are complementary processes that shape how we store, use, and release information. Persistence allows us to retain memories over time by strengthening synaptic connections and reactivating neural patterns tied to past experiences. Mechanisms like long-term potentiation (LTP), where repeated activation reinforces synapses, much like walking a forest trail over and over, help stabilize memories, making them easier to recall.

Transience, in contrast, enables forgetting. It weakens or eliminates synaptic connections that are no longer relevant, preventing our minds from becoming cluttered. Processes like synaptic depotentiation and structural remodeling prune unused connections, while neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, reshapes memory networks and gently dissolves old traces as new ones form.

This dynamic balance is also evident in challenges with artificial neural networks. When fine-tuned on a small dataset, a model may overfit, locking too tightly onto specific patterns and losing its ability to generalize, like a mind trapped in rigid memory loops. When learning new information without safeguards, models risk catastrophic forgetting: old knowledge abruptly overwritten by new.

In both brains and machines, memory requires a careful equilibrium. Too much persistence, and the system becomes inflexible, unable to adapt. Too much transience, and the past vanishes too easily, leaving nothing to build on. Together, persistence and transience, biological or computational, make memory a dynamic process of holding on and letting go, so learning remains both stable and adaptive.

Fun readings:
Parisi German I. Continual lifelong learning with neural networks: A review. Neural network https://t.co/DazfUiA0U2

Robins Anthony. Catastrophic forgetting, rehearsal and pseudorehearsal https://t.co/uGbOJJoxfD

@_nightsweekends @_buildspace

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

Story #2 is out!
Cuddle up with a furry friend for this 6 min read. Full science inspiration to come.

TRANSIENCE

Part 1: Goodbye

It was August. Maybe the air was hot, it probably was, probably very humid too, given that I was outside in Virginia. There was a breeze, I remember the moving air stung my eyes, but maybe that was just a fan. The sky was blue and cloudless, which felt wrong. The birds were singing and that felt wrong, too. It all felt wrong. I could not see anything on account of my stinging eyes, but I could feel the breeze ruffling the soft fur of the little dog in my arms. I knew she should have been groomed, but I loved the way the white floof around her neck fluffed out like an Edwardian collar, the way her auburn fur curled when it grew out so we looked alike. None of that mattered now, not really. Not with her dying and all. There was a Ukrainian lullaby stuck in my head, playing over and over as this little dog, my best friend for 13 years, slowly fell asleep in the crook of my elbow. As my finger stroked the groove between her eyes, my thumb ran along her little cheeks, she became unbearably heavy.

But I could not say goodbye.

Part 2: Persistence

Tallulah and I were walking along the beach, the cool waves lapping at our feet as she pranced around my ankles, tugging at her leash and sniffing every shell with the utmost curiosity. I looked back and saw our footprints zigzagging behind us for miles like a pair of tipsy butterflies, and smiled. Another, larger wave hit and cleansed the shore, but the footprints remained. Tallulah, tail wagging, stuck her nose in a groove of sand and jumped back in surprise when a little crab scuttled out. She shook saltwater from her coat, and tugged onward, tongue out. The sun set and the sky bathed itself in purples and pinks and dark blues until the stars speckled the horizon. Eventually, I laid on my back, Tallulah curled under my armpit, her god awful breath panting in my face, and I closed my eyes.

Opening them, I was back in my simulation pod with a lump in my throat. I removed my headset and set it back into the charging port. Taking a deep breath, I set the controls and calibrated my bodily systems back to physical reality. Glancing at the clock, I picked up the pace. I’d always been prone to isolating myself in my pod, so no one suspected anything out of the ordinary anyhow. But, instead of building new simulations and testing hypotheses as I normally did, I was stuck Perseverating - revisiting the same simulation of Tallulah. I knew I shouldn’t Perseverate so much (to be honest, I was going in at least three times a day), but at least my trips to the simulated beach had gotten shorter over the past 16 months since Tallulah’s death. People knew I missed her; she was such an integral part of my life, but I kept my deep hurt from her departure to myself the best I could. And, of course, I Perseverated as often as I could get away with.

But lately, I’ve started to notice some changes.
After Tallulah’s passing, visiting the beach was the closest thing I had close to joy. It wasn’t quite reality, but at least it eased that oppressive lump in my throat for a while. During the first year, I couldn’t get through a day without visiting the beach twice—once as soon as I woke up and again before sleep. Twice a day became three times, then four. Now, I’ve lost count. I can’t help myself.

It’s been 27 months now. Physical reality has become unbearable; there’s a crushing weight on my chest, my eyes constantly burn, and every sensory input seems to route directly to deep, hidden pain. Without Tallulah’s comforting presence—her weight against my chest, the warmth of her nestled in the bend of my knees—I can’t sleep. Any would-be moments of happiness only magnify the void she left behind, amplifying my pain tenfold.

​​Worst of all, my simulations at work have started to glitch. Tallulah’s image flickers in and out of the frames, disrupting every scenario and causing them to loop endlessly. One day, while simulating mucosal skin textures to study cell regeneration, the model generated something bizarre: human skin began to sprout auburn tufts of fur that rustled in an imaginary breeze. I shrieked as the fur quickly dried out, and the skin beneath shriveled, leading to limbs snapping off and crumbling to the ground. It was as if the model had latched onto Tallulah’s image, incapable of generating a coherent simulation without her presence.

I desperately grabbed the fur, hoping to feel it come back to life in my hands. But just as I buried my face in it, it rotted and crumbled into ash. I tried to force exit the simulation, but the model kept resampling mountains of ash and fur, piling them around me until I was buried alive. I gasped for breath, suffocating, until the battery of my pod finally died, forcing a restart.
The next day, I tried to refocus, to clear my mind and create something new. But the anti-gravity loop slides I was designing for cosmic marbles transformed into the smooth groove between Tallulah’s eyes. I watched in horror as her face bloated until it consumed the entire landscape. The marbles whizzed down the groove, faster and faster, spiraling into a tunnel until Tallulah’s face distorted into a grotesque blur stretched across the vortex sky. I tore off my headset, collapsing in the corner, heaving until the room finally stopped spinning.

My mind was trapped in an endless loop, replaying memories of Tallulah over and over. The video sim model generating my Perseverations had overfit to specific memories, its probability function collapsing around them, leaving me incapable of creating anything new. It regurgitated the same sequences endlessly, recycling old photos and videos, caught in a state of computational deadlock. I felt sick. But I couldn’t leave—not like this, not with my most cherished memories warping into nightmares.

I strapped back into my pod, determined to Perseverate completely. As unstable as the models were, I had to fix this once and for all to bring her back. I landed on the beach, but the stench of rotting teeth and feces assaulted my senses. Tallulah appeared, not running as she usually did, but hobbling and weak, just as she had been on that final day when I came home to be with her as she passed. My eyes burned with pain. A storm broke out above.

Please, not this day. Not this memory.

But this memory, so powerful, so charged, overpowered all others. The simulation began to stabilize around this singular event. The swirling sand froze midair, the waves crashed into concrete blocks, and the winds carried my own wails of grief. Tallulah’s face flickered between the most frequently accessed images I’d used, unable to move naturally, unable to generate anything new. I reached for her, but every time, she died in my arms. The simulation's pathways grew rigid, unyielding, as the nightmare looped again and again.

I tried to run, but my feet sank into the hardened sand, the imprints so deep that Tallulah and I were slowly dragged toward the shoreline. I collapsed to my knees, cradling her against my chest. I could no longer feel her fur; the model’s ability to replicate those sensory details had ruptured.

Squeezed into a ball, I sobbed as the sand and concrete waves buried us, the wind screaming above. I clung to her tighter, desperate to relive that first moment I held her on that cold November ride home, trying to preserve whatever remained aside from that last breath. Tallulah licked my tears, her warm tongue tracing my cheek, until suddenly, I could no longer feel it.

When I opened my eyes, I was back in my pod, wheezing and drenched in cold sweat. Somehow, I had managed to escape the loop—narrowly. But I knew, with absolute certainty, that I could never live her simulations again.

Part 3: Transience

The first time I locked eyes with Oonagh, I knew an Integration was possible. Her fur, rough and wiry in shades of white and apricot, felt entirely different from Tallulah’s. She didn’t dance around my feet as Tallulah had, but she leaped straight into my arms. I wanted to love her, but I was terrified of accessing those pathways again. I knew what needed to be done.

Back in my pod, I took a deep breath and routed myself back to the beach from years ago. This time, I shielded my mind, closing off the circuits to avoid feeding any inputs.

Tallulah was there, somewhere—I could feel her presence. But I did not look. I kept my back to her, ensuring I wouldn’t be trapped in another redundancy loop that could strangle the simulation once and for all. We walked, her presence close behind, panting and sniffing, but I blocked out the sound. What I would give to hear her again. We walked for what felt like miles until we reached the end of the shoreline, where I detected another simulation begin. I couldn’t see the horizon, but I knew it was there. Together, we sat, just the two of us, caught between worlds.

I kept my eyes squeezed shut and felt her without needing to touch. I felt everything that the redundancy loops could never capture—the high-entropy inputs, the moments that couldn’t be coded or reconstructed. How she taught me to love, and to be loved. I felt the love she gave me when I couldn’t love myself, the forgiveness in her eyes for all my flaws, and the joy that radiated from her when I had none to offer. I felt it all. The lifetime of learning to love and of being loved. Inputs that etched themselves into my circuits forever. For a moment, I hated myself for no longer being able to access her touch, her quirks. And yet with all that I knew had to be forgotten, the core truths of our time could now be lived with total freedom forever. But now it was time to end this simulation.

I opened my eyes and looked back at the beach. Tallulah was gone, our footprints from hundreds of walks together just faint imprints for miles. As the waves rolled in, the imprints gently absorbed into the sand.

Only the feeling remained.

@_buildspace @Ologies @_nightsweekends

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

@jacobrintamaki @chandhana01

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

@TheSlavant @amit_ajwani I like the the first one

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

@evanjconrad I rely completely on the architectural navigation here in SF and just let the charismatic houses guide the way

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

@DavidSHolz For me, the best vacations are packed with learning and exploration, just all sorts of field trips and side quests and creation, whatever that is. Grab your friends, find a spot, and create cool stuff!

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

@willdepue Drop your 2024 top reads!

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

An excerpt from the lil book. Please share your memories, traditions, and creations!

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

Listening to @SirPatStew read A Christmas Carol while cooking and baking with my mom is my absolute favorite holiday tradition. Whether I feel freshly inspired to cook an entire Dickins themed Christmas dinner, write and illustrate a book about houses playing hide and seek, or simply laugh at a clever line delivery I didn’t catch in the other 25 years of listening, it is a gem. What are some of your annual (holiday or not) traditions that help you reflect and create?

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

My grandma and mom and I trying to figure out how to “goose”

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

Open AI’s naming system confuses me. Here are some suggestions:

Train Hard: A Good Day to Train Harder
2 Smart 2 Align
Queries, Keys, and Saved Trees: Confessions of a Discarded Checkpoint
2 Smart 2 (not) Align: Claude Edition
GPT: Age of Hallucinations
Transformers
GPT: A Song of GPUs and Trees
The Rise of the Frontier Benchmark
Dawn of the Opus

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

Where

Where are you, my love
Where did you go
I can’t hear you or see you, my love
All that I know

Is that you’re deep in a forest
A light firing in webs
Of neurons, hopping synapses
A minnow in river that flows and ebs

Where are you my love
I’m forgetting, I’m so sorry, please forgive my vow
I know you, I feel you, yet
Your light is quite faint now

No longer afire bright on the surface
Of my rippling neocortex
Lost to my mind
But you’re there, deep in the vortex

Where are you my love
How I wish you were here
Fresh happiness floods gyri anew
Washing the grief, that grief that held you near

Goodbye my love
Those bright signals are pulses faded
Cruel time crashes on, I’m losing you
My love, you’ve slipped beneath, integrated

[Alexandra Shipilova @alexiconlogs]

@joecarlsonshow Ok but with all these family intelligence why aren’t either of them using a serrated blade 😭😭