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}
}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.
I admit that I don't think formal "papers" deserve their elevated status in today's information economy.
I think they add a whole lot of ceremony that usually results in a format that's harder to understand.
So me calling this a "paper" was a little bit of a dig!
You, being of sound mind, tried the technique and drew reasonable conclusions … but just look at the original post for this blog post: there are a large number of responses by people who clearly don’t understand the technique, missed the experimental weaknesses, couldn’t place the post into the lineage of mech interp results that preceded it … and will leave the discussion with the wrong impression.
In your mind, whose fault is that? Is that that the unavoidable cost of a field, moving too rapidly to engage in peer review?
In its ideal form, the paper lifecycle is not a gate, but a sharpening stone.
I'm not convinced the alternative - delaying publication by 6 months, keeping the new information available only to a much smaller group until then - would have been better.
All of that said, I did just update my own post to include "The paper (OK, the authors classify is as a “blog post”, but it’s paper-shaped) found that frontier models..." inspired by this conversation.
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.
From memory, yolo and roberta and ppo were initially rejected. After a quick google search, pagerank was initially rejected, word2vec got one weak and one strong reject in reviews, LSTM got rejected (90s but still), dropout, knowledge distillation, and many more such cases. All of these are extremely important, foundational and field defining papers that ended up on arxiv or other preprint places.
If that happened to those papers, there's 0 chance today that it'd be a good idea. The field is simply moving too fast, there's too much being published, and the "top venues" are simply swamped. Blog / preprint / carrier pigeon is ok atm, as long as someone can look at it, try it, and hopefully reproduce it.