My blog posts are mostly shower thoughts expanded into long form, so naturally they tend to be a bit speculative. I have in fact tried a bunch of stuff in the diffusion language modelling space, which culminated in the CDCD paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15089 as well as this theoretical note on simplex diffusion: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14784 -- if the style of the blog post isn't your cup of tea, this might be more to your liking :)

Completely agree re: hard numbers, by the way (I spent quite a bit of time Kaggling during my PhD, see some of my earlier blog posts), but a single researcher can only do so many experiments. Part of the motivation for writing these blog posts is to draw attention to areas of research I think are interesting, and hopefully encourage some people to delve deeper into them as well! Pointing out open questions can be quite conducive to that, in my experience.