DrDan

As we can expect PubMed dysfunction more and more or to be swamped with fake journals I suggest you get acquainted to this nice alternative: europepmc.org

Can confirm. Former USAID here, and I’ve been approached twice in the last 30 days.

Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice At Sesame, our goal is to achieve “voice presence”—the magical quality that makes spoken interactions feel real, understood, and valued.

for all that is holy, what is this? how is it so good?

and who is sesame and why is their advanced voice mode 10 years ahead of OpenAI or anyone else?

www.sesame.com/research/cro...

Silver lining:

Europe became a Union yesterday.
🇪🇺

18F staffers- who were summarily fired en masse overnight- issue statement expressing shock, bewilderment:

"18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated."

I will say again: The destruction of the CFPB—an agency that has brought in $20 billion over a little more than a decade despite having an annual budget that's less than what DOD has spent so far today—is the clearest sign none of this has anything to do with saving taxpayers money.

Our Government Is Experiencing a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly Musk is moving fast and breaking important things

Government does important work — but not if DOGE can prevent it paulkrugman.substack.com/p/our-govern...

This cartoon by @mluckovich.bsky.social is getting banned on Twitter. Because of course it is.

This is what oligarchy looks like.

Increasingly large food.

All made by me with veo 2, the serious point is to note how impressive the "physics" of these models have become (also the consistency, like the spilled burrito across two different shots), there are some issues, obviously, but big advances.

“The effect may be considerable in a few centuries” is a really remarkable sentence here…

YouTube video by DrDan ponders -- Daniel Duma OpenAI o3 - AGI or hype?

Y'all been asking, so I made my first proper youtube video to explain why o3 is a huge deal.

Like, what IS it? What does it all MEAN? Is your job obsolete already?

Find my best effort answers here :)

youtu.be/HM1XZ_3Uho8

Adam Curtis Title Card: We Too Are Trapped In A System. Text over a background of a large office building

THREAD

This Is The Story Of The The Pernicious Rise of AI-Generated Papers and their Online Impact

An Incomplete History Told In The Voice of Documentarian Adam Curtis
1/31

Just 10 days after o1's public debut, we’re thrilled to unveil the open-source version of the technique behind its success: scaling test-time compute

By giving models more "time to think," Llama 1B outperforms Llama 8B in math—beating a model 8x its size. The full recipe is open-source!

A picture of the earth showing the pacific ocean. You can see hawaii and New Zealand. Also the edge of antarctica, australia, and north and south america...but barely.

It’s interesting that the emojis show the earth from three angles 🌎 🌍 🌏 but not the fourth.

Though 🔵 is a fair approximation of what it would look like.

People underestimate the Pacific.

GitHub - geelen/workers-mcp-server: Talk to a Cloudflare Worker from Claude Desktop! Talk to a Cloudflare Worker from Claude Desktop! Contribute to geelen/workers-mcp-server development by creating an account on GitHub.

Been working on making it possible to connect Claude Desktop to a Cloudflare Worker using the new MCP spec, and it works!

You write some functions in a Worker, document them with JSDoc, and then they show up in Claude for you to use. It's kinda magical.

github.com/geelen/worke...

Up to half of medical organizations either already using or preparing to implement AI With the number of FDA approved AI-enabled applications nearing 1,000, it’s clear the healthcare industry is ready to embrace the evolving technology.

🧪 Ready or not, more medical AI is coming.

KLAS reports nearly 20% of healthcare orgs use AI, with larger systems (42%) leading adoption. Popular uses: neurology, breast cancer screening, lung nodule detection 🩺🖥️ #MLSky

Is it? I will make sure to add it to my prompts then.

"Your goal is to write this email AT ALL COSTS" 😃

researcher: "we told the AI to be evil"

AI: *is evil*

researcher:

researcher: "we told the AI to be evil"

AI: *is evil*

researcher:

Claude / Gippy are there to de-isolate you

*show less like this is what I meant, not "mute"

It's still embarrassingly inferior to the "For you" tab on, yes, 🐦

I keep muting the same zero-content posts from the same accounts. Don't make me unfollow people because they skeet too much.

Find the signal in the noise. The signal *for me*

Exponentially growing number of open-source AI models over the course of the past 30 months – from a few thousands to over 1 million and more

Interactive data viz: huggingface.co/spaces/huggi...

OpenAI’s new defense contract completes its military pivot A new partnership with Anduril, announced today, will deploy AI on the battlefield. It represents an overhaul of the company’s position in just a year.

OpenAI in 2024:

“No AI for weapons or military”

“Do use our AI to make weapons to hurt yourself or others”

“Military is fine, but no AI for weapons”

“Sure put it on battlefield drones”

www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/04/1...

What do you love when you fall for AI? Inside the surprisingly meaningful, unexpectedly heartbreaking, and deeply confusing reality of AI relationships.

From this article about chatbots that are designed to mimic human interaction: “Few behaviors trigger the anthropomorphic reflex as powerfully as the use of language” www.theverge.com/c/24300623/a...

The Discover feed is pretty terrible, and I am not sure how to guide the algorithm to make it better.

I know I can use various lists, but I really want a feed that includes serendipity, trends, and a broader set of topics than the one that I follow but isn't full of noise. How do you get that?

Big thanks to Emilian Radoi for the invite and for making it happen! 🙌🏼

When did I become the lecturer? How did it happen? Did I ever stop being an impostor or did I just get better at ignoring the feeling and plowing on?

Either way, an inspiring and very satisfying experience. I should do more of this.