Abstract Tesseract

"Working with an expert personal tutor is generally regarded as the most efficient form of education" well, maybe, depending on how you define "expert", "personal tutor", "efficient", and, uh, "education"

what in the studies-have-shown hell did I just read

Just today I helped a friend activate an eSIM on their iPhone, and it was almost comically hostile, starting with an alert to turn on data roaming, which navigated us to a menu with no visible data roaming option. And of course the top search results looked like LLM slop

Lost track of how many conversations I've had that went like this:

Team: sooooo are we gonna do any user research or testing, or

PM (annoyed): we don't need to do that, we already know our users

Team: cool cool so who are they

PM (rolls eyes): everyone, obviously!

You can't choose where you're born, but you can choose to not take part in genocide. These teens burned their IOF draft papers in Tel Aviv. Many have already spent months in jail but continue to speak up for Palestinians.

ice cream truck just drove by playing..silent night???

"Do you want chicken nuggets?" "It's an interesting question. Chicken is food and I do require sustenance. And nuggets are a shape, if not a specific one. When I do have nuggets, I prefer honey mustard, which may have been consumed as early as Ancient Rome. Honey Mustard is also the name comic book"

yeah I think this and the myth of the "evil genius" type is preventing us from identifying what kinds of people have harmful power over us and what it would look like to take that power back for ourselves

look, the radioactive anthrax bomb is useful for me personally, and frankly it's pretty condescending of you to dismiss my experience like this

reminds me of the time i was stuck on some font code stuff and someone helped me solve it and when i looked him up it was the guy who invented PNG and now is like the main font guy for like microsoft or something like that lol i was like ah well this is convenient

> “There’s interest from every part of the world on this type of thing,” Singh said. “You can see the scale of this thing, how good it can get, as long as we have good guard rails.”

i keep saying it's obscene that engineers can just go to farmers' markets and stuff and not face severe retribution!

Just had my first ride home from the airport with Colorado Drivers Cooperative. Cheaper than Uber/Lyft and pays the drivers more. If you're around here, get on it!

I cannot wait for this. My family immigrated over from Russia/Ukraine with their entire labor and mutual aid society.

AI is sucking out all of the joy I used to feel about technology. It is cookie licking at its absolute worst, tainting everything and dominating the whole conversation. There is no air, only feverish, disgusting, forced hype.

The transcript of this speech is amazing. I hope the attendees who heard it firsthand were as inspired as I feel just reading it

One of the things that most struck me about working at a tech company was how basically everyone knew that the executives didn't know jack shit about anything but we were all supposed to pretend it was because they were simply too busy Ideating to learn or think about things

“A legitimate PhD-level expert in anything,” they said.

“Show me a diagram of the US presidents since FDR, with their names and years in office under their photos,” I said.

Oh what a night, late Ŋany back in (29)17

Super pleased to share a new article that I helped co-author, alongside some amazing Indigenous colleagues, out today in Nature!

I call this the reverse Turing Test. If an LLM is producing something passable, it doesn't mean the tool is intelligent, it means humans were being asked to write something meaningless

can't stop thinking about how many OpenAI engineers there are on literal million dollar a year salaries are currently trying to solve the problem of counting letters in words, and how many people are being paid to write untold number of blog posts about it as training fodder

Engineers: the tech we're building gives us world-changing power

Everyone else: cool, can you use some of that power to say "no" to your bosses because the thing you're doing is hurting us, like, a lot

Engineers: lol no

it really grinds my gears to see NLP researchers—many of whom scoffed at colleagues who engage with texts beyond the level of statistical distributions—wax poetical about synthetic text in ways that are (to say the least!) lacking in thoughtfulness and rigor

As a small-town boy that moved to Chicago right out of law school, I was absolutely staggered and intimidated by how to operate in a city until I realized I didn't just live in Chicago, I lived in my neighborhood of Chicago. Subtle shift but the psychology was completely different

So relieved to hear someone say this out loud. I will never understand how so much of the machine learning community ever took this technique seriously

Them: ChatGPT said...

Me: You cheated not only the game, but yourself.

You didn't grow.
You didn't improve.
You took a shortcut and gained nothing.

You experienced a hollow victory. Nothing was risked and nothing was gained.

It's sad that you don't know the difference.

I’ll keep saying this on repeat but the best antidote I’ve found to doomscrolling and despair is linking up with a mutual aid or direct action org in your area and going to do something that directly helps your neighbors who are struggling. It’s the only thing keeping me from 24/7 screaming

Leaked documents confirm that Microsoft is providing millions of dollars worth of cloud computing and AI surveillance tools to coordinate airstrikes which have killed over 50,000 Palestinians so far.

Microsoft employees demand an end to ties with the Israeli military.

Eko.org/microsoft

Are there any movies where you appreciate the craft that went into it but also really didn't enjoy?

Yeah basically every time I hear about a software development "problem" that was "solved" with an LLM, the actual problem turns out to be "a manager who is unable to hear 'no' when they really need to hear that"