jason

This dude just ran an experiment where police worked together with a mobile primary care center on 6th St in SOMA. And then they documented their learnings after 30 days. This is what state capacity looks like. SF is headed in a good direction.

x.com/kunalmodi/st...

(It's not public, sorry, it's just a dumb little script built into a pile of other utilities I keep)

Results are pasted underneath the original line. Here's how they look:

Here's a neat little Obsidian utility I built for helping me think clearly.

Type `/exa`, and it'll ask @ExaAILabs for a few articles arguing one side, and a few articles arguing the other side.

Whoa, cool! Post more about it when you can.

My grandpa asked "Are there bad monks?" and I said yes, of course, awakening doesn't automatically heal your dysfunctional patterns. His reply was "Would you say one of these bad monks was Hitler?" which just goes to show that you can't anticipate every objection.

I went from 0 meditation in 2023 to 50 days of retreat in 2024. Over the break I wrote up what I learned: jasonbenn.com/tools-for-th...

idle thought... perhaps in the same way that we ought to use AIs to systematically upgrade the security of codebases,

we could use AI to comprehensively upgrade the alignment of the proxy metrics we're optimizing?

aligned AIs as the meta-optimizers?

AI can turbocharge any optimizer. perhaps it'll reveal a bunch of these hidden alignment problems

but it also makes it easier to define better proxies

"optimization disease": when you maximize a proxy, it eventually becomes problematic

it's worse the more powerful your optimizer is

prob every metric is its own little instance of the alignment problem, it's just that most aren't being optimized hard enough to be problematic

this morning i was noodling on proxies for productivity, and it's remarkable how hard it is to design a measure that won't distort my behavior

"screenshot my screen 1x/min and compare it to my next todo" but what if a colleague taps my shoulder? what if i'm AFK? etc etc

A virtual certificate with text "Celebrating 10M users on Bluesky, #15, jason ‪@jasonbenn.com‬, joined on Nov 23, 2022"

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #15!

(Wait, really? That seems... wrong?)

[me telling my story how I survived a plane crash and lived on a deserted island for a year] it was crazy
[friend who once got a text from me where I accidentally called the grinch the grink] was the grink there?

rumor has it if you refresh the waiting screen 5 times they let you in. (for real, try it)

You’re posted up in a hunting blind waiting for a buck. You see this guy, and focus your scope. Suddenly your eye is caught by movement in the ferns between his antlers. It’s… a tiny gnome? The little man in a pointed hat waves his hands in alarm. Wdyd?

Is this what happens when you scroll too much and don’t scoot?

Scene is a perfect name 👌

Eh I’m still having a great time

- lol I got notified that I retweeted my own tweet

This is also how I think Scenes should work: the public tweets of the members of the scene, optionally filtered by organizers using natural language.

Twitter Communities are terrible, nobody posts to them, and I hope Bluesky doesn’t repeat the mistake!

This is also how I think Scenes should work: the public tweets of the members of the scene, optionally filtered by organizers using natural language.

Twitter Communities are terrible, nobody posts to them, and I hope Bluesky doesn’t repeat the mistake!

I predict that most tagging systems will be obsoleted by language models in the near future.

It’d be much easier to express this nuanced & idiosyncratic follow request in natural language than by choosing a set of tags!

I predict that most tagging systems will be obsoleted by language models in the near future.

It’d be much easier to express this nuanced & idiosyncratic follow request in natural language than by choosing a set of tags!

- information density is kinda low, fonts are too big. (Why not just copy the Twitter UI and add Scenes? I like Twitter.)

- “Trending with Bluesky OGs” is a really cool notification, but… now what? Took me a second to realize that there a difference between following a scene and joining a scene.

- overall UX is early, obviously, but it’s worth mentioning: this feels like a product for engineers. It’s utilitarian. No delightful animation when you upvote. 6 different font sizes on this page as I write a comment. No way to thread easily

First impressions:
- saw a mention of a scene during onboarding, promptly forgot about it, followed a bunch of users.
- saw something about Twitter OGs in my mentions, followed them, and SCENES ARE SUCH A GOOD IDEA.

256 characters is a nice touch 😂