What a phenomenal #book. If you’re interested in the “hard problem” of consciousness, this is one book to read and re-read. I came across the author via a scientific article where he (along with Karl Friston) apply the free energy principle to consciousness.

Be aware of a new social engineering attack vector which can lead to your system getting compromised. This is how credentials of a popular open source project (axios) got compromised. It goes like this:

Our economic system exists because humans have needs which they satisfy by matching what they can produce with what others need. Now replace the word “humans” with “agents” above, and it’ll become clear that a parallel machine-to-machine economy is probably inevitable.

Honestly, I feel like a beginner again. Learning what good scientific research is about and how to build a lab that creates impact. Just like my first time building a startup in my 20s, I'm making mistakes, reflecting, iterating - all of it while shipping. It's so refreshing and fun.

Steal this idea. A dark store which stocks your own rarely-used household objects. You ship those occasionally-used but space occupying things and simply get them back within 10 mins from an app, whenever you need them. A minimalist’s dream service :)

People building AI wrappers for consumers should learn what the smartphones did to specialized devices like MP3 players. Consumers want convenience so when a single device that could do multiple things came along, they adopted it with enthusiasm.

Optimism today is more needed than ever before. Given how many reality-distorting bubbles exist out there, pessimism is the easy choice. But those who believe that the future can be a happy place will indeed find ways to have a more satisfactory life than those who implode.

All self-help books should now probably be a folder with prompt or skill files that you can point Claude Code or *Claw to. Then the agent should walk you through the key lessons, help you practice skills and keep tracking that you're actually implementing changes in your life.

Added two new interactive explainers 1) Reservoir computing -> how can a bucket of water compute? 2) Top-down causation -> when the whole bosses the parts around

How does behavior change happen? [New essay from the Nintee series]

Biography of the person who defined what modern physics ought to be like - precise, mathematical and experiment-driven. Newton was a fascinating person. Celibate for his entire life, he was a magician, philosopher, mathematician, theologist and physicist rolled into a single soul.

Your long-term happiness is a simple aggregate of your day-to-day happiness, and your day-to-day happiness is an aggregate of moment-to-moment happiness.. … which (unless you’re in debilitating pain or poverty) completely depends on your attitude towards life.

How LLMs actually work! Recently gave a 2-hour long talk on this. 42 slides, all yours 👇

It seems to be that every small business ought to be prompting their way to build internal workflow tools to increase revenue, decrease costs and improve efficiencies. But.. we aren’t seeing that yet. Why? It’s the clearest proof that AI has yet to make a broad economic impact.

It’s a bit of a misnomer that humans are better at continual learning than current AI systems.

Learning flywheels are all you need One intuition pump for the future of AI is to see what happened with human intelligence in our evolutionary past.

Autoresearch for Sample Efficiency! I took @karpathy's autoresearch and changed the objective to minimizing validation loss for a fixed token budget of 10M tokens. Ran it overnight and the system discovered tweaks that led to 14% improvement over baseline. So crazy!

Are subconscious influences real? Added a new experiment to Vibe Psychophysics! My results showed that a word too briefly flashed to be noticed helped speed up recognition of a related word (v/s an unrelated one). This shows priming effects are real!

If you chase the trendy thing, you should expect to produce the average outcome in that field as many other folks (by definition) are attempting to do the same.

Some people assume that knowledge and intelligence can be decoupled but that’s not the case. The more you know, the more connections you can see between ideas, which is really the essence of intelligence.

My dear young person, Don’t succumb to mediocrity. There’s enough of it going around. Aspire for craftsmanship, as that is what leads to joy and beauty. The world needs more people who’re proud of what they make, and less of those who couldn’t care less.

Been wondering lately how many jobs in the digital economy are hanging by their supervisor’s ignorance of what Claude Code is capable of.

This is so inspiring!

Drop everything and read this #book. Seriously, this sci-fi is leagues apart from any other sci-fi book that I’ve read (except perhaps Ursula’s writings).

Last 12 months of @lossfunk All undergrads, btw! (no PhD)

What a phenomenal #book! The author goes into excruciating detail on how language could have evolved. The first half of the book is dedicated to how our folk intuitions about language evolution are wrong.

Performed another experiment on myself! The Müller-Lyer illusion is perhaps the most famous illusion. Two lines of equal length appear different: • Outward fins (>--<) look longer than it really is • Inward fins (<-->) look shorter than it really is My results track!

I've been building myself a psychophysics lab using claude code. Today I added subliminal perception experiment to it to check how i perform on tasks where I can't see things (because stimulus is flashed only briefly for <50ms).

New post rom the Nintee series. The two views of rationality 👇

I’m very happy that Anthropic chose not to cave into US Dept of War’s demands but their statement has an ambiguity. Does this mean they’d be ok to have their models be used for mass surveillance & autonomous weapons against OTHER countries? A clarification would help.

Today I learned: throughout the history of our species, our effective population of breeding individuals has hovered around 10,000 to 30,000.

Nothing against Anthropic, but I’m not surprised. When you raise lots of capital and have diverse set of shareholders, corporations can aim to do only one thing: maximize growth and profit.

Struggle feels meaningful because it’s an early indicator of acquisition of relevant skills that help acquire resources, allies and mates - this is why evolution made mastery of something a source of dopamine.

People keep confusing nominal with real purchasing power all the time. They’re different - it’s very likely that we will have majority of humans see their absolute living standards increase dramatically while simultaneously see the most rapid decline in relative standards.

🎉 The 7th batch of @lossfunk residency is ready to graduate this Saturday! If you’re in Bangalore, RSVP to attend ⬇️

I’m bearish on software-only startups / products. The first rule of business is that success comes from differentiation, and building software is no longer a differentiation.

I suspect with rising job loss and ease of launching an online business, we’ll see an unprecedented rise in entrepreneurship.

Jevon's paradox is true for personal productivity as well. You make your workflows more efficient, and yet you end up working the same amount of hours / day as before.

I wonder how soon we will get so much energy and sample efficiency in AI models that anyone with a laptop will be able to download a 100kb executable and have the model train on their CPU on their own files + maybe Wikipedia dump. I suspect this will happen, just not sure when.

🌀 Crazy project alert: What if you ask AI to visualize your state of mind? Presenting murmuration: A chrome extension that transforms your ChatGPT and Claude conversation topics into beautiful, animated black-and-white visualizations on every new tab.

Curious - how has AI impacted things in your company? Particularly, on hiring and head count front. Are things different or the same?

How does Instagram decide which reels to show to you? How does it personalize your feed so fast? New explainer 👇

Have you ever wondered how we detected gravitational waves from black hole merger? Well, the answer is wave interferometry - the same technique that gives us the famous double slit experiment of quantum mechanics! Added a new explainer 👇

A simple reminder. For India’s currency to remain valuable, India must have something valuable to export to the world.

You should always intersperse reading when thinking. If you keep on reading, you’ll never get a chance to integrate and come up with your own thoughts. If you keep on thinking, you’ll miss out on “free” cognitive labor done by others, get biased and keep reinventing the wheel.

Steal this idea. Disposable email, phone number and credit cards for AI agents so they can act on your behalf without messing up your real life. I feel this would be inevitable as we give our agents more autonomy on the web.

Hot take: anyone who says AI cannot do X will be proven wrong in the arc of history.

All consciousness theories on one page! It's crazy we have 100s of theories of consciousness, this abundance seems unprecedented in the history of science. We need theories to make surprising, discriminating predictions to sift this list down to few plausible candidates.

This #book makes a convincing case that consciousness arose during the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago when prey-predator dynamics kickstarted an arms race to better represent the environment in order to outsmart the other.

Non-stop productivity is a myth. Multiple lines of research peg peak daily productivity ceiling at 4 hrs/day (but that block is truly uninterrupted hard work). My personal experience tracks this: I’m unable to focus more than 4 hours in a day. First block: 10:30am to 1:30pm and second block: 2-4pm