There’s a lot of this, and (more on the site formerly known as Twitter than here) also a lot of people getting polarized into “AGI in six months“ and “why do *you* need a job anyway” out of exactly the same kind of spite

Physical Intelligence has a recipe for real world RL on top of VLAs and it looks impressive: www.pi.website/blog/pistar06

high-dimensional geometry in general doesn't make any sense for instance: as the number n of dimensions increases, the volume of an n-dimensional ball concentrates into a thin outer shell close to the boundary; the interior shrinks away

i think the actual threshold of prediction is that people always try to imagine the course of current progress, and once their mental model of that breaks down they predict AGI

I suspect the YIMBYs, like the NIMBYs, who think this are mostly wrong. If you own a house, you own land, and land is more valuable if it’s more intensely developed There’s more variance (what if a homeless shelter goes up next door?) but land in Manhattan wouldn’t be worth more if it were SFH-only

productivity tip: stop listening once you realize the crux of a conversation is purely semantic and everyone has a different definition. it’s a waste of time

time again for my favorite venn diagram

she’s a 10 but Excel thinks she’s October

Hyped to write "The models in this paper cost us 476,246.57 USD to train. I'm sorry you are sad we didn't redo all of our experiments on multiple independent training datasets. If you'd like to give us a million dollars we'd be happy to run the experiments you wish" in my response to a reviewer.

A brief taxonomy of crypto: 1) Bitcoin: digital gold 2) Ethereum (+ probably one or two more): very speculative tech stocks 3) everything else: scams

downsides of space-based industry: impractical, expensive, how are you going to dissipate the heat upsides of space-based industry: no one is going to NIMBY you

"babies are born worshipping unknown gods" is one of the most incredible dwarf fortress bugs i have heard of. its poetry.

Nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by putting about 20,000 specific people in prison for the rest of their lives

yeah my most out there technology and crime belief that be implemented is if we can mandate new cars have backup cameras we can mandate they have ignition interlock devices. the first time you get caught driving over the limit it gets turned on. extremely doable technological non-carceral solution.

Does anyone who understands this want to enlighten me? Feels bubbly

This idea of affordable mass market Corollas is just propaganda from developer shills, what we need is an income-restricted lottery for three (3) Ferraris

It's interesting that RLHF'd LLMs and influencers talk the same way. Perhaps through the evolution of clickbait, we'd already found the local maximum of attention grabbing

yeah I actually think the development of a staggering array of new medical procedures and treatments that are vastly more effective than what was available even a decade or two ago is a significant component of material prosperity that greatly improves quality of life, not just a joke

yes, though the same reasoning should lead you to expect that a few specific prices would be extremely salient: housing, maybe rent especially, gasoline, labor (i.e., your wages)

Words to live by tbh

applying for jobs again

slightly metaphorical but real sense in which the future changes the past: we understand our lives as narratives, but we don't (entirely) select actions that way and the narrative that best explains what you've done can change as you do more things

The brain specifically I dunno about: 2+ rather than one must be energetically expensive, why not selection pressure for fewer? How do they multiplex access to motor control centers? But the immune system! It does complicated, goal-directed, long-term adaptive action and planning. Is it conscious?

Trump actually acting like a king is really helping me understand why various parts of Anglo-American government work the way they do

This is the crux of the problem. In the age of highly-centralized media, there WAS a strong relationship between "narratives about the economy" and "the actual economy." But that relationship is falling apart. So suddenly it matters a lot whether the real driver was "narrative" or "real conditions"

Why you should always have been (and still be) skeptical of arguments for foom

ITS A COYOTE! CHASING A ROAD RUNNER!

More than choosing good project ideas, to me "research taste" means recognizing what the interesting part of a result is and how it connects to a bigger narrative. Almost any nontrivial result can be important within the right lens. More than anything my PhD taught me this.

What is this feeling that isn’t cynicism and despair?

"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision" fits awkwardly with the Church-Turing thesis. It would sound less obviously applicable to a (certain sci-fi kind of) robot, right?

This should be a sarcastic street name for cocaine

I don’t think how people are tracking how quickly this is happening, for better or worse.

You can write “Neil Postman vindicated again” every day and have it be correct about something

”AGI”:

This is very literally better journalism from People than the NYT manages now. The audience is better informed about the world after reading this than after reading analysis of how Democrats think it’ll play in Pennsylvania in the midterms

star trek and famous art: a thread

AS IT IS HALLOWEEN, It IS TIME FOR ME TO POST THE HALLOWEEN POLLING JOKE:

Our generation’s Virginia Woolf typing out a social media ad that says “it’s giving GIVING: gobble up these turkey day discounts” and throwing herself in the east river

I use Claude (an AI) to scan my posts for spelling and grammar errors. On the most recent post (about the East Wing, link below), I got a really amazing addendum. www.pbump.net/o/yes-most-a...

motion to ban the phrase "no evidence" from the English language it's ~always used to mean "no proof" which is a better and clearer thing to say. there's no proof the guy discovered a block away near a discarded gun wearing gloves shot the victim but, like

Across social media sites, political posting is tightly linked to affective #polarization - the most partisan users post the most As casual users disengage & polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

CHOTINER: So you asked for a Birkin bag? KOKO: Yes. Possession Bag. CHOTINER: And you had the funds to acquire this? KOKO: No, Professor Purchase Koko Gorilla CHOTINER: That doesn't sound like the funds were justifiable. KOKO: Hostility Interviewer

Change one letter, ruin a candy Reese’s Peanut Butter Pups

just a friendly reminder, this is a nude pic of your waifu/husbando (when AWS us-east-1 does not cause a global internet fallout)

a more or less orderly succession of several hundred years of republican Roman consuls followed by a civil war after the death of about every third emperor

an awful lot of why politics is so deranged now in four easy steps:

Another example of the increasingly common situation where AI helps an academic with intellectually challenging work (solving a 42-year-old open math problem). Seems like real value in combining expert human guidance and increasingly powerful LLM. arxiv.org/abs/2510.23513

We are introducing a very early research preview of Letta Code. Letta Code is our solution to the terminal-based coding assistant, but with state and learning built in. No more compactions. Just specialist agents that learn your code with every commit.

I reposted this in the 12th.