Sam

if only i could type faster, then i would have even more problems

When shaping your research agenda, your objective is to find the weirdest niche possible that still has the potential to change everything.

So over the past week you are seeing what you would expect to see if AI is, in fact, both rapidly gaining capabilities & proving to be very useful:
- Rolling market disruption in response to growing awareness of AI capacity
-Government versus AI lab struggles for control

…& it is still quite early

When D3 was released in February 2011, it transformed how we build data visualizations for the web and ushered in a new age of unbridled creativity in information design, data journalism, and beyond. Today, it remains the backbone of modern, interactive data viz.

Happy 15th birthday, D3 🎂
d3js.org

China's brain-computer interface industry is racing ahead | TechCrunch China’s brain-computer interface industry is rapidly scaling from research to commercialization, driven by strong policy support, expanding clinical trials, and growing investor interest.

China’s brain-computer interface industry is rapidly scaling from research to commercialization, driven by strong policy support, expanding clinical trials, and growing investor interest.

One of the greatest bollard walks in history.
#WorldBollardAssociation

The idea that coding agents prove "learn to code was a mistake" is kind of analogous to thinking the printing press meant "psych! y'all wasted a lot of time learning how to write."

Computational thinking is getting easier to pick up, and also providing more leverage than before.

Causal inference is my passion.

All those products where building an "AI agent" meant defining a series of basic prompts linked together deterministically through a flowchart with separate RAG inputs are looking pretty dated right about now (yes, that is basically every agent product released in 2025).

The Wachowskis: In our films we invented the Bullying the Robots as a cautionary tale

Leftists: At long last, we have created the Bully the Robots from classic sci-fi film series Don't Bully the Robots

i'm basically blackpilled on the power of story at this point

maybe not in general, like, clearly a few people Got It, but people by and large either don't understand even the bluntest cautionary tales or just subconsciously decide that they should act them out

As it turns out, the entire human textual corpus is such a rich representation of cognition and knowledge that a sophisticated and self-reflexive compression of that representation exhibits functional equivalency in range to cognition writ large

It's kind of funny how Hayek's (mostly correct) argument against central planning because concentrating that much economic power in one place inevitably lead to totalitarian behavior is also a pretty strong argument against like, extreme concentrations of wealth and market power

a lot of people here could use a good dose of angry music and combat sports instead of directing their rage and malice at real people

i suspect we all know whose side we're on here

Early on, the CEO is “the best person at the company” at some things. Often sales (passion + knowledge) or product vision.

But by 100 people, if the CEO is “better than everyone” at 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨, the CEO has hired poorly, and the company is suffering.

Tough transition.

The left is missing out on AI As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right

"probably not ideal that just before what might — or might not — be the moment of greatest job dispossession in history, or of democratic dispossession, or worse, or better, part of the group historically most concerned with such things is plugging its ears."
www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...

linked therein and just obviously true imho

Yes,,, your boy has taken a ride in the 4 man bobsled,,, but im an adrenaline junkie and needed to try skeleton. And now I’ve officially joined the team and am gonna try to start competing.

66 years old going 66 mph.

I find that most of the buzz I get from stims loses its intensity when I get more sleep. I increasingly buy into the "adhd is just a circadian rhythm disorder" hypothesis.

It's difficult to find people who are contrarian about the exact right number of things.

These days most of my LLM tokens are spent on laptop, with open-weight models.

My situation is atypical: I have a lot of simple textual summary-like tasks that don’t need SOTA.

But I’m sharing just to say: SOTA can eventually overshoot need for some (small but growing) fraction of tasks. +

The “Epstein Files” and the anatomy of hidden social networks How secrecy reshapes structure and why its analysis is conditional on the data

A lot of “network analysis” about the Epstein Files.

Nearly all of them missing the point: when a system operates under strong incentives for discretion, what gets documented is NOT a neutral sample of reality.
Results are conditional on what is observed!

open.substack.com/pub/manlius/...

not bad. i think our "should swap" logic is wrong somehow. it feels like it "cares" about where you start dragging relative to the dragged thing. but it shouldn't. it sohuld only care when center of one thing cross center of another thing. ⏺ Right. Currently it compares the cursor position against the target's midpoint. But the cursor could be at the top or bottom edge of the dragged element depending on where you grabbed. Need to compare the dragged element's center against the target's center.

ngl. to me it's a miracle that i can talk to a computer like this, and it knows what i'm talking about and does the right fix. many engineers would struggle with this (including myself)

Trying to tweet a Nick bostrom joke while Twitter went down is this anthropic bias?

We’re Living in a Golden Age of Close-Up Magic For our next trick, we explain why professional magicians are having a major moment.

For our next trick, we explain why professional magicians are having a major moment.

Pentagon can go shop somewhere else. I’m sure xAI doesn’t have any morals

that's just beingslop. you only like it because you think

People saying Anthropic fumbled OpenClaw don't understand Anthropic.

Whenever I remember the quote “I’m not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine of off toilet seats”