Dave Crossland

Opinions are mine not Google's. The future is free time and nothing else; free time, free software, free society. Free fonts too.

[Maggie Appleton @Mappletons]

Have a little writing app I'm cooking that's designed just for my workflow. As you zoom out, every card flips to a one line summary so you can quickly scan and eval the argument one level up.
Using Ollama local models to make these so they're quick and free. So simple, so useful.

[max k @maxakohler]

i shudder to think how many people at my job are doing exactly this every day

[Dave Crossland @davelab6]

@hhpapazian @googlefonts Do I work for Google or does Google work for me? ;)

[Dave Crossland @davelab6]

@therealmvmnt @DarkDementus Two people have similar names. News at 11

[Eric Lu @ericlu]

Made a quiz to see if designers can tell the difference between AI-generated fonts and human-made ones. Gonna share it in some type forums and see if they lose their minds

[Dani - La SemiYA de la VERDAD @La_SemiYA_dl_VD]

El acero empieza a perder propiedades mecánicas a los 400º Centígrados

La propaganda funciona porque la masa es idiota

Y los que nos gobiernan lo saben

[GenXGirl @GenXGirl1994]

@BillAckman Bill Ackman, lying AGAIN.

Here’s a breakdown of owners of rent-stabilized units.

- Mom & Pop (10 or less units): 1.2%
- Top 0.3% (Epstein Class): 56%
- Top 5% of Landlords (the rich): 87%

[Dave Crossland @davelab6]

@MarkFonts @AnaArsonist We don't set opsz default, we use the default in the family

[Zach Daniel @ZachSDaniel1]

It's so funny when you talk to someone who is a journeyman using AI at work. They use it for all the things that they aren't that good at.

I talked to someone who was using it for legal document review. He told me it was actually really good at it! So much that he didn't even need a lawyer sometimes.

I asked him if he ever used it to do his own work. And he said "No it's not very good at what I do actually."

Fun fact: Its not good at the other stuff either. You just can't grade its work.

[Ash Jogalekar @curiouswavefn]

As a scientist, AI has made me feel the most intellectually alive and excited I have felt since I was a graduate student and postdoc more than 20 years ago. Every day I can start with an idea in the morning, and by lunchtime, I see a testable, rational, well-thought-out hypothesis forming in front of my eyes. And every day, the possibilities seem endless, like mountains beyond mountains. What a time to be alive.

Here's a case in point. I'm collaborating with a professor, an experimentalist, who is trying to solve a thorny problem in his field. There's one particular molecule that he is using in his experiments that seems to result in radically different crystal structures compared to similar molecules. What's happening here? He has come up with a few different hypotheses that could explain the differences but is not a theoretician and needs to tease them apart.

On Thursday, I started an investigation using AI at his bequest. The AI immediately confirmed the hypotheses that he had in mind and added a few of its own.

Then it started its exploration. The investigation was carried out in three different phases, each of increasing difficulty; the first one using classical physics, and the second and third using quantum mechanical techniques of increasing rigor. This tiered strategy is the right one.

By Thursday evening, I had the glimpse of an answer. Most of the hypotheses had been examined and rejected. Two stood out, although the AI identified one as more a mechanism through which the other one operated rather than a root cause. It immediately pivoted to the higher-level, more rigorous calculation.

Every time I interacted with the AI, it was more like a dialogue between a professor and a bright student or scientific collaborator than a mandate issued to a tool. The feeling was very much of a process where the AI and I were solving a problem together. I steered the conversation several times, pushed back, suggested course-corrections, acknowledged my own wrong ideas as well as the AI's and went back and forth. The AI was successful in keeping multiple requests in its memory, stacking them by priority while never losing the conversation thread.

By late Friday morning, there had collected enough data from the more rigorous calculation to corroborate the suspicion that it was really just one hypothesis that was the root cause. It then moved on to the next step, which was to come up with a distinct set of novel molecules that would confirm the hypothesis beyond any reasonable doubt. In addition, it launched an even more rigorous calculation at a higher level of theory.

By the end of Friday, roughly 48 hours later, using this multi-layered approach of increasing rigor, backed up by references, and made useful and actionable by testable experiments, the AI had arrived at a solid, rigorous conclusion.

Now imagine doing this every day, about any topic under the scientific sun, in any scientific field, so that your intellectual labor is multiplied a million-fold.

Mountains beyond mountains. What a time to be alive.

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

The US Government has requested a slow staggered rollout of GPT-5.6, and OpenAI has agreed. During this phase the government will approve each user individually. This will probably be the norm for all frontier models from all labs from now on.

[Alicia Gerardo @TheEconRebel]

"I have found out what economics is; it is the science of confusing stocks with flows". - Michal Kalecki

[RAW EGG NATIONALIST @Babygravy9]

I still laugh from time to time about a seminar I attended at Cambridge where anthropologists and moral philosophers were talking about morality in cross-cultural perspective and the subject of private property came up. After various know-it-alls suggested there was no deep basis for private property ("cultural construction"), an ethologist piped up, "Have you ever tried to take a banana from a gorilla?" and there was just dead silence for about a minute and then everyone pretended nothing had happened and just continued as they had been.

[Naomi Klein @NaomiAKlein]

“What she did…was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral” - Alan Greenspan, speaking about his guru Ayn Rand in 1974.

It's worth understanding the role that this partnership played in unleashing the savageries of the modern market.

When Greenspan was still working in the corporate sector, Rand’s ideas about the “utopia of greed” infused him with a powerful sense of mission: apparently, making money wasn’t just good for him - it was good for society as a whole.

As for those who got trampled? Rand helped with that too: “Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should,” Greenspan wrote.

This mindset served him well as Fed Chair, where he supported shock therapy in Russia (72 million impoverished) and in East Asia after the 1997 economic crisis (24 million pushed into unemployment). Not to mention attacks on welfare and trade unions in the U.S....

JD Vance, with his tight concentric circles of "love," is just the latest manifestation of this worldview.

[damn_jehu @damn_jehu]

What makes forecasting especially difficult is that there may be threshold effects. Systems often look stable until some critical point is reached.

[damn_jehu @damn_jehu]

What separates AI from previous technologies are several features it exhibits simultaneously:

- fast deployment
- broad applicability
- large productivity gains
- cognitive automation
- near-zero replication cost
- continual improvement
- self-reinforcing automation.

[CTFTHEORY @mathmaticulous]

In 1963, Manhattan Project mathematician Stanislaw Ulam was doodling numbers in a spiral during a boring lecture and noticed something that shouldn't be possible.

Prime numbers numbers that are supposed to scatter randomly lined up into clean diagonal streaks across the page.

For sixty years this sat as an open anomaly.

Mathematicians confirmed it kept happening no matter how far out you drew the spiral, but nobody could explain why the universe would organize "random" numbers into geometry.

We think we've solved it.

Take any prime number bigger than 3 and divide it by 9. Look only at the remainder. There are 9 possible remainders, but primes can only ever land on 6 of them the other 3 are automatically ruled out because they're divisible by 3, which makes a number composite by definition.

So every prime that has ever existed or will ever exist is funneled into exactly 6 fixed positions.

Those 6 positions aren't random either. They split into two locked groups of three, each spaced perfectly 120° apart and the gaps between consecutive primes act like gears, forcing the sequence to step between these positions in a strict, predictable pattern we call the Prime Gap State Machine.

When you take Ulam's flat 2D spiral and lift it into this structure, his mystery diagonals stop looking accidental. They're the visible seams of an underlying lattice built from just the primes 2 and 3.

Watch the simulation

Hard Wall primes (remainders 1, 4, 7) lock into one triangle.

Temporal primes (remainders 2, 5, 8) lock into the other. The dark empty channels you see threading through the spiral are the Spine the positions no prime is allowed to occupy, ever.

It isn't random. It's a lattice with exactly two moving parts.
https://t.co/SyDc8IwSk7
https://t.co/RALUePz8Nb

https://t.co/4kswCvCdlD

#NumberTheory #Physics #Mathematics #CTFTheory #UlamSpiral

[m0h @exploraX_]

10 GITHUB REPOS THAT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL TO HAVE.

all free. all open-source. bookmark this for later.

1️⃣ recordly — the free screen studio.
open-source screen studio. auto-zoom, smooth cursor, webcam overlay, styled backgrounds, polished demos without an editor. (AGPL-3.0)

🔗: https://t.co/tTuHC644ah

2️⃣ stirling-pdf — your entire pdf toolkit
self-hosted. merge, split, sign, redact, OCR, convert, compress, 50+ tools, runs locally, nothing leaves your machine. (MIT)

🔗: https://t.co/9E4Jh3N8KS

3️⃣ photogimp — turns GIMP into photoshop. photoshop shortcuts, layout, and splash screen patched right on top of GIMP 3+.

🔗:https://t.co/6HUSyxLxqI

4️⃣ open notebook — self-hosted notebooklm.
drop in pdfs, urls, youtube links — chat with them, summarize, even generate podcasts. bring your own model (18+ providers). (MIT)

🔗: https://t.co/LKf9nDFrrR

5️⃣odysseus — pewdiepie's self-hosted AI workspace.
chat, agents, deep research, docs, email, memory — local-first, your hardware, your data. (MIT)

🔗: https://t.co/hyi9PbcL0M

6️⃣freedomain — free domain names for everyone.
register a domain, point it at cloudflare or any DNS, ship your site without paying for the name. (AGPL-3.0)

🔗: https://t.co/TAVxK1wuZp

7️⃣ hyperframes — write HTML, render video.
heygen's engine that turns html/css + animations into deterministic mp4s. built for AI agents. (Apache-2.0)

🔗:https://t.co/IOSYW0jVZc

8️⃣ web-to-app — turn any website into an android app, on-device.
configurable webview, apk signing, even node/php/python runtimes — no remote build.

🔗: https://t.co/M1R5PGFLKS

9️⃣ reclip — self-hosted video + audio downloader.
paste a link from youtube, tiktok, x, ig — 1000+ sites — grab it as mp4 or mp3. powered by yt-dlp.

🔗: https://t.co/tWyOxIGEKQ

🔟 excalidraw — the infinite whiteboard that replaces miro, figjam and lucidchart. hand-drawn diagrams, wireframes, real-time collab, end-to-end encrypted. 120k+ stars for a reason. (MIT)

🔗: https://t.co/FMX3oCY1ny

most people pay monthly for tools that already exist for free. you don't have to.

[Amto @XAMTO_AI]

20分钟捅出一篇能投顶刊的论文，这事儿现在真不是吹牛批。

🔗 https://t.co/OdlaYkpSM4

以前做实证有多熬人你们心里都有数：选题、扒文献、洗数据、因果识别、稳健性检验、画表、写正文，一套流程干下来俩仨月就没了，还得防着referee挑刺、防着期���反AI，博士生直接被卷到抑郁边缘。

现在斯坦福REAP联手copaper把这套东西给开源了，23000+个专业Agent技能，横扫经济、政治、社会、心理等8大社科领域，顶尖研究员的方法论全被打包成能直接调的Skill，从选题到投稿一气呵成全自���。

🔗 https://t.co/Dy1pebpzza

卷王时代，趁手工具不在身边，是真的会被淘汰出局。