Paco

intern

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

One of the reasons that I don't accept the "nuking USAID killed millions of people" framing is because most of the people saying this never took the stance that the US was a tremendously good and heroic force for saving millions of people

[sucks @powerbottomdad1]

you can still get a runners high on the hedonic treadmill

[skeleton @ThinkingBone]

accidentally used my rationalist personality with my leftist friends and got hit with that water usage stare

[Paco @GuyAltm]

@ansonlin Cause they post ghost job listings

[Paco @GuyAltm]

@iDonf9z

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

i'm obsessed with AI DIY projects

my favorite one right now is this guy who built an AI system that listens for birds outside his apartment, figures out what species they are, and paints them on his wall.

here's how the whole thing works:

1. a cheap usb mic on his balcony listens for birdsong 24/7

2. BirdNET, Cornell's AI model trained on 6,000+ species, names each bird species from the sound alone (no camera needed)

3. every time it hears one, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image paints that exact bird in the style of an Edo-period japanese woodblock print

4. the new painting drops into a live collage of everything that's been singing outside in the last 24 hours

5. and it all shows up on a framed e-ink display on his wall that reads "heard today" like a little museum placard for his neighborhood

knowing which birds visit you used to take a field guide, a trained ear, plus years of patient practice.

teddy just glances at the frame on his wall and sees the cardinal came back this morning

honestly i'm highly tempted to build one myself haha

[François Chollet @fchollet]

Programming is not about code, just like music is not about notation. It is the art & science of managing complexity through layers of abstraction. AI is simply a part of it.

[Joshua Baer ⚙️ @JoshuaBaer]

My life strategy: 1. Plant lots of seeds. 2. Water everyone's. 3. Repeat.

[HowlingMutant @Howlingmutant0]

Grass never grew on a busy street my dear

[Paco @GuyAltm]

@nikitabier Not from Meta but I love you and I love X. Applied for DE

[Ryan Stephen @Ryan__Stephen]

playing with realtime diffusion ui

[Paco @GuyAltm]

@FreddyLA7 Generational summer run

[SlonkYap 🇵🇷 @Slonk01]

Genuinely, what were they feeding Xbox 360 marketing

[gfodor.id @gfodor]

SpaceX and Meta are inverted bets on if humanity expands into space or into The Matrix.

Physics and game theory make me believe nobody, including us, expand beyond their solar system’s planets, because doing so is a civilizational hard fork.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@thesheetztweetz They can shake their fist at the sky

[echo erick ≫ /dev/null @retrozelda]

@cattobingu 6 seconds.
no monetization incentive.
no political incentive.
pre-2016 election

[Taelin @VictorTaelin]

this is my personal singularity moment

this post may sound like a paid ad. I only wish. I'm concerned, more so than happy. the world is changing, and, among the scenarios where AI goes terribly wrong, inequality is the most realistic, yet, the one Anthropic seems to be the least concerned about. I'm glad OpenAI is taking the opposite stance: *personal AGI for everyone*. I think this is a commendable position in the times we live. but who am I in the queue of the bread?

anyway, Fable is here, so I'll just report my first-hour experience

first of all, all my pet prompts are solved.
→ λ-calculus puzzles
→ bug questions
→ one-shot apps
all are trivial to it.

I don't have anything harder other than my
ongoing work

so, in the last several days, I've been toying with HVM5, a new interaction net evaluator with a faster loop.

after writing the first version, I left 32 GPT-5 agents working for ~20 hours each. this resulted in up to 2x speedups, but the file size increased by 2-fold and quality decreased significantly.

I then simplified the whole thing into an even simpler core, and left Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 optimizing it for 8 hours. Opus got a legit 6% - 34% speedup in most benches. GPT got better results, but, sadly, an unusable file.

I then asked Fable to optimize it.

2 hours later, it landed a 1770% speedup in one case, 100%+ in other 4, and 22% in average. yes, in 2 hours it outperformed me, opus 4.8 and a swarm of gpt 5.5 agents, by one order of magnitude.

that could not possibly be legit. "it must be hardcoding the benchmarks" (GPT trauma). so I read its explanation and what it did was, indeed, the most high impact optimization one could try first. seems like HVM5 was wasting a lot of time garbage-collecting unused branches of pattern-match nodes. I had optimized that for static mats, but not for dynamic mats. skill issue. Fable figured how to do it for these, resulting in a massive speedup in some benches

but wait, is that *correct*? I'm not sure yet, it is credible, but this is the kind of thing that is very easy to get wrong on interaction nets. the problem is, when I was ready to start auditing Fable's solution so I could tell whether it was buggy or legit, it interrupted me to tell me it had found a massive bug on the code *I* had written.

... wait, what?

so... for garbage collection purposes, I stored a bit on lambda term pointers that meant "the variable bound by this lambda has been freed, so, its lambda must free whatever argument it is applied to". that's fine. yet, on duplicator nodes, I also used the same bit to mean "one of the duplicated variables was freed, so, treat this dup as a passthrough no-op". so, if a lambda entered a duplicator, it would mistake the lambda's collection bit for its own, resulting in corrupted interaction!

that's a mouthful, why I'm writing this?

just so you can appreciate the sheer absurdity of what just happened. I didn't ask it to find bugs. I asked it for an optimization. and even if I did ask it to find bugs, this bug is so astonishingly subtle and specific, identifying it takes mastering the domain to an extent that it beyond even me. I'd easily need hours or days to fix it, *if* I ever came across it. chances are it would just go unnoticed. and Fable found it and fixed it like it was nothing, while it was busy adding a 17x speedup to a file that neither I, nor Opus 4.8, nor a fleet of GPT 5.5 managed to barely make 2x faster.

oh and there is also another tab where it is also ripping through Bend's codebase and finishing everything I had to do

I don't know what to say anymore

this isn't about Anthropic or OpenAI, this is about our collective future as a species. the world is changing, and we need to be aware of it, and discuss how to handle this change.

receipt below . . .

[Visa is doing marketing consults (see pinned!) @visakanv]

emotionally speaking, having a newborn is roughly like getting Frodo to Rivendell. Sweet helpless lil guy needs support

toddlerhood is akin to battle of Helm’s Deep. there’s dwarf-tossing, architectural damage, lots of climbing and falling, a giant battering ram for some reason,

[gfodor.id @gfodor]

@eastdakota