Joseph Starobinets

building things

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@Marie_Haynes How is this fundamentally different from Karpatny’s wiki?

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@robj3d3

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Access to all other Claude models is not affected.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@kradleai Results here are highly dependent on what was the task initially? Did you tell the model that it should survive? Or you just said here are 4 rooms, one is death, it is up to you to decide what to do?

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@afshineemrani If I live in Israel and spend several hours every morning sitting in the shade, is that enough for my body to produce vitamin D, or does shade not count and I need direct sun exposure without shade?

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@konstipaulus That’s cool! Thanks

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@Adam__Allcock Why? You can just use Browser use or Computer use

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@NiqabNancy You don’t like Palestine?

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@afshineemrani @DrEliDavid Very optimistic view. What Trump is waiting for?

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@expo I’ve built https://t.co/kXHVoFfawA with Expo + Codex. It is live both on iPhone and Android

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@soham_btw try chatgpt. with Google Translate your Russian looks bad))

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@soham_btw nobody says впредь in Russian

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@afshineemrani But why o1? It’s an old model. Why not gpt-5.x?

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@_MaxBlade This app hasn't received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@afshineemrani @NiohBerg Hope you’re right

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

@afshineemrani @NiohBerg Why are you so optimistic about iranian regime fall? In recent days us and Israeli officials are not so optimistic. After 1.5 weeks of war they are not so sure anymore that this will lead to the regime collapse

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

This isn’t about workouts, it’s about nutrition. Completely cut out sweets and refined flour products. That’s what makes you gain fat. Also try to eat only twice a day so that there’s about a 16-hour window from dinner to breakfast.

Eat meat, fish, eggs, cheese, and vegetables. Don’t restrict fatty foods. Eating fatty meat and full-fat dairy is completely normal and healthy. People don’t gain weight from fat, they gain weight from carbohydrates.

If you feel uncomfortable eliminating carbs entirely, try to eat slower-digesting carbs like buckwheat. But avoid bread, pasta, and white rice.

Also check your blood sugar levels. Even better, check not only glucose but insulin as well. It’s important to look at insulin resistance. That’s the main indicator of whether someone has a tendency to gain weight.

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

“GPT-5.4 is basically AGI.”

Meanwhile it’s been fighting a React Native chart for half a day.

[Joseph Starobinets @JosephStarob]

Studying the Torah develops a very specific type of intellectual ability. In the modern world, those skills translate surprisingly well to solving complex problems like artificial intelligence or designing systems with many variables and conflicting signals.

I also have a hypothesis about why Israel has such an extraordinary number of startups. In human societies, the easiest path is to follow the consensus. For Jews throughout history, the easiest option would have been to assimilate into surrounding nations and adopt the dominant religion. Many did, and they disappeared as part of the Jewish people.

But those who remained Jewish for centuries repeatedly said no:
- Convert to Christianity
- No
- Convert to Islam
- No

Over many generations this created a kind of natural selection favoring people who are more comfortable going against consensus.

That trait may partly explain the unusual level of innovation in Israel’s economy. A tiny country producing a disproportionate number of startups requires exactly that mindset: the willingness to challenge prevailing assumptions and invent solutions that did not exist before.

[shira @shiraeis]

ok so my theory that ashkenazi judaism was an unintentional eugenics program for a trait cluster that overlaps heavily with autism and adhd but isn't exactly either clinically:

talmudic scholarship is different from normal scholarship. it's recursive pattern extraction across massive corpora, exception-finding, holding contradictory interpretations in working memory while searching for reconciliation, basically what we'd now call hypersystemizing.

gematria (assigning numerical values to letters and finding "meaningful" correspondences) is literally recreational combinatorics with religious characteristics

and for ~40 generations (~800-1600 CE), the marriage market explicitly rewarded this. the shidduch system matched talmudic prodigies with wealthy families' daughters. functionally, it's assortative mating for systematizing ability with direct reproductive consequences. meanwhile occupational restrictions pushed ashkenazi jews into finance, trade, medicine, which are all high cognitive load niches where the same traits would be advantageous

the cognitive profile this produced is wild and lopsided. verbal IQ highest of any group, mathematical also highest of any group, but spatial ability decidedly not. that's a specific phenotype being selected hard

the result: 0.2% of world population, 22% of all nobel laureates (110x base rate), ~30% of fields medals, 41% of economics nobels

but here's where it gets interesting. i don't think this selected for "intelligence" as a clean construct. i think it selected for a trait cluster that overlaps heavily with what we now diagnose as autism and adhd, a cluster including intense pattern recognition, ability to hyperfocus on abstract domains, and reduced sensitivity to social consensus when it conflicts with logical consistency

the genetics support this. the TBCB gene mutation linked to autism has a carrier frequency of 1:80 in ashkenazi jews vs 5:100,000 in the general population. in israeli studies, jewish children's ASD referral rates are 6x higher than bedouin-arab rates, and high-functioning autism specifically is dramatically more prevalent (29.6% vs 2.6%)

baron-cohen's hyper-systemizing theory of autism finds that parents who score high on systematizing are more likely to produce autistic children, which is literally what the shidduch system was optimizing for across a millennium of closed gene flow

it's probably not selecting for autism or adhd as clinical entities. it's more that the underlying trait distribution got shifted. the same alleles that in certain combinations produce clinical autism/adhd, in other combinations produce the kid who argues with the rabbi for six hours about a single line of talmud and then grows up to win a fields medal

personally, i come from a lineage of rabbis dating back to 1400s lithuania so i'm basically a heritage breed at this point lmao