Yossi Horowitz

Jedi: Survivor team at @Respawn. Did #DuckTalesRemastered at @WayForward, #CocoVR at @Magnopus. (Any thoughts and opinions expressed are my own, etc.)

[Yossi Horowitz @YossiMH]

@AntonHand If nobody's explained it to you and you've heard that people are playing steam games via Virtual Desktop, why *wouldn't* you assume that it's a VM running on your quest?

[Yossi Horowitz @YossiMH]

@thsottiaux No built in database-backed directional todo graph.

[Yossi Horowitz @YossiMH]

@ShinyColarbone @FFmpeg Like is all about accepting the unacceptable, but that's not the same thing as recategorizing the unacceptable as acceptable.

[Klara @klara_sjo]

Take me down to the parallax city where the back moves slow and the front moves quickly.

[Sandy Petersen 🪔 @SandyofCthulhu]

We have gigantic creatures in the sea which can sing for hours and have arteries so big you can crawl through them. (whales)

We have birds that fly 50,000 miles every year. From the antarctic to the arctic and back again. (arctic tern)

We have living creatures which never get old and never die naturally. (jellyfish)

We have animals which you can force through a sieve, and they can reassemble themselves. (sponges)

We have an ancient line of animals which once had 30 or more successful species, and has gone extinct down to just one single representative, and that representative has conquered the entire world (us).

We have horrors that look just like rocks and if you step on them your whole world becomes agonizing pain. (toadfish)

We have animals who hide inside other animals, and when you eat that animal, they enter your intestines and live there. (tapeworms)

We have plants which live on other plants and never touch the ground.

There's a fruit tree that grows around another tree, and eventually kills and replaces it. (strangler fig)

We have gliding lizards, marsupials, snakes, frogs, and rodents.

What the heck do you need fairies for?

[Yossi Horowitz @YossiMH]

@PhantomAst74563 @VideoGabesBU About 1936?

[Yossi Horowitz @YossiMH]

@mitchellh If you can tell the difference you don't need the disclosure. If you can't tell the difference why does it bother you?

[shira @shiraeis]

"limit your kid's screen time" is correct advice today, but people are confused about why it's correct, and that matters because the reason has an expiration date.

the issue with ipad kids was never too much screen time in some vague moral sense, but that the software on the other side of the glass is essentially a superstimulus engine running a curriculum in learned helplessness. bright colors, zero latency rewards, infinite novelty, no boredom, no friction, and no consequence. you poke the most interesting square and something happens immediately.

if the world worked that way, it'd be fine, but the world is almost entirely delayed gratification, ambiguous feedback, physical constraint, and needing to sit with uncertainty long enough to actually figure something out. so you're training a kid on an environment that is aggressively uncorrelated with the one they'll have to function in. it's a distribution mismatch problem.

this means the winning parenting heuristic isn't "less screen time," but "don't let your kid marinate in a training environment optimized for engagement extraction when they should be building a world model." screens just happen to be a horrible training environment.

but that's contingent and doesn't have to stay true.

consider an AI that actually knows your kid, not in a creepy ad-targeting way, but in a way an aristocratic tutor knows their pupil. it follows them since birth, and maybe it remembers what confused them in march and checks whether they've resolved it by june. it notices when they're pattern matching instead of reasoning and calls them out on it. it asks hard questions at the right time, not to test them, but because it has a genuine model of what they're ready to think about next, and critically, it keeps routing them back to real world problems instead of substituting for them.

this probably starts life as a stuffed animal, but the same entity transfers across form factors as the kid ages. the plush rabbit becomes a voice in their earbuds. he memory and the relationship are continuous. the interface changes, but it's one long developmental arc, not a series of disconnected apps.

the thing that made ipad kids a cautionary tale was that the optimization target was retention. a sufficiently good AI tutor could optimize for what actually matters, like reflection, causal reasoning, metacognition, and tolerance for confusion, using the kid's actual life as curriculum instead of some frictionless cartoon sandbox.

basically, the principle I'd actually endorse isn't "minimize screens." it's closer to "choose the training environment that best teaches your kid to think, pay attention, and update on evidence."

right now that means less screen time, but in maybe two-five years the correct parenting move might be something nobody is emotionally prepared to hear, which is, your kid should probably be raised in part by an aristocratic tutor with perfect recall and great priors who happens to live inside a stuffed rabbit.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

I know there is some overlap between open source and anti-AI activists, but I have a hard time reconciling it. My million+ open source LOC were always intended as a gift to the world. Yes, I would make arguments about how it would strengthen our communities, and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors, but those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift.

AI training on the code magnifies the value of the gift. I am enthusiastic about it!

Some people do look at open source as a tool for social change, career advancement, or reputation building, but those are all downstream of the gift.

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages.

The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse.

I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee.

There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true.

But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.

[Madelaine Hanson @MadelaineLucyH]

The thing I hate the MOST about the left is the culture of trying to punish good-faith people for not being off the deep end of academic language and in-group signalling.

The thing I hate the MOST about the right is brutal violence, racism, rampant sexual abuse, oppression, paedophilia, and white supremacy

[Ivan Burazin @ivanburazin]

Voice messages should die.

I hate everyone who sends them. When someone sends me a voice note, I don't look at it for days.

It's the most selfish form of communication. You're offloading your typing time onto my listening time.

You get convenience and I get locked into your pace. Can neither skim thru nor reference them later.

[Gappy (Giuseppe Paleologo) @__paleologo]

If someone had told me in 1990 that I would be sending a post on a microblogging site (not a thing), about writing natural language instructions to an AI agent to create symbolic mathematics, rewrite a paper, then write the code in a readable language (python, not released) to simulate the algorithm in the paper, while on a plane with fast wi-fi (not existing), on a 3lb fast mac with a hi-res color screen (the first powerbook with a color screen came in 1993, 640x400, 7lbs) and 10+ hours of battery life, I would not have believed them. All of these things ranged from the "does not exist yet" to the "are you completely bonkers".

35 years.

Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

[Yossi Horowitz @YossiMH]

@summeryue0 @petergyang I've never understood why agent harnesses don't maintain user instructions verbatim as part of compaction if they're short enough.

[Matthew Zeitlin @MattZeitlin]

whenever people downplay AI capabilities by saying "actually it's just a next token predictor" all i can think of is

[Yossi Horowitz @YossiMH]

@mrwater79321297 @no_muppets Sure, but the Smithsonian is one of the most prestigious museums in the world. That's not an insult; it's an honor.

[Yossi Horowitz @YossiMH]

@no_muppets @mrwater79321297 Surely they must have several builds of major characters like that?

[Yossi Horowitz @YossiMH]

@mrwater79321297 @no_muppets Why?