Zac de Lusignan

Catholic | Runner | Data Science | Seahawks 🏈 Bulls 🏀 White Sox ⚾

[Sam Biddle @samfbiddle]

I don't think I've ever seen someone tweet that their job has a >10% chance of ending humanity

[Lincoln Michel @TheLincoln]

"My job has a 1 in 10 chance of killing all humanity but at least I'm trying my best 👉👈🥺"

[Doc Sportello @TheDocSportello]

admiring the fantasy football team I just drafted

[Chuck Naso @ChuckNaso]

This is a BEAUTIFUL new White Sox stadium

Right on the River, access to train lines from every suburb and an actual real entertainment district around it.

Get it done Ishbia!

[Billy Binion @billybinion]

Here's your reminder that George Washington successfully opposed a congressional plan to put his face on a coin because he thought it was too king-like. Hard to think of a more perverse way to celebrate America's 250th than with this tacky-ass Trump coin.

[Seattle Times Sports @SeaTimesSports]

If there was a breakout figure from “Hard Knocks,” it was the Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald. His approach, demeanor and personality shined throughout the series.

Via @ByTimBooth

https://t.co/kDraXFqHla

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.

This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.

All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.

I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.

Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:

https://t.co/Nb2un9oNJR

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

Reading through the Huggingface reports, very hard to shake the feeling that this is basically Gain of Function research.

[Emma Camp @emmma_camp_]

Can rent control fix the housing crisis? No. In fact, it could make things a whole lot worse.

Find out more in my latest for @WSJFreeEx

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

i think AI is about to uncover an entire hidden world of animal communication

and what it's already found is insane...

> AI found evidence that elephants call each other by name. when researchers played one its name-like call, it approached the speaker faster and called back more, revealing a form of personal naming once thought almost uniquely human

> AI analyzed 53,993 marmoset calls and found tiny monkeys may use names too. entire families use similar labels for the same monkey, suggesting they learn names and dialects from each other

> AI learned to tell what Egyptian fruit bats were arguing about: food, mating, sleeping spots or personal space. it could even partly identify who was shouting at whom inside a colony of thousands

> AI discovered a “phonetic alphabet” in sperm whale clicks, with rhythm, tempo and tiny timing changes combining into at least 143 recurring patterns. their communication system is nearly 10x more expressive than scientists previously believed, and we still don't know what most of it means

> an AI trained on 1.5 million zebra finch calls held real-time vocal exchanges with living birds, generating calls as they spoke and getting them to respond with the same timing and flexibility they use with other birds

> Google trained an AI on decades of dolphin recordings to predict what sound comes next, then paired it with an underwater device that gives objects their own synthetic whistles. the goal is for a wild dolphin to copy a whistle to ask a human for a specific object, creating a tiny shared vocabulary between species

> AI combined microphones worn by wild crows with nest cameras and uncovered quiet calls that may announce when a crow is arriving at the nest and help entire families coordinate caring for their chicks

> a robot bee performed the waggle dance real bees use to share the direction and distance of food, and the bees changed their flight paths based on its instructions. researchers effectively sent a destination into a hive in bee language

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

People are about twice as likely to approve of **coal plants** being built nearby as opposed to data centers.

Coal plants use more water and pollute more. They create comparable noise pollution. There's no way this makes sense outside a media panic.

[Conor Friedersdorf @conor64]

I continue to marvel at how many of you voted for and support this man.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

At the San Diego Zoo, an otter family stole the spotlight in the most adorable way, turning a simple visit into a viral sensation.

While visitors watched in delight, a proud mother otter carried her tiny newborn pup right up to the glass for everyone to see. Moments later, the father joined in… but instead of another pup, he proudly held up his favorite smooth rock, creating a hilarious “show and tell” moment.

The charming video quickly exploded online with millions of views. Viewers couldn’t stop laughing, joking that the rock was “the one that got him the family,” while others praised the otters’ playful and social personalities. Wildlife experts noted that these heartwarming, funny moments are exactly why otters captivate people around the world.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

@WillManidis !!

Yes!

[Billy Binion @billybinion]

Fascinating. Some data centers came to a struggling town in Washington state. Did it run out of water? Was the community destroyed?

Let’s see. The town…built a new high school, hospital, library, sewage systems, and police & fire stations. Poverty fell from 29% to 6%.

Oh.

[Zac de Lusignan @ZacdeLusignan]

Envy becoming a dominant factor in American politics is so bleak

[Dr. Abdul El-Sayed @AbdulElSayed]

Both of these multimillionaires can afford a weekend on Mackinac Island. How about you and your family?

[Christopher Hale @ChristopherHale]

Let’s play this out.

Let’s say you skip the MMR shot for your kid. He catches measles at school.

A kindergartner down the hall is between chemo treatments for leukemia. Her doctors can’t vaccinate her, no matter how much they want to.

Measles floats in that classroom’s air for two hours after your son leaves, so she never has to be in the room with him to catch it.

Her immune system can’t fight off what a healthy kid’s body handles in a week.

Same danger for the six-month-old child down the street, because they’re too young for their first dose.

They’re only alive because everyone else in that building stayed vaccinated.

One infected kid in a full room can infect twenty others. No common infectious disease spreads faster.

Your decision about your own child just endangered other people’s children.

This poor child is dead in Texas because her parents are idiots who think they’re smart.

Full story below.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Fun chart: LLM study of how western values have changed in the last 2,000 years, based on an analysis of 23,000 books.

It's striking that while some values rise and fall over the millennia, "Indulgence"— defined as freedom from rigid social control and a preference for fun and gratification against restraint and asceticism—is higher than ever, having basically increased steadily since the 1500s.

[Zac de Lusignan @ZacdeLusignan]

3:42.66!! Kerr did it

[Zack Kanter @zackkanter]

If you mentally replace ‘data center’ with ‘big computer’ it helps crystallize the stupidity.