Andrew Clough

Because ten billion years' time is so fragile, so ephemeral...it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness.
🔸🌎🏗

[Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 @RuxandraTeslo]

It turns out that when you start to vaccinate dogs, humans cases of rabies massively decline

[Will Poff-Webster @willpoffwebster]

New York spent 18x what Madrid spends, per mile, on the Second Ave Subway.

Over the same period that California failed to build 150 miles of high-speed rail from Bakersfield to Merced, China built 30,000 miles of high-speed rail.

We've known for years that America was paying more for less, but we didn't know how to fix it.

We published the Transit Abundance Playbook to change that, with 15 specific ideas focused on the surface reauthorization bill - let us know what you think!

[Andrew Clough @aclough]

When I was writing about the diplomatic handicaps the US was giving itself in the war with Iran, I didn't consider that we'd also put time pressure on ourselves to come to an agreement ahead of the president's birthday. https://t.co/ksKDBsIJC0

["Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @BretDevereaux]

Crucially, it is possible for all the following to be true:
1) The foolish decision to attack Iran has damaged the USA's strategic interests but
2) A more competent negotiator might mitigate that damage, but that's not what we have but
3) a return to hostilities would not help.

[Andrew Clough @aclough]

In the world cup I'm rooting for the US first, but second should I prioritize places great grandparents were born (England, Ireland, Sweden), my employer (Korea), or languages I've attempted to learn (Spanish, Japanese)?

[Andrew Clough @aclough]

@tracewoodgrains @Col_Crockett I endorse the above. I like renting a bike for the carriage trails but that's a pretty well known activity I think.

[Josh Young @JoshYoung]

Trump: the Strait is reopening, more ships are passing through, the Oil is flowing

The Strait: mostly the same as yesterday, last week, and last month

[Ben Smith @semaforben]

Extent to which White House allies are signaling that this is a culture war issue, not a technical one, is striking

[Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid]

Thanks to socialism, the average Zimbabwean became a trillionaire before @elonmusk 💪

[Shashank Joshi @shashj]

A transparent process would explain the basis on which a model gets banned so people could see whether this applied equally to equivalent model capabilities. Instead we have chest-thumping tweets from DoD.

[Jerusalem @JerusalemDemsas]

Actually read Silent Spring with @mattyglesias for the pod and hot take: modern Greens should take a lesson from Carson's book and be more boring.

Watch/listen to our pod wherever you get your podcasts.

https://t.co/2gYyzlMLgI

[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 . . .

[Violet @buxwal]

You could raise $90 billion for reconciliation if you did an age-adjusted compensation ranking. Meanwhile, USG itself admits the $100k H-1B fee loses them money.

[Leah Libresco Sargeant @LeahLibresco]

This is a huge, devastating loss

[Brad Carson @bradrcarson]

As OAI tries to distance itself from LTF, another notable fact from the @TaylorLorenz and @TheMidasProj investigation: Of the sock puppet accounts, which don't have tons of followers, who else but OAI's Chief Strategy Officer! You don't just stumble on these accounts!

[roon @tszzl]

the frontier labs don’t have “comms problems”. reality right now has a comms problem. what is happening is a little scary and there’s no nice words anyone could say, especially not those profiting from it, that’ll make it feel that much better

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Anthropic has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Pending completion of SEC review, this gives us the option to pursue an initial public offering.

Read more: https://t.co/onGZAhRLvD

[Bull Theory @BullTheoryio]

BREAKING: Google is planning to release 32 million mosquitoes across Florida and California.

The company has asked the EPA for permission to proceed, with the public given until June 5 to respond.

The mosquitoes are infected with Wolbachia bacteria, which stops them from reproducing and slowly collapses the wild population from within.

Google's previous Debug Project trial in California's Central Valley nearly eliminated mosquitoes from three test sites entirely. A separate trial in Singapore cut dengue cases by 70% within 12 months.

Google has now released over 1 billion mosquitoes across four continents. This new proposal is the largest deployment in US history.

[Eric Berger @SciGuySpace]

Early reports that one tower and the transporter erector at LC-36A were damaged beyond repair appear to be true.

[NSF - NASASpaceflight.com @NASASpaceflight]

Blue Origin's New Glenn just blew up at LC-36 while attempting to Static Fire ahead of NG-4.

https://t.co/tANS0dWyIH