bensa

wow space

[bensa @benhsampson]

@ahgraz @joyful_union @MemesOfCars So other than the noble intentions of the CCP, how are the Chinese subsidies different from the US ones in a substantive way?

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Under the pretext of banning under-16s from social media to “protect the children,” Keir Starmer has snuck in some small print that should make Americans really glad that all the tea was dumped into the Boston harbour back in 1773.

Adults will still be “allowed” to use the platforms… once they’ve handed over facial recognition, digital ID, passport, or credit card details to prove they’re not a child.

So it was never really about the kids. It was about making sure every single person who wants to speak online has to first tell the government exactly who they are.

Step 1: Link your real identity to your speech

Step 2: police have a lovely searchable database of every spicy take, meme, or complaint you’ve ever posted

Step 3: bring in the consequences - arrests, travel ban, debunking, for out-of-bounds speech

The UK is in a free fall.

[Lauren Chen @TheLaurenChen]

Mail-in ballots favor Democrats.

OK, fine.

Spencer Pratt was never going to lead in mail-in ballots.

But what is the justification for mail-in ballots received BEFORE the election vastly favoring Karen Bass, and the ones received AFTER the election favoring Nithya Raman?

[soothsayer @iamasoothsayer]

2023: Corona ended
2026: Hantavirus

[bensa @benhsampson]

@rickr7n @JamshidHormuz @jbillinson Try giving a drone a gun and see how it manages the recoil.

[bensa @benhsampson]

@jbillinson The capability is impressive regardless of whether its going to be used in sports or not.

[bensa @benhsampson]

@Edin_333 @SnowHimbo Why is it those that have experienced communism are its most ardent critics?

[bensa @benhsampson]

@DissentFu @TheyWokeAmongUs So the 80,000 jobs originally there is "piddly" but the 8000 cut is gargantuan.

80000 > 8000 last I checked.

[bensa @benhsampson]

@DissentFu The median yearly total compensation for a Meta employee is approximately $281,933.
But yeah the way you portrayed it isn't delusional at all.

[bensa @benhsampson]

@SpartanFan055 @tomaskenn What do you mean by right wing? Like the economic reforms in China that reduced poverty from 41% to 5%. Go tell them their policies didn't work now that they don't have to starve anymore.

[bensa @benhsampson]

@wooklordbrayan @PresidentToguro So we're people better or worse off prior to Milei being elected?

[bensa @benhsampson]

@TrickVAL @canezerra @erafps Can anyone testify to seeing this tweet before the allegations? Wanna make sure this wasn't edited in the backend or something.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

I play devil's advocate against my guests to test out their ideas.

As you pointed out yourself when I hassled Dario during *his* interview :)

Re China, when I had Dario on, because he supports export controls, I asked him, “Why can’t China and America both have a datacenter of geniuses?”

With Jensen, I took the opposite track.

https://t.co/kjNO73JGdX

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.

The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.

But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.

So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.

TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

[bensa @benhsampson]

@DavidShares @kick_clips And?? What part of that disputes him being a genius?

[bensa @benhsampson]

@SportsHQ360 @kick_clips Ronaldo isn't the GOAT because he had a team.
That's basically your argument.

[bensa @benhsampson]

@MowzaProduction @_ProfeticEye_ @kick_clips So the company goes from $10 million to $1 trillion and you think that has nothing to do with the guy that coincidentally became CEO in between.

[bensa @benhsampson]

@ABVGpkmn @_ProfeticEye_ @kick_clips So the company goes from $10 million to $1 trillion and you think that has nothing to do with the guy that coincidentally became CEO in the interim. Odd that.

[NewsForce @Newsforce]

POKÉMON GO PLAYERS TRAINED 30 BILLION IMAGE AI MAP

Niantic says photos and scans collected through Pokémon Go and its AR apps have produced a massive dataset of more than 30 billion real-world images.

The company is now using that data to power visual navigation for delivery robots, letting them identify exact locations on city streets without relying on GPS.

Source: NewsForce

[david friedberg @friedberg]

what if the AI creates/enables/unlocks new higher-paying jobs? by trying to prevent organizational evolution due to technology, you are limiting technology’s ability to create more value for workers.

if you had done this with the emergence of the tractor to protect loss of jobs on farms, we’d have very expensive food, no industrial revolution, and a shitty standard of living for workers. if you had done this with the emergence of the automobile, we’d have lost the economic explosion that arose from highways, lower cost transportation, and countless networked industries. if you had done this with the emergence of the computer and the internet, your entire district would still be based on an economy of oranges and plums.

humanity’s ability to compete, organize, and carry itself forward is a magical miracle. in every truly free society, tech evolution has improved the lives of absolutely everyone. in every society where a government stood up to create barriers and gates to tech evolution in the name of “workers rights”, standards of living went into a freefall.

your view is luddite at best and authoritarian at its heart. limiting freedom of choice, controlling the rights of workers and capital providers, is the core activity of socialism and will cause unbelievable unintended damage. well-intentiined, sure, but examining the consequences and n-th order effects, it’s clear how this model deeply harms workers, employment standards, wage growth etc.

i urge you to deeply study the social and economic history of technology evolutions, speak to folks in your district, and avoid the socialist trap the Dem party seems to be swirling into…