Ben Levine

Helping you w your finances, building ai agents @getcandidly. PhD @Columbia dropout. Formerly @twitter doing data+revenue things.

[Ben Levine @blevined]

My preferred aesthetic is sitting in a crowded Chinese restaurant alone eating soup dumplings listening to a podcast

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.

Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.

I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."

"They just come with the table, man."

They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.

This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.

I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.

"Did we…?"

"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."

Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.

My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.

Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.

I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.

Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

[Ben Levine @blevined]

The remote coding experience in the ChatGPT iOS app + whatever compaction magic OpenAI has done for Codex means I can literally keep a project going poolside with minimal hiccups

[Ben Levine @blevined]

Tough to use this as an effective example, we withdrew from this treaty 😂

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

i'm obsessed with AI DIY projects.

my favorite one right now is this broccoli farmer in hokkaido, japan using Codex to run his 100-hectare farm

this guy never studied agriculture, never inherited land, started out as a civil servant.

but he wanted his farm to run better, and instead of paying an engineering firm he couldn't afford, he just built the tools himself.

here's what he's built on his own:

> remote control of his greenhouse vents from a chat app, wired up with an esp32 board, a motor driver, and cloudflare workers

> a bot that checks each greenhouse's temperature and opens the vents when it gets too hot

> satellite crop-health data laid over a map of his own fields

> an airtable base linking his plots, tasks, materials, and sensors

> wiring diagrams of his electrical panels, generated from a photo

stuff like this used to be locked behind machinery and engineers only the big agribusinesses could pay for.

but this legend just breezed past all of it with a laptop and Codex lol

[Ben Levine @blevined]

this is a big brain thought idc

[Ben Levine @blevined]

i wonder if the dewey decimal system is like deeply ingrained in foundation models' understanding so that it is actually a good way of organizing knowledge for them

[Ben Levine @blevined]

@RaminNasibov Oregon trail, obviously

[Ben Levine @blevined]

@brookeleblanc Best popovers in sf!

[Karen McGee @karenmotherof2]

My body is a machine that turns domestic beers and grilled meats into respect for all of those who have served

[Ben Levine @blevined]

me at work

[Ben Levine @blevined]

I can hear BTS from my house

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

"The single most important thing for anybody wanting to break into any industry is go to the headquarters or cluster of that industry. Move to wherever that thing is. And all the advice that you can do anything from anywhere and everything's remote is all BS. With AI, 91 percent of private technology market cap is in the Bay Area. Ninety-one percent of the entire global set of AI market cap is all in one 10 by 10 area."
— Elad Gil

Listen to my interview with @eladgil:

https://t.co/Z1cjLkdcX0

[The Associated Press @AP]

WATCH: Taiwanese grandmothers aged 89 and 91 train at the gym. An increasing number of elderly people in Taiwan’s super-aged society are hitting the gym to stay healthy, both physically and mentally.

[Ben Levine @blevined]

Caninus internus

[Ben Levine @blevined]

You can leave the plates on, I need to warm up

[Ben Levine @blevined]

Really excited to be presenting a paper I've been working on at this workshop! more to come

[Hannah Li @hannahq_li]

Submit your work to our Workshop on Experimentation for Decision-Making!

We are particularly interested in how experiments fit into larger systems. How do they influence decisions? Who decides which experiments are run? How do you navigate multiple experiments?

[Ben Levine @blevined]

🥶🥶🥶 looking so good @Gavmn

[Gavin Nelson @Gavmn]

Computer Use icon for today's Codex update

[Chris Hayduk @ChrisHayduk]

I strongly suspect that Claude Mythos is a looped language model, as described in the paper "Scaling Latent Reasoning via Looped Language Models" from ByteDance

The authors of that paper called out graph search as one of the areas where looping provides a huge theoretical advantage over standard RLVR. And look at where Mythos blows out its competitors the most

[signüll @signulll]

ai is exposing everyone right now & making legacy entities vulnerable af. even labs are having a tough time shipping features that feel really good end to end.

most ppl fail to realize that the hard part of building ai stuff was never access to a good model, it's the orchestration layer, the data plumbing, the taste in knowing when ai should intervene vs shut up, how it should intervene, what it should say, how it should say it, how does human in the loop work.. among many other subtle things. copilot is a prime time example of this.

most legacy players have none of these instincts cuz they built their orgs around shipping deterministic software. we are firmly in the non deterministic era now & that requires a very different skillset to build great tools.

[Ben Levine @blevined]

lots of alpha here

https://t.co/vbqArzl3CX