carlosb

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

John McCain and I didn’t always agree, but he understood that some values transcended parties. He knew that if we got in the habit of bending the truth to suit political expediency or party orthodoxy, our democracy will not work.

John McCain had character. That’s what I think about so much these days because it’s so different from what we see out of the Republican nominee.

[World of Engineering @engineers_feed]

useful tool for running wires in places that are closed in

[Paul Graham @paulg]

How many Olympic medallists even know why one would bite a medal?

I bet few do. And for the rest it must seem such a bizarrely pointless thing to do.

[Kenneth Roth @KenRoth]

Here's a good summary of the evidence suggesting that Egypt's President Sisi gave Trump $10 million in cash to help finance his 2016 campaign and that, once elected, Trump's attorney general quashed the investigation of this embarrassing crime. https://t.co/oJfYdpBLop

[Mira of Kyiv 🇺🇦 @reshetz]

Modern Turing test

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

When schools go phone free, the results are great -- once you get past the first few weeks and withdrawal symptoms. It's working in NY state schools, and Gov. Hochul will call for it statewide:

https://t.co/a4biSkY9Va

[Erik Brynjolfsson @erikbryn]

With pro-immigration, pro-child and pro-housing policies, the US could exceed China’s population in the next century.

#OneBillionAmericans

Cc: @mattyglesias

[Mark Carnegie 🛡️ @iammarkcarnegie]

If you don’t think this is a crisis i don’t know what to say to you. H/t ⁦@toadmeister⁩ ⁦@JonHaidt⁩

[Josh @JoshuaOgundu]

A woman who graduated from Harvard Business School breaks down the hierarchy of men in finance

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

It's not possible to share this image too widely or too often. Join me in spreading it far and wide.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

every single company in my portfolio that has done layoffs is shipping product faster than they did before

[Christian Keil @pronounced_kyle]

The number of people living in extreme poverty fell by ~100,000 yesterday.

(This has been true every day since 1990, on average.)

[David Perell @david_perell]

Dave Letterman’s advice to Jerry Seinfeld: “Make sure you fail doing exactly what you want to do. That, you can live with.“

[BONUS🌍 @TheDisproof]

This is genius: https://t.co/j1CJmZyH2g

[Lee Mordechai @LeeMordechai]

1/ I’m an Israeli academic. My community is too silent about the ongoing war in Gaza. Here is how I see things based on reading hundreds of articles and watching thousands of videos and images about the war. This tweet chain contains my conclusions as a sort of executive summary.

[Middle East Eye @MiddleEastEye]

“(Israeli soldiers) shot my mother in her stomach. She was pregnant, in the seventh month.”

Palestinian child Faisal al Khaldi recalls the moment that Israeli soldiers came to their home as he was preparing to go to school and killed his mother in front of him in Gaza City.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

# on technical accessibility

One interesting observation I think back to often:
- when I first published the micrograd repo, it got some traction on GitHub but then somewhat stagnated and it didn't seem that people cared much.
- then I made the video building it from scratch, and the repo immediately went through hockey stick growth and became a verty often cited reference for people learning backpropagation.

This was interesting because the micrograd code itself didn't change at all and it was up on GitHub for many months before, stagnating. The code made sense to me (because I wrote it), it was only ~200 lines of code, it was extensively commented in the .py files and in the Readme, so I thought surely it was clear and/or self-explanatory. I was very happy with myself about how minimal the code was for explaining backprop - it strips away a ton of complexity and just gets to the very heart of an autograd engine on one page of code. But others didn't seem to think so, so I just kind of brushed it off and moved on.

Except it turned out that what stood in its way was "just" a matter of accessibility. When I made the video that built it and walked through it, it suddenly almost 100X'd the overall interest and engagement with that exact same piece of code. Not only from beginners in the field who needed the full intro and explanation, but even from more technical/expert friends, who I think could have understood it if they looked at it long enough, but were deterred by a barrier to entry.

I think as technical people we have a strong bias to put up code or papers or the final thing and feel like things are mostly self-explanatory. It's there, and also it's commented, there is a Readme, so all is well, and if people don't engage then it's just because the thing is not good enough. But the reality is that there is still a large barrier to engage with your thing (even for other experts who might not feel like spending time/effort!), and you might be leaving somewhere 10-100X of the potential of that exact same piece of work on the table just because you haven't made it sufficiently accessible.

TLDR: Step 1 build the thing. Step 2 build the ramp. 📈
Some voice in your head will tell you that this is not necessary, but it is wrong.

[Matthew Chapman @fawfulfan]

Sigh... every year I have to explain this. THIS PART OF THE TAX CODE HAS A VERY GOOD REASON FOR EXISTING.

Of course the IRS doesn't expect criminals to follow it. The idea is that when they DON'T follow it, they can then get charged with tax evasion on top of their other crimes.

[Sam Altman @sama]

here is sora, our video generation model:

https://t.co/CDr4DdCrh1

today we are starting red-teaming and offering access to a limited number of creators.

@_tim_brooks @billpeeb @model_mechanic are really incredible; amazing work by them and the team.

remarkable moment.

[Jim Bowers @JimBowersclimb]

Look at what @elonmusk has accomplished. Lying about science is now out of control! And it's so easy to fool people with science lies because of the lack of science education. Oil lobbyists can make up all sorts of lying crap and millions can't tell they are lying!