Clayton Miller

Emergentist. The beauty of Fourier is not that everything can be reduced to sine waves, but that sines can form a universe of infinitely complex waveforms.

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

When I claim the label of “emergentist,” this is the kind of cosmic reductionism to which I stand constitutionally opposed.

“We’re all just meatbags.” “We’re all just stardust.” “We’re all just carbon atoms.”

We are infinitely complex arrangements of systems built upon systems, from the quantum properties of those carbon atoms up through the proteins that make the “meat” we are so glibly reduced to, through the complexities and adaptations of mammalian bodies, up to the fearsome order of the human brain and the intricate sprawl of human society and culture.

To reduce us to anything less is to deny the cosmically implausible, fearfully and wonderfully emergent singularity that is humanity.

[Vivian Midha Shen @vivianmshen]

i think about this story often now

we're all just meatbags

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@Indian_Bronson This made me realize that for all our differences, Chicago and Miami share a certain tempestuous relationship with nature that the principal coastals don’t quite have.

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

I would add understanding the continuum of what is solidly in-distribution and what is on the fringes. You have to be able to differentiate “this is a broadly documented domain that I personally have little experience with but can benefit from an LLM’s abstraction” from “this is something either novel or dumb that will yield a confident and plausible yet ultimately incoherent answer”

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@jonatanpallesen It was at least fine for a while when the Following tab had an algorithmic feed of only accounts you follow. But now that feed mixes in ones you don’t follow, completely negating the original value of the feature.

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@Paul_Heron_ I initially misread the artist’s name an Andrew Wyeth, but then looked him up and discovered they are father and son.

Next thing I’ll find out George Tooker had a kid who kept the dynasty going…

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@lauriewired Do you think modern on-package memory architectures like Apple Silicon could have made this kind of round-tripping more feasible, or would the performance hit still probably not be worth it?

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@junker_jo “Babe, whatchu talking bout, I ain’t got no amphoras

Definitely no gay ones”

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

Even at a big industry conference, McDonald’s can’t help but create liminal spaces.

[Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌 @Chris_arnade]

Who says America can't build things?

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@camhberg @Tyler_A_Harper That's fair; it's reductive to paint the much higher-order math that transformers do as equivalent to what a word processor does. That math has emergent properties; we only disagree on the possibility space of what those properties could be.

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@camhberg @Tyler_A_Harper I mean if you're on board with computational functionalism, sure, but 3B1B isn't going to take you down that road.

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@camhberg @Tyler_A_Harper Those videos are great! I do not, however, see how a better understanding of multilayer perceptrons and attention blocks would lead one toward the possibility that these (amazing) mathematical processes would become self-aware.

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@jon_stokes This is interesting because there's a kernel of truth to the idea, even in modern silent reading. When you read a text, you're modeling the writer, running foreign code that usually stays sandboxed, but there are plenty of unpatched privilege escalations out there...

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

"We need craft proof. Problem grid triangular positive a,b sum<=n+1."

[Jonathan Chang @ChangJonathanC]

accidentally discovered a way to get raw-ish cot from gpt-5.5

here is it trying to solve IMO 2025 P1

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

“Well, Tucker, if you really want to understand, you must go back to the very beginning. Not to the 20th century, not even to the time of the Plantations or the Flight of the Earls… no. We must begin with the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of the Taking of Ireland, and the coming of the Tuatha Dé Danann.”

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@GodCloseMyEyes

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@CHI2COL @culturecanceler I’m at the Sbarro and Taco Bell oasis
I’m at Soldier Field
I’m at the combination Sbarro and Taco Bell oasis Soldier Field

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

As best I can tell, the Following tab on X is now about 50% accounts you aren’t following. Presumably this means the For You tab is now 0% accounts you follow. I’d go check, but I think this change has convinced me to take a break from The Everything App.

Heckuva job, Nikita. 🫡

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

For me at least, Russell’s teapot. It is perhaps not entirely impossible that silicon performing matrix multiplication to mimic human thought via language could coincidentally develop the same consciousness as arose from a fundamentally different arrangement of systems that make up human beings… but such an astronomical improbability would be an article of faith, just like that against which Russell originally argued with the teapot analogy.

Which is a roundabout way of saying it *is* in fact faith-based for me, but that a belief in AI consciousness has no greater claim to rationality than my own faith in imago dei.

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@GarrettPetersen At this point, anyone sending SMS MFA messages without an all-caps "DO NOT GIVE THIS NUMBER TO ANYONE OVER THE PHONE" is liable for criminal negligence.

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

It's happening. I was just talking with someone at work after they gave me a deck with some background on a technical problem that will need some UX around it, and I started to say "I'll ground my understanding..."

I'm talking like Codex now. Lab-grown memetic virus got me.

[Clayton Miller @claymill]

@theREALgilesb @kunley_drukpa Apparently the book goes into (much) greater detail on this, the thrust being that the Eridians, lacking any sensory organs in the electromagnetic spectrum (like eyes) had a totally different tech tree that simply never got as deep into the various forms of radiation.