Jay Nelson

Former erlangist / scalability consultant. Wanna be digital code artist. African music lover.

[Sophie Wang @SophieLWang]

I made an interactive blog post about how JPEG image compression works: https://t.co/I3HU73R2ae

[Jay Nelson @duomark]

@TambayObenson @Metrograph This film is on Kanopy now.

[philip lewis @Phil_Lewis_]

Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She was 95. https://t.co/kfVPnCBSNt

[Frank @jedisct1]

Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access. https://t.co/qa18DbOm5a

[mariana Z @mariana057]

Why is no one ever the right amount of whelmed?

[Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy]

🚨 MIT just humiliated every major AI lab and nobody’s talking about it.

They built a new benchmark called WorldTest to see if AI actually understands the world… and the results are brutal.

Even the biggest models Claude, Gemini 2.5 Pro, OpenAI o3 got crushed by humans.

Here’s what makes it different:

WorldTest doesn’t check how well an AI predicts the next word or frame.
It measures if it can build an internal model of reality and use that to handle new situations.

They built AutumnBench 43 interactive worlds, 129 tasks where AIs must:

• Predict hidden parts of the world (masked-frame prediction)
• Plan multi-step actions to reach goals
• Detect when the rules of the environment suddenly change

Then they tested 517 humans vs the top models.
Humans dominated every category.
Even massive compute scaling barely helped.

The takeaway is wild:

Today’s AIs don’t understand environments they just pattern-match inside them. They don’t explore, revise beliefs, or experiment like humans do.

WorldTest might be the first benchmark that actually measures understanding, not memorization. And the gap it reveals isn’t small it’s the next grand challenge in AI cognition.

(Comment “Send” and I’ll DM you the paper 👇)

[Jay Nelson @duomark]

@rzezeski Maybe a good use for voice AI during debugging. I’m not a fan of generative, but maybe here you can narrate and make sense of things later.

[Homo Honey @DixPeyton]

i think about this often... how pushed we are to overproduce, how half-baked so much art is now and how much more we could learn if we took our time! what happens when we go into ourselves and away from it all can be really spectacular and d'angelo's discography is proof of that

[Jay Nelson @duomark]

@kwuchu Thanks, worthwhile tips and features. I still get benefit of my neighborhood bank (personal service, safe deposit box for thumb drive backups, passports, life docs), have long established Fidelity trading familiarity and decent resting cash rate. Good to know newer alternatives.

[Jay Nelson @duomark]

@kwuchu What advantages do you see for both Schwab and mercury?

[Techmeme @Techmeme]

As a percentage of US GDP, AI datacenter capex is already larger than peak telecom spending during the dot-com era and is approaching the railroad spending boom (@pkedrosky)

https://t.co/9Nokr1Nyco

https://t.co/ViIg9KrQIW
https://t.co/ZOzeer2dpR

[2mm @2mm2mm2mm2mm]

twitter specifically is 76%

[Jay Nelson @duomark]

@kwuchu Music? Photography? Travel?

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Yes.

Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking.

Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.

[alfie @alfienxo]

well well well, if it isn't the bridge i said i d cross when i came to it

[Bizlet @bizlet7]

They are calling vacations 'Micro-retirements' now.

[Jay Nelson @duomark]

@kwuchu Why did I think you posted “should I shoot my next trip to Fiji on the Ricoh”?

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This absolutely stunning chart comparison by the NYT might prove to be the most important geopolitical visualization of the 21st century.

The two major superpowers are each cornering a competing energy platform. China bets everything on clean energy, the US on fossil fuels.

It's incredibly rare, probably even unprecedented in history, to see 2 superpowers making completely opposite trillion-dollar bets on the underlying technology that literally powers the world.

Let's see how it plays out... One interesting related statistic: 87% of the Global South's new energy investments go to clean tech (https://t.co/DeCcbUAVCA), so it's pretty crystal clear which future they back.

Link to the NYT article: https://t.co/9HVVT7N9Bk

[Daniel @growing_daniel]

LLMs will achieve AGI by making humans so stupid that surpassing us is trivial