Alex Warren

Design Engineering & Research into Emotion Understanding with AI
@typesafeai

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

@dotpem @CompleteSkeptic @typesafeai Relatable

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

@CompleteSkeptic life as an agent

[Diogo Almeida @CompleteSkeptic]

https://t.co/lkDM4VXS4e

[Frank Yan @FrankYan2]

As promised, here's the short film Jia Zhangke produced using Seedance 2.0 for Chinese New Year and his take on AI filmmaking

[fabian @fabianstelzer]

The AI assistant Moltbot / Clawdbot trilemma is that you only get to pick two of these until prompt injections are solved:

Useful
Autonomous
Safe

[lmeyerov @lmeyerov]

We're launching something new to help investigation & automation teams🤠

When the @LOUIE_AI team went from announcing the first agentic AI speed-run of Splunk's annual Boss of the SOC investigation CTF at #RSAC → then helping 100+ hackers build their first AI agents at #BlackHatUSA with @Cyb3rWard0g , it was clear:

How to do agentic AI well needs to reach more of the investigation & automation community.

So, I'm happy to share we're starting a 2-day online masterclass "From AI Copilot to Commander" (16 CPE credits)

Think big picture views on what works today and what's next, and going hands-on with an AI cyber range for RAG, evals, investigation agents, OSS tools, MCP, semantic layer, etc on your choice of @splunk , @databricks , #kusto @AzDataExplorer .

Link in comments, and stay tuned for a @LOUIE_AI announcement on the software side of this same community direction. Fall is heating up! 🔥

cc @vicfcs @dawnsongtweets @cosh23 @Cyb3rWard0g @JohnLaTwC @ram_ssk

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

Intelligence Augmentation over Artificial Intelligence 😎

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

It's exciting building with this wave of AI and disheartening how quickly the startup community is ready to disregaurd human capacity

We are only beginning to understand human complexity - terra incognita, no training data, the frontier of understanding is right here.

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

@inconcel Oh, I'm in Tucson

[Michael Adams @m_adams]

Government is going to change in 2025 and good tools can help us do it right.

Introducing v2 of the SF Government Graph - a complete map of San Francisco’s government 🌉📈

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

@algekalipso `Interaction Ritual Chains` is a good explication for this sort of idea

[Carmen @carmenleelau]

Nutrient Levels in Retail Grocery Stores, or Why You Should Be Buying Your Groceries from Walmart

I've done some digging into nutrient levels in retail grocery stores (specifically where I should shop if I want nutritious food) and learned some insane things. Longest post I’ve done yet, so for readability this is also linked in my bio.

1) It's a well-documented phenomenon that nutrient levels in produce have been declining for decades. The average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach has dropped 80-90% between 1914 and 2018. (Image by Workinger et al., 2018)

There are several reasons for this, but most of them are due to modern agricultural practices. These reasons include: selective breeding, soil depletion, synthetic fertilizers that provide basic nutrients necessary for plant growth but not others that would make them nutrient-dense, higher CO2 levels in atmosphere diluting nutrient content in plants, over-irrigation washing away nutrients from soil, and long storage times.

2) If all you care about is nutrient content, SPEED is the only factor that matters. That means time between being picked and ending up in your mouth. Price doesn't matter, organic doesn't matter, marketing hoo-ha about how fancy the produce is doesn't matter. Literally just speed. Fresh spinach loses almost ALL of its vitamin C within 7 days of harvest when stored at 68°F (20°C). When stored at 39°F (4°C) which is about fridge temp, it loses 75%. The apples you buy at the grocery store can be up to a *year* old since they've been harvested, especially if you are not buying them in season.

Taste, texture, and smell are not good indicators of nutrient content, because you can't tell how long it has been since it's been harvested. Modern shipping and storage methods can be deceptive, combined with practices like spraying strawberry fragrance on otherwise bland strawberries so you think you're buying the good stuff (yes some places actually do this).

In general, it can help to eat in season, but due to the globalized supply chain...it's always in season *somewhere*. But how long did it take to get to you? You don't know. Even if it's in season where you are, how do you know if that's not from *last* season? Again, you have no idea.

3) Think for a moment: what store do you think sells the most nutritious produce? Your local farmers’ market? Whole Foods? Trader Joe’s must be decent, right? Nope, it’s Walmart. Because of their scale and insanely efficient supply chain, they can get things from the farm (wherever it is in the world it's growing in season) to the store where you can buy it, really really fast. Oh, and for the lowest cost.

I wanted to believe every time I splurged on fancier produce, I was actually getting something better. But this is what the data comparing 18 major US retailers showed – Walmart consistently outperformed.

I learned this from talking to Brent Overcash, co-founder of a startup called TeakOrigin, which specialized in testing nutrient content in groceries from retail grocery stores. For years, every week, his team would walk into grocery stores, buy thousands of produce items the way normal consumers would, and bring them back to the lab to assess nutrient content. They’d go to Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Costco, Wegmans, Sprouts, Waitrose, farmers’ markets, and many more retailers. The “winner” varied depending on the specific type of produce/brands/exactly what week it was, but Walmart tended to come out on top. The more important point is that price and taste and organic certifications had no impact on the actual nutrient density.

They raised ~$5M and did a decade of research with labs full of analytical chemists where they used a combination of molecular spectrometry, HPLC, GC/MS, TGA, and wet chemistry methods. With 800+ million data points, the USDA and FDA at one point told them they had the world’s largest dataset of dynamic nutrition data. They’re no longer around, but had branches in California, Boston, and the UK just a couple years ago.

It went out of business because no major grocery store wanted to partner with them, because the transparency would hold these retailers accountable for *so many things* the consumers aren't even currently aware of. Things like how Whole Foods centers their entire branding around fresher, higher quality produce that's better for you, but when he actually tested some expensive apples they were selling from a local orchard advertised with handwritten chalkboard signs, it had so little nutrient content it was barely detectable on their lab-grade machines. He called the orchard because he was curious, under the guise that he was interested in picking some apples for the season. They said, "Oh sure, you can do that, but our first harvest isn't for another 6 weeks." That means it had been a year since the apples he bought were actually picked. This is actually industry standard, made possible by storing them at low temperatures and spraying a gas called 1-MCP which blocks ethylene (a gas naturally produced by the apples that makes them ripen) by binding to the same receptors.

I asked him: Are farmers’ markets any better, since we're getting the produce directly from local farmers? And he said basically there's huge variance. If you walk into a booth and that vendor is selling over 5 types of produce, there's no way they all ripened at the same time. They may not even all be grown by them. Once, he actually saw a vendor at Boston farmers’ market selling carrots from Target! He could tell from the packaging because he used to work for them. Turns out when a produce delivery is refused by the grocery store, the truck owner is then responsible for getting rid of that produce, and they usually drive to a “food hub” where bulk produce is bought and sold just to recoup some of the costs. That is one possible source of the mysterious farmers’ market carrots they were pawning off as homegrown.

Now, I'm not saying you should *stop* shopping at non-Walmart places. There are a lot of factors other than nutrient density that influence a purchasing decision. The fancy, expensive produce might taste better, smell better, and be better for cooking. It may come from farms where there are better wages and working conditions. There might be fewer pesticides. But again, for nutrient content, speed is the only thing that matters.

I want to do something about this, but it’s an issue way bigger than I can tackle alone. From the way we do modern farming, to the complete lack of transparency on the retailer's end (and vested interests in keeping it that way), to the government's lack of interest in enforcing this transparency for the sake of consumers...the problem runs deep and I'm tired man. And so is Brent, who’s retired and doing woodworking in his studio these days, living the good life.

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

@leecronin What definition of intelligence are you using?

Posts like this seem about intra field status jockeying - what quality would you attribute to LLMs, they have capacities, you must admit.

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

@FU_joehudson I was just listening to Krishnamurti and Bohm say what if there was movement without time, awakened people say that strangest things..

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

As someone who likes tracking biometrics, intrigued by this

https://t.co/Yr4RgUtRqN

[Space Koala @SpaceKoala]

So absolute essentials start at the caudal end (which makes sense), but now you have an issue:

Your heart is not on the top of your head.

That means it needs to move.

And it does, twisting down into your chest. 6/13

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

@AirKistler This is great, self discovery as a phenomenological journey

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

@jonnym1ller Jane Jacobs is well represented in the training data, I assume it would degrade if outside well trod thought trajectories

[Leland McInnes @leland_mcinnes]

Datamapplot 0.4 is out now, and has far more powerful and effective interactive plots.
Here is an example of a Data Map of 2.4 million papers on ArXiv, ready to be explored.

[Alex Warren @exrhizo]

@jonathandubin I haven't heard him talk about instinctual behavior like this,

It's amazing ,I wonder how behavior like this can be generated by development