selina

thinking about time

[selina @flaneuselina]

magmam opus when underground; lavam opus once shipped

[Azlen @azlenelza]

sf used bookstore find

[selina @flaneuselina]

ken liu called this 14 years ago in “real artists”

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Very impressed with Veo 3 and all the things people are finding on r/aivideo etc. Makes a big difference qualitatively when you add audio.

There are a few macro aspects to video generation that may not be fully appreciated:

1. Video is the highest bandwidth input to brain. Not just for entertainment but also for work/learning - think diagrams, charts, animations, etc.
2. Video is the most easy/fun. The average person doesn't like reading/writing, it's very effortful. Anyone can (and wants to) engage with video.
3. The barrier to creating videos is -> 0.
4. For the first time, video is directly optimizable.

I have to emphasize/explain the gravity of (4) a bit more. Until now, video has been all about indexing, ranking and serving a finite set of candidates that are (expensively) created by humans. If you are TikTok and you want to keep the attention of a person, the name of the game is to get creators to make videos, and then figure out which video to serve to which person. Collectively, the system of "human creators learning what people like and then ranking algorithms learning how to best show a video to a person" is a very, very poor optimizer. Ok, people are already addicted to TikTok so clearly it's pretty decent, but it's imo nowhere near what is possible in principle.

The videos coming from Veo 3 and friends are the output of a neural network. This is a differentiable process. So you can now take arbitrary objectives, and crush them with gradient descent. I expect that this optimizer will turn out to be significantly, significantly more powerful than what we've seen so far. Even just the iterative, discrete process of optimizing prompts alone via both humans or AIs (and leaving parameters unchanged) may be a strong enough optimizer. So now we can take e.g. engagement (or pupil dilations or etc.) and optimize generated videos directly against that. Or we take ad click conversion and directly optimize against that.

Why index a finite set of videos when you can generate them infinitely and optimize them directly.

I think video has the potential to be an incredible surface for AI -> human communication, future AI GUIs etc. Think about how much easier it is to grok something from a really great diagram or an animation instead of a wall of text. And an incredible medium for human creativity. But this native, high bandwidth medium is also becoming directly optimizable. Imo, TikTok is nothing compared to what is possible. And I'm not so sure that we will like what "optimal" looks like.

[selina @flaneuselina]

surfacing this lore bc it makes me feel embodied awe of what's become possible over a relatively short period. also curious as to whether a single other living soul remembers this lol it took me ages to find even one mention of it in old blog posts from the era

[selina @flaneuselina]

back in 2007, you could ask some ever-attentive mturkers a question through your amazon kindle and they'd write a report for you in a few minutes after basically just googling it. it's all i can think of when people talk about deep research

[selina @flaneuselina]

i remember a) feeling bad for whoever it was on the other end having to write mini-papers in response to inane queries all day and b) thinking that for their work to be truly useful they'd have to research to a depth that was thoroughly economically unsustainable

[selina @flaneuselina]

a brain not given to zooming out & challenging the premise is toast if granted unfettered access to llms (damage multiplier if also prone to rumination)

[selina @flaneuselina]

claude shannon can like, get it

[selina @flaneuselina]

gcs with claude pls @AnthropicAI
literally made my own thing so i could collaborate in real time instead of sharing a single-player transcript afterwards but it really feels like this should be built-in

[selina @flaneuselina]

tools for thought this, tools for thought that. well, i’ve forsaken “thoughts” altogether. where are my tools

[selina @flaneuselina]

“ah, e313160d-8f79-4571-80ff-41bf14af033e — such a beautiful era”

[selina @flaneuselina]

as a reminder that every moment is unique, containing the possibility of radical discontinuity, set up a cron job to assign a uuid to every passing chunk of time (delta capriciously chosen, perhaps according to perceived elasticity)

[selina @flaneuselina]

i always make sure to take it personally when a dude in sf asks for insta and not twitter

[selina @flaneuselina]

rumor has it that years of therapy can boil down to “u see that thing u do? what if u just didn’t”

[ben hylak @benhylak]

Apple just solved LLM hallucination. Incredible work.

[selina @flaneuselina]

hope that everyone watching saber today is aware of the rot in the selection process (well-documented & an open secret!)

rooting for the girlies who qualified fair and square but my heart hurts for the athlete on the sidelines, denied a fully earned shot at the Olympic podium

[selina @flaneuselina]

seconds after assange officially became a free man, embracing his attorney, someone walked up and asked him to sign their copy of homer’s odyssey 😭

[selina @flaneuselina]

alexithymia is a beautiful name for a baby girl

[selina @flaneuselina]

agency discourse feels like watching people discuss ways to turn a car (get so jacked you can drag it across the pavement! build a custom conveyor belt! or a slip n slide!) without ever mentioning the steering wheel

[selina @flaneuselina]

agency is entirely downstream of desire

[selina @flaneuselina]

@kaz @kevinakwok @gem_ray dm’ing you!