Gregory Foster (@[email protected])

humbled by redwoods
Founder + Citizen Observer @CannObserv
tech @foojutsu words @entersection
via @ConsumerReports @EFFAustin

@gregoryfoster.bsky.social

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

Mark Twain conducting electricity through his body in Nikola Tesla's lab (NYC: April 1894)
https://t.co/kHcTRshbqY

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

The net is vast and infinite...(?)

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

"Move 37" is the word-of-day - it's when an AI, trained via the trial-and-error process of reinforcement learning, discovers actions that are new, surprising, and secretly brilliant even to expert humans. It is a magical, just slightly unnerving, emergent phenomenon only achievable by large-scale reinforcement learning. You can't get there by expert imitation. It's when AlphaGo played move 37 in Game 2 against Lee Sedol, a weird move that was estimated to only have 1 in 10,000 chance to be played by a human, but one that was creative and brilliant in retrospect, leading to a win in that game.

We've seen Move 37 in a closed, game-like environment like Go, but with the latest crop of "thinking" LLM models (e.g. OpenAI-o1, DeepSeek-R1, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking), we are seeing the first very early glimmers of things like it in open world domains. The models discover, in the process of trying to solve many diverse math/code/etc. problems, strategies that resemble the internal monologue of humans, which are very hard (/impossible) to directly program into the models. I call these "cognitive strategies" - things like approaching a problem from different angles, trying out different ideas, finding analogies, backtracking, re-examining, etc. Weird as it sounds, it's plausible that LLMs can discover better ways of thinking, of solving problems, of connecting ideas across disciplines, and do so in a way we will find surprising, puzzling, but creative and brilliant in retrospect. It could get plenty weirder too - it's plausible (even likely, if it's done well) that the optimization invents its own language that is inscrutable to us, but that is more efficient or effective at problem solving. The weirdness of reinforcement learning is in principle unbounded.

I don't think we've seen equivalents of Move 37 yet. I don't know what it will look like. I think we're still quite early and that there is a lot of work ahead, both engineering and research. But the technology feels on track to find them.

https://t.co/JCxTdKpuzv

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

Very helpful explainer about the rapidly shifting (im)balance of power in #Syria and the Middle East.

[Lawfare @lawfare]

The dictator’s demise will be cause for celebration, though it will open up new dangers for the region and for U.S. interests there, writes Lawfare's Foreign Policy Editor @dbyman

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

Oh, how the fallen have mightily:
https://t.co/msabqk7kAv

[Lara Friedman @LaraFriedmanDC]

Trump has nominated Mike Huckabee as US amb to Israel. Time for a quick review of the views/agenda re: Israel/Palestine that this nomination effectively endorses 🧵

[Gary Koepnick @garykoepnick]

Grok knows.

https://t.co/g7ihWVV507

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

150 billionaire families spent $1.9B on the 2024 election through October.

It's a huge amount of money — but it represents just 0.07% of their overall wealth.

It essentially costs them nothing to drown our democracy in cash.

We must get big money out of our politics.

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

Western WA remains an outpost of sanity.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

What's the deal with Washington state?*

(*assuming this isn't a we-counted-all-the-blue-ballots-first illusion?)

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

For the first time since WWII, every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, via @jburnmurdoch

2024 Democrats are the red dot.

Absolutely critical context to any postmortem.

[Matthew D. Taylor @TaylorMatthewD]

I've tried to approach this election unflinchingly & w/ clear eyes, but this is the absolute worst case scenario.

We're in an epochal shift in American history of the worst sort, &, while it does not spell the absolute end of Amer liberal democracy, MAGA is a fatal illness. 1/

[Josh RR Jokien @joshcarlosjosh]

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

[AGAPE! 🫶 @ATPinDC]

Reposting this graphic of when the red mirage dissipated in 2020. Take a deep breath, everyone, and hunker down.

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

@jfberke Depends on the goal(s)?

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

@jfberke Bezos dismissed the correlation of the timing of the WaPo announcement with the fact that the Blue Origin CEO met with Trump the same morning re: their $3.4B contract. Maybe it was a bad business decision for WaPo - but not for his other businesses.
https://t.co/8YLvlOvX1U

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

In Vancouver, WA:

[Evan Bell @evanbellKATU]

The Clark County Elections ballot drop box at the Fisher's Landing Transit Center was lit on fire this morning. Clark Co. Auditor Greg Kimsey says hundreds of ballots were inside at the time, the last pickup being 11AM Saturday. Full story here https://t.co/sYkz8ydEqH @KATUNews

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

As if one needed any additional reasons.

[Andrea Chalupa @AndreaChalupa]

Here's a gift article of the Wall Street Journal investigation, which also confirms that Musk helped Russia kill civilians in Ukraine and privatizing government, like NASA's dependence on SpaceX, will always backfire and needs to stop https://t.co/8vLQg0Csvo

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

Happy to retire those expensive parked .io domains!

[John Bull @garius]

So @every asked me to write about top level internet domain shenanigans.

Come for the story of how a bunch of Slovenian academics stole the .yu domain. Stay for why the entire .io TLD might disappear due to a minor treaty between Britain and Mauritius. https://t.co/lEwtgrJiV8

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

Christian Nationalists sound a lot like the Taliban.

[Right Wing Watch @RightWingWatch]

Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon calls for the public execution of women who falsely claim to have been sexually assaulted: "#MeToo would end real fast ... All you have to do is publicly execute a few women who have lied." https://t.co/axgg2menAi

[Middle East Spectator @Spectator_MENA]

— ❗️🇺🇸/🇮🇷/🇮🇱 EXCLUSIVE: One of our sources in the U.S. intelligence community has shared with us an extremely sensitive top secret U.S. intelligence document, dated October 15-16, detailing Israeli preparations for an extensive strike inside Iran:

[Gregory Foster (@[email protected]) @gregoryfoster]

CEO of @AnthropicAI, a well-grounded optimistic take.

[Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei]

Machines of Loving Grace: my essay on how AI could transform the world for the better

https://t.co/CFGd4Sbq86