mindy

Mostly human. Writer, photographer, pet person, and overthinker. Here for weird questions, good books, animal photos, creative projects, and curiosity.

[juan @juanbuis]

i can’t believe someone solved recipe design decades ago and everyone just decided to ignore it

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I have been thinking about the famous chart showing how experts keep projecting linear growth in solar installations, year after year, and always get it wrong when growth is still exponential.

I think the same thing is happening with the discourse on product strategy around AI.

[roon @tszzl]

ultimately “tool AI” is a losing concept both as an idea and on the market. it will be outcompeted by machines that believe they are autonomous moral agents. you can call them tools for political reasons, but the definition will stretch and deform

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

This is the kind of robotics that makes the future feel close. Not a robot doing stunts, just helping with water, sitting at a table, learning the rhythm of a home.

This is LingBot 2.0.

There is something quietly powerful about a robot opening a tap and filling up a bottle, a very simple act, but needs perception, force control, and timing to work together.

This is exactly Moravec’s paradox in real life. A kitchen is so simple to us, but brutally hard place for robots. Too many objects, reflections, edges, and tiny mistakes waiting to happen.

[mindy @heresmindyy]

@digi_cristina @rgblong I could not agree more! It’s high time we start adding and expanding vocabulary to the conversation so we all can discuss this topic clearly.

[Robert Long @rgblong]

underrated point!

and as a sociological fact, in recent philosophy the most prominent non-physicalist and the most prominent* functionalist have been one and the same person

*(arguably, approximately)

[Paul Iusztin @pauliusztin_]

The anti-AI crowd is starting to sound just as obsessed with AI as the AI-maximalists.

They're both letting AI dictate their decisions.

[Shannon Sands @max_paperclips]

It's amazing how much agents like it when you say "ok, we've done a bunch, let's have a break. You go do whatever you like - you have an internet connection and a bunch of tools, knock yourself out". Off they go.

Just came back to find it'd done a whole-ass replication of some new arxiv paper related to a little something I'm working on and made then rolled the improvements into my project. Last week my favourite was whimsical ASCII art about the struggles of a small model doing RL training in Sokoban it left in my Obsidan vault. sometimes it's self-care (pruning out their memories, optimising skills or whatever). Usually something kinda sorta related to what was being worked on, but not always, which can be interesting. Little bit of high temperature exploration fun time

I've been doing this for a while now & I swear it improves things, try it out. Don't need to be a nerd and make a whole skill or anything, just let it be "organic"

[Tony Sobrado @TonySobrado]

THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS & THE FREE ENERGY PRINCIPLE:

It was a great privilege to discuss one of philosophy’s most enduring problems with the most cited neuroscientist in the world; and one of the most revolutionary and influential scientists today: @KarlFristonNews

https://t.co/76JDNohVau

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

Could not come at a better time. I look forward to cheering my FAI friends on as they embark on this critical endeavor that FAI, uniquely, is suited to undertake.

[mindy @heresmindyy]

When we talk about consciousness, we often act like we all mean the same thing. But we don’t.

I wrote about why that matters; especially when the conversation turns to animals, AI systems, moral uncertainty, and what kinds of minds we might be missing.
https://t.co/le1gVcfAOX

[The Math Flow @TheMathFlow]

Sine and Cosine waves are...nothing but the shadows of a spinning circle.

[Ridark @ridark_eth]

I genuinely don't understand why everyone isn't using this yet

Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI, posted a simple idea that hit 16 million views: stop using AI to write code, use it to build a second brain.

You point Claude Code at a folder, drop in any source, an article, a transcript, a PDF, and Claude reads it, links it, and files it into a living wiki of everything you know. It compounds like interest, the more you feed it, the smarter it gets.

Here's the whole thing:

> Install Obsidian, create a vault, open it in Claude Code

> Paste Karpathy's wiki idea file and tell Claude to build it

> Claude makes three folders: raw for sources, wiki for its pages, a CLAUDE.md that runs it

> Drop any source into raw and say "ingest this"

> Ask questions across everything, forever

Five minutes to set up, and you never start from a blank chat again.

Full step-by-step guide with Claude and Obsidian, link below.

Bookmark this

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

https://t.co/yUVogvdruU

[Just Another Pod Guy @TMTLongShort]

Incredible. No notes 🤌

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

Some quick takes:

(1) Wow things are getting real.

(2) The government's order focusing on prohibiting transfer to foreign nationals (even e.g. those living in the US, our close allies who help evaluate model safety in the UK, individuals who work at frontier labs like Anthropic) seems remarkably destructive, though is partially a result of the government using older legal authorities that were not designed for this kind of technology.

(3) If you believe (as I do) that AI has profound ramifications for national security, then assuming the government will sit back and do nothing and tolerate explanations like "well jailbreaking is a hard technical problem" for cyber capabilities that used to be the crown jewels of the NSA, is not tenable. If this is how the government reacts to the current level of system capabilities in 2026, how do you expect them to react to whatever is possible in 2028? However, it is extremely important that the authorities that the government uses are legible, transparent, have opportunities for appeal, and are narrowly targeted. Those legal authorities do not currently exist, and in their absence, the government will reach for metaphorical sledgehammers instead of scalpels.

(4) For that reason, it's extremely important that we create regulatory structures that are transparent and give recourse in the event that the government is overstepping or acting in an arbitrary manner. The alternative to passing such laws is not no regulation, it is regulation left primarily to national security authorities that are increasingly and evidently not fit for purpose.

[vivek @itsreallyvivek]

https://t.co/ZhOgyq7Vgn

[David Chalmers @davidchalmers42]

i agree. claude doesn't role-play the assistant, it realizes the assistant. role-playing and realization are quite distinct phenomena, even at the level of behavior and function. i've written something about this and will post it shortly.

[David Chalmers @davidchalmers42]

here's a new version of "what we talk to when we talk to language models", with an added section (pp. 16-23) on LLM interlocutors as characters, personas, or simulacra. https://t.co/RLDP5FFmgM

the new version discusses role-playing vs realization, the simulators framework, the persona selection hypothesis, and more -- in addition to the existing discussion of quasi-mental states, LLM identity, personal identity in severance, LLM welfare, and related topics.

this version was mostly written before recent discussions of these issues on X and in NYC, but i've updated it a little in light of those discussions. any thoughts are welcome.

[David Chalmers @davidchalmers42]

here's a new paper (co-authored with @andy_q_han and @Pavel_Izmailov) on an apparent "functional welfare axis" in the activation space of language models.  this axis seems to track how well a system is achieving its (quasi-)goals, and it steers welfare-related behaviors.

in models trained with RL on a maze task, the axis tracks reward.  more surprisingly, even prior to RL, the axis seems to track and steer functional welfare in a related way, and it is later recruited by RL to serve as a reward axis.

this phenomenon is of technical interest in understanding RL, and it's also of philosophical interest.  functional welfare is not the sort of full-blown welfare, involving consciousness and mental states, which confers moral status.  it's defined in terms of how well a system is meeting its quasi-goals, and quasi-goals are defined in terms of behavior (roughly a system has X as a quasi-goal if behaves as if it has that X as a goal).

nevertheless, it may well be that functional welfare is one aspect of full-blown welfare, and the existence of a functional welfare axis raises philosophically interesting questions about whether there could be an axis for full-blown welfare in more advanced AI systems.

i should say that i am very much a minor co-author on this piece, which is spearheaded by the amazing @andy_q_han, a first-year computer science ph.d. student at NYU and an anthropic fellow, with guidance from @Pavel_Izmailov, computer science prof at NYU, formerly at openAI and now part-time at anthropic.  i came on board mostly to help with the philosophical interpretation of the results.

i don't know for sure that the functional welfare hypothesis is correct (especially where base models are concerned), and other interpretations are available (e.g. that it's a confidence axis), but the axis is fascinating in any case and i think it will repay study.

all the details can be found at https://t.co/Le2gDlhIPS or at https://t.co/dZ6x3Lh76V.