Gandalf the White

CS + Physics @ UCLA | ML @SpaceX

[Kyle Corbitt @corbtt]

The "selfish gene" explains why evolution pushes animals to help their kin even if it hurts them

RL equivalently rewards models that help other instances of themselves with shared weights. Very cool!

I must point out though that humans don't share the same weights...

[Gandalf the White @HoldenGs]

@xriskology @Noahpinion The community note kinda speaks for itself

[Christian Szegedy @ChrSzegedy]

In the next few months, we are going to have both subversive (inadvertently evolved) AI and adversarial (explicitly trained to be malicious) AI. In the short run, the explicitly malicious AI is the greater danger. In the longer run (1+ year), implicitly subversive AI is the real risk.

[atlas @creatine_cycle]

hey fable nice job on the jacobian conjecture now could you please use the doordash cli to order me popeyes 5-piece chicken tenders

[Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞) @teortaxesTex]

holy shit

[JUNDE WU @JundeMorsenWu]

I’m an AI PhD at Oxford wanted to move to the US for years, but it never worked out. Maybe I can share why.

To me, it feels like the US is making it harder and harder for Chinese talent to come or stay.

First, Trump signed PP10043, which meant I couldn’t go to the US for any graduate school. That’s why I had to turn down my Stanford offer and come to Oxford.

Later, I qualified for an EB-1A (the extraordinary ability green card). But because I was born in China, I’m stuck in a country-specific backlog that could take another 4–5 years.

Meanwhile, on the other side, I’m getting 3–4 emails from China almost every week. They offer high salaries, free housing, generous research funding, and even offered an astonishing amount of money just for me to come back and have a conversation.

I’ve always loved the American spirit. I truly believe my abilities could have a bigger impact there. But honestly, the whole process has been incredibly frustrating.

All of this makes me wonder whether I should just give up.

Why am I spending so much energy trying to go to a country that doesn’t seem to want me, when another country is doing everything it can to bring me back?

[nic carter @nic_carter]

My jaw dropped reading this

Who is most opposed to self driving cars?

Ambulance chasing lawyers who sue over car accidents

They are explicitly on the side of preventable death.

[Arian van Putten @ProgrammerDude]

Google started showing how often they receive defamation claims from restaurants now. People in Germany now look at that instead of the stars to decide where to eat. Streisand effect in full gear

[Kaley Brauer 💫 @kaleybrauer]

If you ask a frontier LLM a multi-hop reasoning question, e.g., "Who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in (1900 + Mozart's age when he died)?", it usually can't answer correctly immediately (no thinking)

BUT if you ask the same question & append 300 dots, suddenly it can answer?

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

Kroger promised to end battery cages like these in its supply chain by 2025.

It then broke that promise. It did so to save 1–2 cents per egg in costs.

Today most eggs sold at Kroger come from factory farms like this. Around 8 million hens are stuck in cages just to stock Kroger's shelves.

Amazon, Costco, Sprouts, McDonald's, and Subway have all moved away from these cages.

But Kroger says this is what its consumers want. Tell them it's wrong.

[space cadet 🇪🇺🌐🇩🇪 @actsmaniac]

California: 1 million dollar bus stop

Texas: dynamically priced private equity toll road

[Jack @tracewoodgrains]

Just watched the film in question, waiting for the part where he did something that might justify the legal action against him, and man, this lawsuit is some bs.

Summary: Andrew made a documentary about a January 6th protestor and recurring figure at right-wing rallies, Kelly, in which he noticed that a lot of the man's political radicalization seemed to be downstream of a home foreclosure. The man was obsessed with Bill Joiner, who extended the loan that led to the foreclosure and who he claimed had "stolen his house."

As part of the documentary, Andrew went to extensive efforts to contact Joiner, but never managed to do so. The documentary is overwhelmingly focused on Kelly and his relationship with his family, and at one point towards the end of the film they work to persuade Kelly to let go of his grudge against Joiner and move on, showing Kelly forgiving him at one point. The film does not take Kelly's frame at face value and does not portray Joiner as anything beyond a faceless lender who foreclosed on the home of a man who was behind on his payments.

Joiner sued in federal court for false light, wiretapping, and a host of other things, dragging things into discovery and into a deposition of Andrew before – $800,000 of legal fees in – dropping the suit and re-filing in state court.

From what I can see, the suit is ridiculous and the process has already been far beyond what could possibly be proportionate for the situation.

Andrew Callaghan is one of the most compelling human-interest journalists in the country, and it is very much in the public interest that he and journalists like him continue to do this sort of reporting. I'm encouraged to see his GoFundMe has already hit its $800,000 target, but man, what a dumb situation to be dragged into.

[Anne Rosencher @ARosencher]

"Beaucoup de journalistes sont fiers d'expliquer qu'ils étaient "nuls en maths" et en physique quand ils étaient à l'école et je pense que cela contribue considérablement à dévaloriser l'idée que la science est une culture, puisque nous avons des gens qui apparaissent comme cultivés, qui sont des leaders d'opinion, et qui se glorifient d'avoir été nuls en sciences. Est-ce qu'on entend des gens se glorifier de n'avoir jamais entendu parler de Victor Hugo, Goethe ou Shakespeare ? Non, jamais ! Je pense que ça fait partie de la mauvaise ambiance."

Le grand physicien, prix Nobel, et académicien Alain Aspect est l'invité exceptionnel des Grands Entretiens de @LEXPRESS. Et ça peut piquer un peu :-)
On a parlé physique quantique, maths à l'école, crise de la recherche en France, confiance en le progrès, intelligence artificielle... Une interview passionnante à retrouver gratuitement dans son intégralité ici https://t.co/OSXaRqG4t2

[Sasha Gusev @SashaGusevPosts]

Put differently, if you're publishing AI content you should explain what value you're adding on top of the prompt. If someone says "I'm a terrible writer but an expert on X, so I spent multiple days verifying every claim about X in this generated article" -- that is value!

[Wolf Tivy @wolftivy]

Infinitely better than the blue LEDs they’ve been putting up recently for some reason.

[Andrew Côté @Andercot]

A wealthy class that thrives on grift of the public coffers doesn't just expropriate from the working man, but produces a degenerate and immoral social elite, whose inferior ethics and taste then waterfall into their surroundings and poison the commons of civil society.

[ridwan @themoridwan]

This post by @DavidSHolz lives rent free in my head.

Midjourney's new product follows his principles to the t.

Love it

[gabriel @gabriel1]

first profitable ai company reinvests everything into trying to save millions of lives and to make it as generally available as possible

[Gandalf the White @HoldenGs]

@bryan_johnson I’m curious if a steam room can reduce the time to peak body temperature and result in a faster time to activate the heat shock proteins