jonesgary

Loitering with intent

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

The rationalists are irrational, the altruists are selfish, the experts lack expertise, the intellectuals are midwits, the scientists are for sale. The fact checkers lie.

Not news. It has always been so.

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

For a considerable time, the Green movement hasn't been green; the Feminist movement hasn't been about women; the Human Rights movement hasn't been about rights; the Anti-Racist movement has been racist.

All have merged with each other (intersectionality) and with the Pattern.

[Dan Sutton @DSutton1986]

This is what a 10MW single geothermal borehole looks like.

This is the energy equivalent of ~200 football fields worth of solar panels located on the sunniest desert on earth. Plus another 5 football fields worth of battery storage to stabilize the load.

It is capable of delivering consistent baseload energy for over 100 years if well maintained. Feasibly much longer.

@syntholene’s architecture is designed to convert geothermal wells like this one into low cost oil wells that never run dry.

As long as the earths mantle is hot, we can produce clean synthetic hydrocarbon fuels to power human civilization long after the economic limitations of crude oil have been exhausted.

This is how we make unlimited fuel. Forever.

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

"Five hundred years later the people who cook in olive oil are once again explaining to the people who cook in butter that theirs is the sinful fat. The indulgence is now sold as a Mediterranean diet cookbook."

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The Protestant Reformation was a butter dispute, and there is a 250ft stone tower in Rouen, paid for out of the fines, to prove it.

The medieval Church banned animal foods through Lent and on a great many days besides: no meat, no eggs, no cheese, no milk, no butter, for something like a third of the year. In Rome this was painless. Rome cooked in olive oil and had done since the Caesars. A cardinal could keep a perfect fast without changing his dinner.

North of the Alps there are no olive trees. A Norman or a Saxon who obeyed the rule had to buy oil that had come over the mountains by cart, months old and frequently rancid, from merchants who knew exactly what the calendar was worth to them. The alternative was lard, which was banned too.

Or you could pay. The Church sold permission slips to go on eating butter through the fast, and Normandy, which is a dairy with a coastline, bought them by the cartload. Rouen's cathedral put the money into a new tower between 1485 and 1506. It is still called the Tour de Beurre. Bourges has one as well.

In 1520 a German monk put it in print. Rome, wrote Martin Luther, laughs at its own fasts, makes foreigners eat oil it would not grease its boots with, and then sells them leave to eat butter.

Within a generation the butter countries had gone: northern Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England. The oil countries stayed loyal to a man. France, which cooks in both, had a civil war about it.

Five hundred years later the people who cook in olive oil are once again explaining to the people who cook in butter that theirs is the sinful fat. The indulgence is now sold as a Mediterranean diet cookbook.

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

Even better

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

Every girl crazy bout a sharp dressed man. And the reverse. It's disrespectful to low ball appearance no matter the age. If you have means, then more is possible, and it's something you can do for your mate to soften the sting of aging. Larping through life. Fun.

[Mason @webdevMason]

Man, I genuinely try to argue both sides of the gender war issues internally but you can't treat looking old after 40 years of marriage as a betrayal

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

"The abstraction layer moved. Writing code was how you told a machine what to do. Orchestrating agents is how you direct systems that figure it out themselves."

More accurately, you have always directed systems that did the work. The systems have become increasingly capable, deprecating your old methods.

[Guillermo Flor @guilleflorvs]

Alexandr Wang just named the most underrated career shift in tech.

"When I started a company back in my day, we wrote code."

"Now I'm sure nobody here writes code anymore."

"Now it's, how do you get a million agents to work together? Then it'll be, how do you get a trillion agents to work together?"

The progression he's describing is real and already visible — the engineers getting hired at Scale AI and labs like it aren't valued for syntax fluency. They're valued for systems thinking at a scale that didn't exist two years ago.

The abstraction layer moved. Writing code was how you told a machine what to do. Orchestrating agents is how you direct systems that figure it out themselves.

That's not a subtle evolution. It's a different cognitive job entirely — and most developers haven't updated their mental model of what "being technical" means.

[Guillaume Herblot 🎖️ @Guigz75116]

Bukele a résumé l’ONU en une phrase :

«  L’ONU nous fait la leçon sur les droits humains.
Pendant 30 ans, elle n’a rien fait contre les gangs qui tuaient, extorquaient et violaient.
Aujourd’hui que le pays est en sécurité, elle s’indigne.
Ce n’est pas une organisation pour les peuples.
C’est un club de bureaucrates qui protègent les criminels. »

Bukele a compris que l’Assemblée de l’ONU est une réunion tellement essentielle… qu’on peut très bien s’en passer sans que personne ne s’en aperçoive.

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

Spectators and color commentators second guess the players, scrutinizing slow-mo replays, imagining themselves in control.

[Jay @pu3he]

我的乖乖，真的戳心窝子，兄弟们

看完百亿对冲基金大佬 Bill Ackman 谈马斯克的这段切片，最戳心窝子的根本不是 SpaceX 和特斯拉的万亿估值，而是他提到自己女儿时的那半句话，

身家百亿美金的华尔街巨鳄，可以用钱买下这世上99%的顶级资源，唯独买不回女儿重新看见世界、重新开口说话的生理机能，

而今天唯一能给他女儿带来这种物理希望的 Neuralink，
恰恰来自一个二十年前就可以彻底躺平退休、却偏偏选择继续拿命死磕硬科技的疯子。

很多人总喜欢拿世俗的功利算盘去揣测马斯克为什么还不收手，

却忘了如果当年他在把特斯拉做上市后就去买游艇打高尔夫，

今天人类既不会有占全球过半运力的可回收火箭，更不会有让无数失明失语者重获新生的微米级脑机电极丝。

这就相当于一个早就通关了财富游戏的玩家，非但没有退服养老，反而把赢来的全部金币熔铸成手术刀和发动机，孤身一人去撞人类物理与医学边界上最硬的那堵墙，

所以 Ackman 最后那句感慨才显得格外沉重：当一个人明明拥有随时退场享受人生的特权，却依然留在泥泞的工程第一线替全人类蹚雷，这样的人出现在我们的时代，本身就是整个人类文明最不该被辜负的幸运

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

Another naked emperor story. The purple prose drowning in adjectives, digressions and emotional corpulence is simply bad writing, and has been ridiculed since Cicero. It's famous for being famous.

[Mason @webdevMason]

On some level I believe that there are maybe 1,000 people on Earth who really love "great literature," and all its other enthusiasts are relatively ineffectual sadomasochists who just seethe at the idea of a typical child enjoying an easy read that adapts his interests

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

Good enough for government work. The rot spreads from there.

[Luckey Faraday @luckeyfaraday]

AI is making me realize just how much of the economy runs on human incompetence.

Waiting days for someone to answer an email.

Paying hundreds of dollars for something that takes 30 seconds.

Dealing with people who don’t understand their own jobs.

Getting charged extra because someone made a mistake.

We’ve normalized an absurd amount of inefficiency simply because humans were the only option.

Now there’s another option.

And people are calling it an existential threat.

Maybe the real existential threat is to the business model of being mediocre and getting paid anyway.

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

Bureaucracy will increase as its friction decreases. Jevons.

[Daniel Lemire @lemire]

Andreessen wrote that “software is eating the world.”

What seems obvious today is that “AI is going to eat bureaucracy.”

For the last couple of months, I have been running circles around the bureaucratic processes of my university.

Here is a recent example. This summer I was charged with producing an assessment of a certificate program. Normally, as a professor, it is a significant fraction of your time. You often get to deduct this time from your teaching duties. It is a lengthy process that ends up with a complex report that might span 100 pages or so.

I threw thousands of documents and all the expected analysis at my AI. There was still some manual labour, because I have not connected my AI to my email… But I did weeks or months of work in hours.

And the result is massively better than what I would have done by hand.

I am just burning through the legalese, the forms, everything.
Where does that lead us?

If you are not using agentic AI, you are seriously handicapped. You are going to be swarmed, overwhelmed. You won’t understand what is happening.

But if you are using AI, if you are using it well, then the time tax of bureaucracy is melting with every month that passes. I’m soon going to automate entirely the bureaucratic component of my job.

What a time to be alive.

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

"I now consider the deep understanding of a language to be a supreme waste of time and effort. ... I’ll leave that to my agents. What I need now is to understand the high level gestalt of the system. I want to see the systems and subsystems."

[Uncle Bob Martin @unclebobmartin]

I used to be a language lawyer. In the late 80s I _studied_ the ARM (Annotated Reference Manual for C++). I knew the language cold, inside and out. I could make it do backflips. I shipped a lot of code using it. A LOT.

I’ve attacked other languages with a similar intensity and depth. Until recently, that was simply the only way to become adept at building software systems.

I now consider the deep understanding of a language to be a supreme waste of time and effort. I don’t want to learn Rust, or Golang, or Typescript, or any of the thousands of other languages out there. I’ll leave that to my agents.

What I need now is to understand the high level gestalt of the system. I want to see the systems and subsystems. I don’t need to inspect the cogs. If I truly need to understand a detail at the cog level, I’ll interrogate my agents. I’m not going to pretend to be a language expert anymore.

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

"The black box finally has a reader. It isn’t us."

[Arjun Jain | Fast Code AI @Arjunjain]

For my whole PhD, the case against neural nets was simple: nobody can read the weights.

Last night, one model read another’s weights and edited 0.016% of them. No gradients, no training. Math went from 7.9% to 48.1%.

The black box finally has a reader.

It isn’t us.

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

"introduce disease-resistant varieties faster than pathogens can adapt." ... "develop new fruits and vegetables in response to consumer trends, much like the fashion industry."

Good points and bad points.

[Atoms Not Bits @AtomsNotBits]

BREAKING: A Y Combinator startup emerges from stealth with technology to create fruits and vegetables with new colors and flavors, aiming to make pesticides obsolete by 2042.

Nitroduck is developing a gene-editing platform that delivers CRISPR through pollen grains, allowing breeders to introduce new traits and disease resistance across a wider range of crops. The company aims to cut breeding timelines from 8–16 years to under four, enabling breeders to introduce disease-resistant varieties faster than pathogens can adapt.

The technology could also allow breeders to develop new fruits and vegetables in response to consumer trends, much like the fashion industry.

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

There's a type of reel/short/clip that drills into some subject to explain. My feeds tend to fill up with them since I like them, watch them longer etc.

However, they bug me because the AI avatars they use have that NPR smarminess that repels me. Interesting content, smarmy presentation in both appearance and voice.

I have the impression that people who like that read the smarminess as truthiness. They hear it and are disposed to believe whatever, while I tend to distrust whatever since the semiotics are deceitful.

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

cool buckle

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

People dream of getting a "sleeve" transplant for their brains. A better sleeve, not just new.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Elon Musk says you can get a heart or kidney transplant, but not a brain transplant, because you are your brain

"You can get a heart transplant, you can get a kidney transplant, but I don't know anyone who’s gotten a brain transplant"

"So, you are your brain"

"It's funny to think that me talking right now is a bunch of neurons firing that then result in speech that you hear and cause neurons fire in your brain"

"Your experiences are these neurons firing, with trillions of synapses that somehow lead to conscious comprehension of the world"

[akari @akarixbt]

This is f*cking insane. SpaceXAI founder Elon Musk:

"99% of people still use GrokBot like Google. They ask one question and close the tab

At SpaceXAI, over 80% of our engineers already run teams of 50+ GrokBot agents.

A Chief of Staff plans the day, PMs hand out the work, and the workers ship it overnight.

In 6-12 months GrokBot will be the #1 agentic tool in the world"

In this 1-hour session, Elon sits down with SpaceXAI engineers and shows how one GrokBot turns into a team that never clocks out

GrokBot → Chief of Staff → PMs → 50+ Workers → Autonomous Company

Chief of Staff agent plans the day and hands out every task

PM agent splits the work and checks everything the workers ship

Anyone can ask GrokBot a question, almost nobody gives it a team to run

Worth more than any $6,000 agentic engineering course

Bookmark and watch it today

Then read how to build your own team of GrokBot agents in the harness engineering guide below ↓

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

"The future’s going to be weird. But pretty cool"

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Elon Musk predicts Neuralink will let you mentally inhabit an Optimus robot

"You should be able to actually have full body control and sensors from an Optimus robot. So you could basically inhabit an Optimus robot"

"So you could basically mentally remote into an Optimus robot. It’d be kind of cool. The future’s going to be weird. But pretty cool"

"We think in the future we’ll be able to attach an Optimus arm or legs"

"That scene from Star Wars where Luke Skywalker gets his hand chopped off with a lightsaber, and he gets a robot hand"

[jonesgary @jonesgary]

"We're going to have to revise a lot of what we "know" about the world that isn't really knowledge but is actually just received popular consensus."

[Joshua Achiam @jachiam0]

People who have been in research fields develop a felt sense that most "research" (in almost any field that isn't exactingly technical) is research theater, and many superstar careers enjoy star status not because of a unique connection to the truth but because of a unique connection with an audience. No one really has the time or stature to, from a position of objectivity and trust, bring popular researchers to heel. But it will get increasingly hard to hide from serious critique. The machines can do critique now, at the level of depth and rigor previously only possible for the academically deranged. We're going to have to revise a lot of what we "know" about the world that isn't really knowledge but is actually just received popular consensus - like floating voltages without grounding wires. The grounding wires are coming.