Karan N

looking for a ghost in my shell

[Karan N @Knaikk]

Met Bjarne Stroustrup at my 1st hackathon, I'd just changed majors to CS.
I told him "my Uni isn't a C++ school" bc "CS1 was taught in Java", the same uni he came to speak at. Idk how he kept a straight face, bc I asked for a pic right after.
He prob doesn't remember, but I do.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

# on shortification of "learning"

There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.

Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.

I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.

So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.

And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.

[Will @realwillreil]

You can change your life in 6 months.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

[AI at Meta @AIatMeta]

Today we're introducing TRIBE v2 (Trimodal Brain Encoder), a foundation model trained to predict how the human brain responds to almost any sight or sound.

Building on our Algonauts 2025 award-winning architecture, TRIBE v2 draws on 500+ hours of fMRI recordings from 700+ people to create a digital twin of neural activity and enable zero-shot predictions for new subjects, languages, and tasks.

Try the demo and learn more here: https://t.co/VkMd1YpQWI

[Sherry @SchrodingrsBrat]

If you suffer from rumination or can’t get over regrets I think your worst sin might be pride because to be stuck in regret is to think that you had full control over that past situation instead of thinking maybe you were never as powerful or intelligent or wise as you believed

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

[Jonathan Lambert @evolambert]

The National Science Foundation cancelled over 60 grant review panels today, effectively grinding funding of new projects to a halt.

The pause comes as NSF grapples with the impact Trump's executive orders will have on their grantmaking process.

https://t.co/Hk8VTwoEgE

[Yann LeCun @ylecun]

🥁 Llama3 is out 🥁
8B and 70B models available today.
8k context length.
Trained with 15 trillion tokens on a custom-built 24k GPU cluster.
Great performance on various benchmarks, with Llam3-8B doing better than Llama2-70B in some cases.
More versions are coming over the next few months.

https://t.co/EkU9aIHdZE

[Karan N @Knaikk]

@p1kachao "I'd just like to take a moment to highlight this text, there were a lot of updates so you might have missed it" (derogatory)

[Natalie Holt @filmmusicholt]

The end of #loki ep6 felt like the culmination of all the music from the last few years working with this show. Thanks the whole music team and everyone who worked to make it what it is. Here’s ‘History is Now’ which will be on the final instalment of the Loki soundtrack 💚

[Loki @LokiOfficial]

Might take a while.

A new episode of #Loki Season 2 starts streaming this Thursday at 6PM PT on @DisneyPlus.

[AI at Meta @AIatMeta]

We believe an open approach is the right one for the development of today's Al models.

Today, we’re releasing Llama 2, the next generation of Meta’s open source Large Language Model, available for free for research & commercial use.

Details ➡️ https://t.co/vz3yw6cujk

[fanfan! @fanfan]

@Knaikk you’re INSANE

[Karan N @Knaikk]

@fanfan @AlveusSanctuary @mayahiga marty and barbara really had you bugging out

[Karan N @Knaikk]

@Andercot Github discussions+Arxiv feed, but it's informal.
I've read community notes on Github, HN, @_akhaliq 's HuggingFace papers, and Reddit. https://t.co/SmSVoeCaFg seems to have different goals.
Notes would extra useful for new research areas and early career researchers.

[Karan N @Knaikk]

@fanfan I'd like to have those brain cells back after you're done using them please
https://t.co/zeXL1HMZoH

[Jen Heemstra @jenheemstra]

The perfect job or career path doesn’t exist.

Every career has positives and negatives, and the key is to think about the positives that are most important to you and the negatives that you find most palatable, and know that what you choose doesn’t have to be your final choice.

[Karan N @Knaikk]

I ranked a lot faster than I was expecting

[Karan N @Knaikk]

Didn't realize the answer was misspelled. 3+ hrs to find a 2nd valid attack. I spent more time on level 8 than 1-7 combined. Output's nondeterministic so retrying the same prompt is a valid strat. Fun update to the prompt injection challenge by @LakeraAI https://t.co/8zDQuY120g

[Karan N @Knaikk]

@huggingface How can users enable 2 factor authentication? I was unable to find anything in settings, it is not currently possible? I've avoided HF paid services because I'd rather not keep a payment method saved without 2fa enabled.