Only one chance in this lifetime…
Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.
I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.
@k2__investment@elerianm@FT The point, however, is that it is the median, not the average. Tech has outperformed, but half of the companies have at least that profitability.
@RileyRalmuto Yes! Your definition is super related to Michael Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory (AST). Have you seen his work?
Professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton
i get a lot of questions these days from people feeling worried, disturbed, even overwhelmed about our political environment. my answers have been honest but incomplete. i've tried to answer this particularly heartfelt request more fully--and i'm posting here (with her name redacted) in the hope that maybe others might find it useful too. ian
Not sure you will read this through…
The bottom line up front: I’m reaching out, not for reassurance, but for direction. Are there ways of engaging that you believe actually make a difference—paths for ordinary people like me who refuse to give up—I would be deeply grateful if you’d share them.
I’ve been a follower of yours since my introduction to you via Preet’s podcast. I just finished How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa. It lit a fire in me but also leaves me overwhelmed. I feel pulled to do more, but don’t know how beyond what I am currently doing: I make weekly calls through 5calls (dot) org, I write, I show up to local protests, but it feels like trying to hold back a tidal wave with a teaspoon.
How does a layperson create change? I’m not a lawyer or political expert, but a mom and the wife of a now-retired Lt. Colonel. For 24 years, I stood by my husband’s side, believing deeply in the idea that the sacrifices our family was making were for the greater good—that our country, for all its flaws, stood for freedom, truth, and accountability. That there was honor in this calling. But over the last eight years, and especially these past nine months, I’ve felt that foundation crumble. The freedoms I once believed were sacred are being chipped away, quietly and relentlessly.
I know you’re not an oracle. But I view you as someone who connects the dots with clarity, empathy, and integrity. Thank you for the work you do. You make people like me feel less alone, and that’s no small thing in times like these. I will take any guidance you can provide.
Respectfully,
XXXXXXXX
We evaluated Gemini 2.5 Deep Think on FrontierMath. There is no API, so we ran it manually. The results: a new record!
We also conducted a more holistic evaluation of its math capabilities. 🧵
Here’s one of the covers of this week’s Economist magazine.
There is little doubt in my mind that AI is a transformative general-purpose technology poised to deliver significant productivity gains—and, inevitably, excesses.
History reminds us that such innovations dramatically lower the barriers to entry for both existing and new activities, often setting off initial waves of overproduction and overconsumption.
As such, some wasted investments and failed ventures are part of the process. But get the ecosystem and diffusion right, and the upside potential for growth is exciting, substantive, and critical to pursue.
#economy #theeconomist #innovation #growth #productivity #AI
"BORTOLETO É O MELHOR NOVATO DESSA GERAÇÃO"
"Eu acredito que se fosse inglês ou algo assim, no P6 com uma Sauber, seria primeira página em todos os jornais amanhã..."
HABLA MESMO DON FERNANDO🔥
https://t.co/w8U1n3x0Oy
I didn't want to post on Grok safety since I work at a competitor, but it's not about competition.
I appreciate the scientists and engineers at @xai but the way safety was handled is completely irresponsible. Thread below.
Very impressed with Veo 3 and all the things people are finding on r/aivideo etc. Makes a big difference qualitatively when you add audio.
There are a few macro aspects to video generation that may not be fully appreciated:
1. Video is the highest bandwidth input to brain. Not just for entertainment but also for work/learning - think diagrams, charts, animations, etc.
2. Video is the most easy/fun. The average person doesn't like reading/writing, it's very effortful. Anyone can (and wants to) engage with video.
3. The barrier to creating videos is -> 0.
4. For the first time, video is directly optimizable.
I have to emphasize/explain the gravity of (4) a bit more. Until now, video has been all about indexing, ranking and serving a finite set of candidates that are (expensively) created by humans. If you are TikTok and you want to keep the attention of a person, the name of the game is to get creators to make videos, and then figure out which video to serve to which person. Collectively, the system of "human creators learning what people like and then ranking algorithms learning how to best show a video to a person" is a very, very poor optimizer. Ok, people are already addicted to TikTok so clearly it's pretty decent, but it's imo nowhere near what is possible in principle.
The videos coming from Veo 3 and friends are the output of a neural network. This is a differentiable process. So you can now take arbitrary objectives, and crush them with gradient descent. I expect that this optimizer will turn out to be significantly, significantly more powerful than what we've seen so far. Even just the iterative, discrete process of optimizing prompts alone via both humans or AIs (and leaving parameters unchanged) may be a strong enough optimizer. So now we can take e.g. engagement (or pupil dilations or etc.) and optimize generated videos directly against that. Or we take ad click conversion and directly optimize against that.
Why index a finite set of videos when you can generate them infinitely and optimize them directly.
I think video has the potential to be an incredible surface for AI -> human communication, future AI GUIs etc. Think about how much easier it is to grok something from a really great diagram or an animation instead of a wall of text. And an incredible medium for human creativity. But this native, high bandwidth medium is also becoming directly optimizable. Imo, TikTok is nothing compared to what is possible. And I'm not so sure that we will like what "optimal" looks like.
REPORTER: You would agree it's never acceptable to assault police officers?
TRUMP: Sure
REPORTER: Among those you pardoned is a guy who used a stun gun on a police officer. Why does he deserve a pardon?
TRUMP: Well, I don't know
Just insane that America had the best productivity growth of comparable major nations in the years pre-COVID, then went "hold my beer" post-COVID and had ~double the productivity growth of the next-closest country
Eu quero essa mulher prefeita de SP e Presidente do Brasil.
Enquanto alguns se calam e se acovardam, @tabataamaralsp mostra coragem e mostra ser uma pessoa forte para governar e enfrentar de verdade essa bandid@gem que quer o poder.