Jonatan

looking for easy decisions |

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

Sovereign compute

[shb @himbodhisattva]

opus 4.8 with the fable context is some real flowers for algernon shit

[Dominique Paul @DominiqueCAPaul]

To all technical students and engineers in Europe.

The US export control on LLMs is the first taste of what will become the new norm. Many people are calling for "radical measures" and that we need the equivalent of a Manhattan Project to create change in Europe. But this is not how change will happen. Change will never come top-down from a government. The state and EU can fund, but they cannot found it. That part is on us.

You are the only ones who can change this.

You are among the few people on this continent who actually know how to build foundational technology - LLMs, robotic AI, actuators from scratch, chip infrastructure, rocket engines, organoids. ETH, EPFL, TUM, École Polytechnique, KTH, Imperial and dozens more produce absurd talent every single year. And almost all of it talks itself out of building.

We finish our degrees surrounded by such an incredible average that we're sure someone is always better at [your idea] - so who are we to start? I've seen so many friends at ETH think they need to "get more experience first" and take a job at Nvidia or Google and never do anything interesting again.

Technology-driven companies aren't founded by the most qualified person. They're willed into existence by people who see what others do not and refuse to stop. The person who's "better than you" almost never does it. And as for experience, nothing will teach you how to build the thing like, well, just trying to build the thing.

Our education is a chance most of the world will never have. There are people in Europe who have to worry about getting a job. We get to worry about finding our dream job. We're able to make bets that not many people can make or afford. It's nothing anybody expects you to do, but if you want a life filled with purpose, this is a unique kind of responsibility you can choose to step up to.

So if you actually want to do something ambitious, how about changing a continent?

If you really want change, you cannot wait for others. You are one of the few people who can create it. It starts with you.

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

This feels important

[Ido Aizenbud @IdoAizenbud]

What can a neuron compute?

Real biological neurons are complex, but how capable are they?

Using a new method, we found that a single cortical neuron can classify cats vs dogs, recognize spoken words, and solve 10-bit parity, all tasks thought to require entire networks. (1/15)

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

@DavidMKeyes The US will regulate it immediately. Too much power

[Jason Kelly @jrkelly]

@katclone @OmicsOmicsBlog This is good

https://t.co/ttXsQohjWQ

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

Good perspective to keep in mind. I’d like to build at least several blocks of gold worth of companies

[Jürgen Schmidhuber @SchmidhuberAI]

Tera IPOs coming! $1T sounds like a lot. But $1T is just a 7-m-wide gold cube, thanks to massive inflation since 1971 when $ and gold decoupled. A little house full of gold. To put things in perspective: the 2017 neutron star merger GW170817 produced several earth masses of gold.

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

@magnushambleton Also, no terminal and no Claude desktop?

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

@magnushambleton Well, yes technically, but arc is yeeting all my tabs all the time

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

@magnushambleton Google Calendar doesn’t have a desktop app and I don’t want everything to live ephemeral in my browser. ButI go back to it to change calendar invites (because iCal doesn’t allow for that ofc). Also, I need notifications that yell at me to get to my meeting

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

As much as I detest ads, this is a good way of reaching a very specific audience

[Andrew McCalip @andrewmccalip]

Get paid to wait

The Claude Code spinner might be the most watched line on Earth.

So I turned it into an ad marketplace.

Advertisers bid on it. You keep 50% of the money.

Install the extension → get cash from ads.

Introducing Kickbacks

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

@cremieuxrecueil For what types of interventions?

[Dominique Paul @DominiqueCAPaul]

We're organising another event in Munich.

Last event's demo rate of participants: 100%.

My favourite projects so far:

▶︎ A guy who electrified his hometown church's pipe organ with PCBs
▶︎ Apple Vision Pro app for cyclists (don't ask about safety)
▶︎ Save-to-play: gamification of mobile apps that makes users pay into their own savings
▶︎ A Christmas cookie picking robot, including a peek at everything that went wrong along the way of building it

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

@ben_sdl @DominiqueCAPaul Love it! Unfortunately won’t be in town otherwise I’d have demoed some stuff

[Benedikt Seidel @ben_sdl]

We need more people building if we want more upside in Europe.

@DominiqueCAPaul and I want to demystify what it actually takes to build something. By showing how we and every Demo Night participant go from the first line of code that follows an idea all the way to a finished project or a real business, it becomes clear what works and what doesn’t.

If you want to be part of this and meet people who, like you, are just going for it, sign up here. https://t.co/Wwv6AwNtsI

A random side project, the latest paper, or the newest core feature you shipped, whatever it is, everyone here wants to see it and help you succeed (you might also win one of our prizes).

We’re thrilled to have PXR as our host and sponsor for the food afterwards. And if you’re weighing the legal side of turning your demo into a company, I know Daniel and the team are happy to help.

[banteg @banteg]

new shai hulud wave. interestingly it has this inside the payload to trigger safety refusals in potential defensive scans.

[Panda @VivaLaPanda]

New @gwern post is compelling

https://t.co/JDHd4yR3D9

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

Very bullish

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

I was just reminded that for our Series A, we sent a questionnaire to the investors we were considering to understand if we have alignment.

Then the investor needed to write a doc or a presentation explaining their answers and thinking.

[Jonatan @mountbranch]

Putting up flyers with $1,000,000 rewards for some rare bird called Jackie to trick people into paying attention to nature

[José Moran @drmtgr]

Ah a paper came out by Parisi and Zamponi in glassy physics.
They are monstrous physicists (Parisi is a Nobel, Francesco Z is a former mentee of his and an all around brilliant guy, who even has done economic ABMs)

But the cool thing is... Their proof was done partially using