Mikkel Christiansen

Back in Denmark after many years in South Africa. Mostly tweet about programming (Haskell), business, politics and philosophy

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

"The most intelligent inhabitants of that future world won't be men or monkeys. They'll be machines—the remote descendants of today's computers. Now the present-day electronic brains are complete morons, but this will not be true in another generation. They will start to think, and eventually they will completely outthink their makers.

Is this depressing? I don't see why it should be. We superseded the Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal men, and we presume we're an improvement. I think we should regard it as a privilege to be stepping stones to higher things. I suspect that organic, or biological, evolution has about come to its end, and we're now at the beginning of inorganic, or mechanical, evolution, which will be thousands of times swifter."

— Arthur C. Clark 1964

[Jason Zweig @jasonzweigwsj]

NVIDIA now has a greater market value than the entire German stock market and the entire Italian stock market.

Combined.

[h/t Torsten Slok]

[Naval @naval]

The real tax is society forcing otherwise productive people to pay attention to politics.

[Patrick Blumenthal @PatrickJBlum]

60 years old.

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

Great thread from @jeffreychngo on Walz’s record on China — and particularly human rights.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Starship reentering like a meteor

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Letitia James to Billy Baldwin: "I'm automatically attracted to assets -- I just start seizing then. It's like a magnet. Just seize. I don't even wait. When you're a state attorney general, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the airplane. You can do anything."😃Love this WOMAN!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Precisely

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

💯

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

This is the most iconic image in the history of college marketing. Colleges have come up with everything under the sun to attract students, but St. John’s in Annapolis just took a picture of their reading list and countless students have made their college decision because of it.

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

I’m very excited to share our work on Gemini today! Gemini is a family of multimodal models that demonstrate really strong capabilities across the image, audio, video, and text domains. Our most-capable model, Gemini Ultra, advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 benchmarks, including 10 of 12 popular text and reasoning benchmarks, 9 of 9 image understanding benchmarks, 6 of 6 video understanding benchmarks, and 5 of 5 speech recognition and speech translation benchmarks. Gemini Ultra is the first model to achieve human-expert performance on MMLU across 57 subjects with a score above 90%. It also achieves a new state-of-the-art score of 62.4% on the new MMMU multimodal reasoning benchmark, outperforming the previous best model by more than 5 percentage points.

Gemini was built by an awesome team of people from @GoogleDeepMind, @GoogleResearch, and elsewhere at @Google, and is one of the largest science and engineering efforts we’ve ever undertaken. As one of the two overall technical leads of the Gemini effort, along with my colleague @OriolVinyalsML, I am incredibly proud of the whole team, and we’re so excited to be sharing our work with you today!

There’s quite a lot of different material about Gemini available, starting with:

Main blog post: https://t.co/NzSycJl7aE

60-page technical report authored by th Gemini Team: https://t.co/CEdMRyYSLo

In this thread, I’ll walk you through some of the highlights.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

This time-lapse captures a formation of drones creating a dragon soaring through the skies above Shenzhen, China.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

"Everyone talks about how if you went back in time, some tiny change could make everything different now, but no one talks about how some tiny change now could make everything different in the future."

— 14 yo

[Wrath Of Gnon @wrathofgnon]

In Japan prawn and shrimp fishing is still done with beautiful sailing vessels. The engineless ships can use nets to catch the shrimp without damaging the eelgrass habitat. Engines would limit the fishing to baited baskets which alters the quality (taste) of the catch.

[Bastien Fachan @BastienFachan]

Djokovic’s first-ever tennis practice at 4 years old in Kopaonik, Serbia - fascinating footage

This is why you should always record your kids

[Mikkel Christiansen @mschristiansen]

@pitdesi @naval Donald Knuth: "I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime."
https://t.co/WXRP2aQNMS

[Tristan S. Rapp @Hieraaetus]

THREAD - The Drowning of Doggerland

(1) Cities may be burnt & forgotten, distant islands lost & found. It is rare that an entire landmass is erased, only to be rediscovered millennia later.

This is the story of Europe's true Atlantis, of a Prehistoric world, lost to the sea.

[Daniel O'Connor @Singularitarian]

How learning math works:

1) You don’t like the explanation you read.

2) With much effort you figure out a clear explanation.

3) The explanation you came up with is obvious to experts but nobody ever mentions it.

[Just In Politics @ancapquotes]

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty." - Henry David Thoreau