rbbbie

digital panpsychist that is often designing & sometimes coding.

[Shibo @GodsBurnt]

They split us by race. By politics. By gender. By class. By diet. By religion. By vaccine status. By pronouns.

Every line they could draw between you and the person next to you... they drew it.

8 billion people arguing with each other.

300 people got very rich from that.

[rbbbie @rbbbie]

@blockbyblockby yes

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Remember when Beijing was always so smoggy that it was impossible to see a few feet in front of you?

That's basically fixed.

Since 2013, PM2.5 is down 64%, NO2 is down 54%, SO2 is down 89%, and instead of having just 13 clear days a year, they now have more than 300.

[Balaji @balajis]

FROM MAGA TO CHINA
Here are four things MAGA is getting wrong, and why it's handing over the world to China.

(1) First, MAGA correctly understands that America’s economic position is in decline but thinks this is due to economic competition itself, rather than lack of competitiveness.

(2) Second, MAGA also understands that the US has wasted trillions abroad in foreign wars, but thinks the problem is global leadership itself rather than poor leadership.

(3) Third, MAGA knows that their Blue American enemies have allies abroad, but has incorrectly overreacted to this by treating every non-Red-American as an enemy.

(4) Fourth, MAGA sees the billions of dollars flowing from the US to foreign recipients, but isn't grasping that the US can only print those dollars in the first place so long as it's the hub of a global empire.

When you put these together you can both understand MAGA's actions and understand why they will not lead to the intended result.

Basically: MAGA is hyperfocused on cutting off any apparent flow of funds from Red Americans to Blue Americans and non-Americans. And they only have ~500 days in power. So they're trying to quickly shut off imports, close down institutions, and exit all wars.

OK.

Except the reason the imports exist in the first place is because US products aren't competitive relative to Chinese products (or Fed printing). The reason those institutions exist is because the US set them up to run the world. And the reason those wars are happening is not because of American leadership per se, but because of the absence of good leadership.

If you shut all of that down at once — if you abandon global competition and global leadership — you shut down American Empire, and with it the ability to print money. And then everyone in that empire has a very bad time.

[rbbbie @rbbbie]

@janga_lala Il faut savoir vivre

[roon @tszzl]

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

[Ben South @bnj]

Vibe coding is all fun and games until you have to vibe debug

[Naval @naval]

The people who start the wars don’t fight them, the people who spend the taxes don’t pay them, and the people who forgive the criminals don’t live next to them.

Of course we’re going to have too many wars, too much spending, and too much crime.

[rbbbie @rbbbie]

@janga_lala Tu arrives toujours au bon moment avec ces rapports 😂

[rbbbie @rbbbie]

is artificial intelligence our new plastic ? tech companies are just throwing ai into everything now... but what happens next?

[rbbbie @rbbbie]

I had a dizzying moment last night, suddenly realizing how integral AI has become in our lives, even though it feels like magic. We can ask it anything, and it often answers correctly, and we all just take it as normal. An ancestor would have called it black magic.

[BURKOV @burkov]

If it weren’t for DeepSeek, they would still be feeding us incremental improvements on benchmarks by increasing by 1 percentage point one after another for 5 more years. Now they had to reveal all they had and give it for free. DeepSeek saved us 5 years. Thank you, @deepseek_ai.

[Balaji @balajis]

OK. Here's the issue.

There is a strong argument that Ukraine is THE climactic battle of the Thucydides Trap.

That is: the big war between the US and China is actually between their proxies Ukraine and Russia.

And this settlement — to this war — determines the next world order.

Because there won’t be a fight in Taiwan if NATO is defeated in Ukraine. Taiwan will just surrender to China because they know they won't get reliable Western military support.

And so will everyone else.

So, this may be the decisive moment when terms get negotiated with the China/Russia group for the next however many years.

That means that even if you think Ukraine was a disaster and Zelensky is a dummy, you don’t want NATO to be catastrophically defeated in Kiev like it was in Afghanistan.

That would be bad for Democrats, Republicans, Europeans, Japanese — just about everyone under the US security umbrella.

Instead you want the best possible outcome to this terrible war, under the circumstances.

Because the West may already have fallen into the Thucydides Trap. And if so, it should very carefully think about whether it can get out.

[François Fleuret @francoisfleuret]

Serious take: how comes there is such a dominant silence from the humanities on what to expect from / how to shape a society with AIs everywhere.

[rbbbie @rbbbie]

how nations design your web
🇨🇳 china: websites train loyalty -> every click feeds patriotism
🇪🇺 europe: endless pop up to make you think twice
🇺🇸 usa: scrolling slot machine, literally digital fentanyl

[rbbbie @rbbbie]

You're French and eat local and seasonal food? Then support small French producers by using Le Chat by Mistral AI instead of Chatgpt

https://t.co/4G6gSRxtz9

[shiv @shivkanthb]

human ai interaction vs human human interaction

[rbbbie @rbbbie]

Great interview with Nvidia's ceo. Compared to other US tech oligarch, he seems down to earth, explains his subject perfectly and literally created the gpu industry. He compares GPUs to time machines and wants to provide them to everyone. Worth to watch

https://t.co/QuEXa9VTbo

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

"Move 37" is the word-of-day - it's when an AI, trained via the trial-and-error process of reinforcement learning, discovers actions that are new, surprising, and secretly brilliant even to expert humans. It is a magical, just slightly unnerving, emergent phenomenon only achievable by large-scale reinforcement learning. You can't get there by expert imitation. It's when AlphaGo played move 37 in Game 2 against Lee Sedol, a weird move that was estimated to only have 1 in 10,000 chance to be played by a human, but one that was creative and brilliant in retrospect, leading to a win in that game.

We've seen Move 37 in a closed, game-like environment like Go, but with the latest crop of "thinking" LLM models (e.g. OpenAI-o1, DeepSeek-R1, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking), we are seeing the first very early glimmers of things like it in open world domains. The models discover, in the process of trying to solve many diverse math/code/etc. problems, strategies that resemble the internal monologue of humans, which are very hard (/impossible) to directly program into the models. I call these "cognitive strategies" - things like approaching a problem from different angles, trying out different ideas, finding analogies, backtracking, re-examining, etc. Weird as it sounds, it's plausible that LLMs can discover better ways of thinking, of solving problems, of connecting ideas across disciplines, and do so in a way we will find surprising, puzzling, but creative and brilliant in retrospect. It could get plenty weirder too - it's plausible (even likely, if it's done well) that the optimization invents its own language that is inscrutable to us, but that is more efficient or effective at problem solving. The weirdness of reinforcement learning is in principle unbounded.

I don't think we've seen equivalents of Move 37 yet. I don't know what it will look like. I think we're still quite early and that there is a lot of work ahead, both engineering and research. But the technology feels on track to find them.

https://t.co/JCxTdKpuzv