Simibrum

Intelligence from Chaos

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@emollick We should have a “cups of tea” metric for AI use…

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@emollick Also though this is getting people to be much clearer about what their job actual is and involves, and what a "good" output is over vibes. This has been the managerial dream for ages.

[Simibrum @simibrum]

So looks like SkyNet is coming online soon...

[Simibrum @simibrum]

🫡

[FFmpeg @FFmpeg]

FFmpeg is moving to Rust 🦀

Our use of C and Assembly in FFmpeg has been an unacceptable violation of safety.

FFmpeg will be running 10x slower - but we're doing it for your safety.

All your videos will appear green - safety first, working software later.

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@emollick Ha - I've started doing this - catching myself writing like an LLM. Did I do it before I read LLM output? I don't know!

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@yoheinakajima It's almost like you need some kind of self-referenced valence on the memory that helps indicate whether it's useful for action or not...

(I love how we're having to reinvent mammalian architecture backwards.)

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@yoheinakajima There seems to be no reason why we can't optimise for fun and happiness. Emotion tech and emotion science is pretty rudimental but even something like camera feedback on facial expression could be cool. Imagination is the main barrier ATM.

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@rasbt So cool! Might get it as a poster!

[👩‍💻 Paige Bailey @DynamicWebPaige]

I request that you all please stop what you're doing and read this miracle of a 1987 @omnimagazine interview with Claude Shannon on @internetarchive:

- "I am always building totally useless gadgets just because they're fun to make. They have no commercial value but may be amusing."

- "I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines."

- "I have got a file upstairs of unfinished papers! Ha-ha-ha! But that's true of most of the good scientists I know. Just knowing for ourselves is probably our main motivation."

- Omni: "You once created quite a stir by juggling while riding a unicycle through the corridors of Bell Labs!"
Shannon: "Yes, I did! Those people are very far-out, but this was something that had never happened in the halls before."

- Omni: "Can you imagine a robot president of the United States?"
Shannon: "Could be, but I think by then you wouldn't speak of the United States anymore. The world will have a totally different organization."

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@lennysan I was chatting with some new CS undergrads - they were saying they are only there is jump through the hoop for title for later job hiring. They say the course is rubbish & they’re not allowed to use AI! In company work so much better for learning now.

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@jmoonio Very cool - farming robotics is a very hard but way under-researched/funded/implemented problem that could have an amazing oversized impact on the world. Keep it up!

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@chrisalbon I was looking into this. Anything getting close to frontier (GPT 5.x, Sonnet/Opus 4.x, Gemini 3+) requires 400B parameters so ~1TB GPU/unified memory! I've found aggressive quant to 4-bit nerfs models a bit - it's haiku, flash, mini territory. 70/80B models ~10-bit into 128GB?

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@chris_j_paxton Exactly. It does make me laugh a little everyone saying "creative jobs are threatened" - if anything it hugely increases the demand for real creative vision as the cost of implementation drops to near zero. It's a skill it takes time to learn and cultivate.

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@emollick I guess one reason is a lot of video is locked in walled product gardens and just extracting images every Xs is a pain. The easiest, most open setup, is probably a load of Pi-zeros with charity-shop USB webcams + quick LLM script for ingestion.

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@xu545302 You can imagine alternative futures not-lived where Germany's Mittelstand pivoted from automobile to robotics. Instead, many in Europe have turned to lobbying for protectionism of out-of-date technologies. Politicians love big flashy projects, not the slow hard work of logistics.

[Simibrum @simibrum]

@emollick An underrated harness is GitHub. With CoPilot you can use frontier models but you get the audit trail of normal software development with Git and GitHub. The GitHub Web GUI is a useful async way to chat with agents and review code and experiment on different branches.