Simshv

AI enthusiast

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

It is a thoughtful framework overall and certainly a good starting point for discussions

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire

The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history.

1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough.

2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available.

3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre.

4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings.

5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it.

6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself.

7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

BREAKING: The casualties from the Bondi Beach antisemitic shooting have risen to 16.

May their memories be a blessing 💔

[David Wolpe @RabbiWolpe]

“The man who disarmed one of the Bondi Beach shooters has been identified as Ahmed al Ahmed.”
God bless him- his courage saved many lives.

https://t.co/UdcQvtyIWl

[Israel ישראל @Israel]

As we breathe, almost for the first time in 738 days with the return of the hostages, stolen by Hamas, held in torture, we mourn, we grieve the loss of the hostages who did not survive Hamas’ evil.

May their families recover. May they rest in peace. May their memories be a blessing.

יהי זכרם ברוך

[Israel ישראל @Israel]

Two years since October 7, 2023.

Hamas terrorists started this war by murdering over 1,200 people — babies, children, women, men, even Holocaust survivors — in a brutal massacre.

That day, 251 people were taken hostage by Palestinian Hamas and held in Gaza. Some were released in hostage deals, while others were returned in body bags — murdered in captivity.

Today, 48 hostages remain in Gaza, including both the living and those who were murdered and whose bodies are still being held.

May the memory of all the victims be blessed — and may every hostage, living or dead, come home. 🕯️

[Max Levchin @mlevchin]

Meaningful (and easy) fast to those heading into YK’5786. G’mar Chatima Tovah. ✡️

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Extremely troubling

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

Stop calling everyone you disagree with Nazis. There’s a real world out there, and your words can make people pick up guns.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

So here I am for the second time in a few days urging you to stay calm even while something wild goes on. Staying calm in crisis is the mark of civilization. You're not a beast; you're a human being. Master yourself.

What's going on in Los Angeles is well within the jurisdiction and powers of the federal government to intervene upon and deal with. The Mayor of Los Angeles and Governor of California will very likely end up having to stand by while federal law enforcement takes care of an uprising and foreign invasion. Though they'll be subversive and passive aggressive and Communist about it, federal law enforcement is well within its jurisdiction, and President Trump is not a man to be trifled with.

What is unhelpful in the extreme is you, in your frustration and anger that this is happening again (not "being allowed to happen," seeing as Trump sent the National Guard), radicalizing. Call for the law to be enforced. Call for the law to be enforced strictly and firmly. Call for those complicit in the obstruction of law enforcement to receive full prosecution under federal law. Call for those who enabled this uprising to be held to account. Yes, call for all of this, but do so without losing your mind to your base passions.

Simultaneously, pay attention to those who are asking you to lose your mind to your passions. Pay attention to those who are trying to propagandize and agitate you now (those (ironic) WWII propaganda posters are a good hint... think twice before sharing them). Pay attention to those saying our country, our Constitution, or whatever has failed. Learn who these men are and understand what they are: seditious enemies of the United States and your and your children's futures.

Right-wing Leninism will not solve Left-wing Leninism. It just leaves us with Leninists in charge, at which point their specific values don't matter much, or won't for long.

Keep your head. Demand the United States defend itself by using those laws and powers it has to the fullest extent. Remember that we have the harder job (a narrower way): We must maintain civilization while we stop those who would destroy it. Resist every invitation to "win" by destroying it ourselves.

Arrest. Arrest. Arrest. Prosecute. Prosecute. Prosecute. Deport. Deport. Deport. Use whatever legal force is necessary. But don't burn this country down in radicalism.

Compare the two images below. Are you the guy on the left, but in reverse, or are you the guy on the right who will actually solve the problem? You can only choose one.

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

I am alarmed by the proposed cuts to U.S. funding for basic research, and the impact this would have for U.S. competitiveness in AI and other areas. Funding research that is openly shared benefits the whole world, but the nation it benefits most is the one where the research is done.

If not for funding for my early work in deep learning from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which disburse a good deal of U.S. research funding, I would not have discovered lessons about scaling that led me to pitch starting Google Brain to scale up deep learning. I am worried that cuts to funding for basic science will lead the U.S. — and also the world — to miss out on the next set of ideas.

In fact, such funding benefits the U.S. more than any other nation. Scientific research brings the greatest benefit to the country where the work happens because (i) the new knowledge diffuses fastest within that country, and (ii) the process of doing research creates new talent for that nation.

Why does most innovation in generative AI still happen in Silicon Valley? Because two teams based in this area — Google Brain, which invented the transformer network, and OpenAI, which scaled it up — did a lot of the early work. Subsequently, team members moved to other nearby businesses, started competitors, or worked with local universities. Further, local social networks rapidly diffused the knowledge through casual coffee meetings, local conferences, and even children’s play dates, where parents of like-aged kids meet and discuss technical ideas. In this way, the knowledge spread faster within Silicon Valley than to other geographies.

In a similar vein, research done in the U.S. diffuses to others in the U.S. much faster than to other geographic areas. This is particularly true when the research is openly shared through papers and/or open source: If researchers have permission to talk about an idea, they can share much more information, such as tips and tricks for how to really make an algorithm work, more quickly. It also lets others figure out faster who can answer their questions. Diffusion of knowledge created in academic environments is especially fast. Academia tends to be completely open, and students and professors, unlike employees of many companies, have full permission to talk about their work.

Thus funding basic research in the U.S. benefits the U.S. most, and also benefits our allies. It is true that openness benefits our adversaries, too. But as a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives committee on science, space, and technology points out, “... open sharing of fundamental research is [not] without risk. Rather, ... openness in research is so important to competitiveness and security that it warrants the risk that adversaries may benefit from scientific openness as well.”

Further, generative AI is evolving so rapidly that staying on the cutting edge is what’s really critical. For example, the fact that many teams can now train a model with GPT-3.5- or even GPT-4-level capability does not seem to be hurting OpenAI much, which is busy growing its business by developing the cutting-edge o4, Codex, GPT-4.1, and so on. Those who invent a technology get to commercialize it first, and in a fast-moving world, the cutting-edge technology is what’s most valuable. Some studies (link in original post, below) also show how knowledge diffuses locally much faster than globally.

China was decisively behind the U.S. in generative AI when ChatGPT was first launched in 2022. However, China’s tech ecosystem is very open internally, and this has helped it to catch up over the past two years:
- There is ample funding for open academic research in China.
- China’s businesses such as DeepSeek and Alibaba have released cutting-edge, open-weights models. This openness at the corporate level accelerates diffusion of knowledge.
- China’s labor laws make non-compete agreements (which stop an employee from jumping ship to a competitor) relatively hard to enforce, and the work culture supports significant idea sharing among employees of different companies; this has made circulation of ideas relatively efficient.

While there’s also much about China that I would not want the U.S. to emulate, the openness of its tech ecosystem has helped it accelerate.

In 1945, Vannevar Bush’s landmark report “Science, The Endless Frontier” laid down key principles for public funding of U.S. research and talent development. Those principles enabled the U.S. to dominate scientific progress for decades. U.S. federal funding for science created numerous breakthroughs that have benefited the U.S. tremendously, and also the world, while training generations of domestic scientists, as well as immigrants who likewise benefit the U.S.

The good news is that this playbook is now well known. I hope many more nations will imitate it and invest heavily in science and talent. And I hope that, having pioneered this very successful model, the U.S. will not pull back from it by enacting drastic cuts to funding scientific research.

[Original post, with links: https://t.co/JR3x4O1iVr ]

[Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו @netanyahu]

So here are the facts:
Since October 7th, Israel has sent 92,000 aid trucks into Gaza. That's right. 92,000 aid trucks. That includes 1.8 million tons of aid. 1.8 million tons of aid – more than enough food to feed everyone in Gaza.
Yet as we had let the aid come in, Hamas stole it. They took a huge chunk for themselves. The rest they sold at exorbitant prices to the Palestinian population.
And then they used the money they stole to recruit new terrorists to continue their war against Israel.

Our goal from the start was to get food to Palestinian civilians, not to Palestinian terrorists.
So we consulted with our American allies: what do we do to prevent Hamas from looting the aid? Well, together we devised a mechanism to achieve this goal.

American companies will distribute the food directly to Palestinian families. They'll do so in safe zones secured by our military. And this will allow us to complete our goal of destroying Hamas while enabling aid to reach the civilian population.

We’ll complete the construction of the first distribution zones in the coming days.
Ultimately, we intend to have large safe zones in the south of Gaza. The Palestinian population will move there for their own safety, while we conduct combat in other zones, and receive humanitarian aid there without Hamas interference.

In the meantime, we authorized letting trucks enter Gaza to provide for immediate needs. Yesterday I think 100, more than 100 trucks went in. More will come in today.
I tell you this: no army in the world has ever gone to such lengths to provide aid to the civilian population in the midst of intense combat.
And Hamas of course, opposes this.
It shoots Palestinian civilians who want to leave for safe zones and it shoots Palestinian civilians who want to prevent Hamas terrorists from looting the aid trucks intended for them.

As for the hostages, we'll do every effort to secure them. I'm ready for a temporary ceasefire to get more out but we demand, and you should demand, that all of our hostages be released and released immediately. And so should every civilized country demand this.
We’re in an intense seven front war that was launched against us by Iran and its proxies. Sometimes in war accidents happen.

One such incident happened the other day in Jenin. And thankfully no one was hurt. Our military has expressed its regret over the event because we don't target civilians or diplomats. We target terrorists.
Exactly the opposite of Hamas. They target civilians, ours, and they hide behind civilians, theirs. They use them as human shields. That's a double war crime. But I don't hear that coming from anyone of those countries that criticize Israel.

For those who say that Israel stands alone, I say we’re not alone.
Justice stands with us.
The truth stands with us.
History stands with us.
And so do countless people around the world who can tell the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil.

I want to thank all of them.
And I especially want to thank President Trump and the American people for their forthright stand with Israel and with the Jewish people.
Together we stand.

Together we'll triumph and will see the victory of civilization over barbarism.

[Dan Roberts @danintheory]

It’s a day late, but I guess now we know this year’s version of OpenAI upstaging Google I/O?

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

The Holy See is willing to help enemies meet, so they may look each other in the eye and so people may be given back the dignity they deserve: the dignity of peace. With heart in hand, I say to the leaders of nations: let us meet; let us dialogue; let us negotiate!

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

"Chatting" with LLM feels like using an 80s computer terminal. The GUI hasn't been invented, yet but imo some properties of it can start to be predicted.

1 it will be visual (like GUIs of the past) because vision (pictures, charts, animations, not so much reading) is the 10-lane highway into brain. It's the highest input information bandwidth and ~1/3 of brain compute is dedicated to it.

2 it will be generative an input-conditional, i.e. the GUI is generated on-demand, specifically for your prompt, and everything is present and reconfigured with the immediate purpose in mind.

3 a little bit more of an open question - the degree of procedural. On one end of the axis you can imagine one big diffusion model dreaming up the entire output canvas. On the other, a page filled with (procedural) React components or so (think: images, charts, animations, diagrams, ...). I'd guess a mix, with the latter as the primary skeleton.

But I'm placing my bets now that some fluid, magical, ephemeral, interactive 2D canvas (GUI) written from scratch and just for you is the limit as capability goes to \infty. And I think it has already slowly started (e.g. think: code blocks / highlighting, latex blocks, markdown e.g. bold, italic, lists, tables, even emoji, and maybe more ambitiously the Artifacts tab, with Mermaid charts or fuller apps), though it's all kind of very early and primitive.

Shoutout to Iron Man in particular (and to some extent Start Trek / Minority Report) as popular science AI/UI portrayals barking up this tree.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

Bernie Sanders WANTED TARIFFS in 2008

Bernie Sanders said not having Tariffs in America means all our manufacturing goes overseas and it’s the same thing as giving corporations the “freedom to throw American workers out on the street”

What changed?!?

[Tesla Owners Silicon Valley @teslaownersSV]

“My plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness.”
Elon Musk

[ADL @ADL]

This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety.

It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge.

In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead.

[Kaizen D. Asiedu @thatsKAIZEN]

I want to clear something up.

I always voted blue before 2024, and as a black, coastal, Ivy Leaguer who worked in tech, it was my default tribe.

That changed in 2024.

Right now, I am more critical of the Left, and more aligned with the Right.

The Left has lost its way.

It has been taken over by extremists who are driving America and the West into ruin in the name of social justice and suicidal empathy.

Leftist ideology has been more influential culturally and politically for the last 16 years.

So I’m railing against what is currently the biggest threat.

Some, triggered by my critiques of the Left, respond by bringing up issues with the Right.

This is preventing them from seeing what’s happening.

This isn’t a sports match.

This isn’t about political parties.

It’s the People vs the Establishment.

Freedom vs Control.

Truth vs Lies.

Good vs Evil.

Degrees of the former and the latter exist in both parties.

There is no shortage of corrupt cowards on the Right.

Some think of me as being on the Right, and that’s ok.

I think of myself as Team Humanity.

I’m not interested in critiquing the Right simply to appear neutral.

Although the truth is often somewhere between two poles, rarely is it exactly in the middle.

Currently, the Left is further away from Truth.

But one day things may change, the Right dominant again, and in greater need of correction.

And when that day comes, I pray I’ll have the clarity and moral courage to call it out.

In the meantime, I encourage you to stop thinking of yourself as team red or team blue.

Stop reacting to criticisms of “your” side by critiquing “their” side.

Tribal thinking prevents us from seeing when we’re being manipulated by our own leaders.

Whichever party is in charge, governments exist to serve people.

Not the other way around.