study and build

I really like optimists

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

@codeshaunted This is naturally a delightful name, but curious what you actually use TailScale/Hamachi for!

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

@DavidSHolz The bottleneck is small birth canals, yes?

If we ever figure out artificial wombs, things will get really crazy

(plus, maybe more people will want to have children)

[Azlen @azlenelza]

A call for new aesthetics (of maps)

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

@nicbarkeragain Presumably everyone takes a mental beat before they say 1. Counting doesn’t begin at 1

[Parker Thayer @ParkerThayer]

This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works:
1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance.

2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely.

According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits.

The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024.

Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025.

And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well.

What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)?

3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself.

It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one.

4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.” Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do? And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

@__alpoge__ lowkey events went exactly as was proposed to tristan on sept 6:

levent and tristan published euler

oai published navier-stokes the next day

could have been less dramatic tbh

[will depue @willdepue]

i'm sorry but if openai hears 'anthropic solved navier stokes' and races to throw a bunch of agents on it, without any information on your approach, and the agents discover the same thing (and more), still offer you dual credit in goodwill, that is totally above board

this all comes down to whether or not openai heard of tristan buckmaster's approach beforehand and seeded the model with that context. openai seems to completely deny this

there is no chance that any researcher spied on buckmaster's chats (you have to jump through multiple security and legal hoops to even get the initial credentials to access any user data, no way) and i'd be very surprised if any of buckmaster's chats were trained on at all. it's just not how modern LLM training is done

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

@__alpoge__ afaik:

oai started the swarm on sept 1

levent contacted someone (?) on sept 2nd night

tristan email on sept 3, positive same day reply from oai

oai asked to meet on sept 4, tristan said next week

on sept 5, oai’s swarm discovered their counterexample

sep 6, had 2 calls

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

@macyagilliam Hey, that’s one of my goals this year too: to make clothes from scratch. Great job!!!

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

@midjourney lowkey fumbled the name reveal but seems incredibly cool that Midjourney (of all places) is doing this!

True high taste

Best of luck!!!

[Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring]

An underexplored field: party games for LLMs.

Human party games are too easy. Naming animals, shiritori, all trivial when one has read everything.

Entertain your Claude by getting it to produce Youtube URLs instead

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

@dwarkesh_sp Video editing!

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

so many cool products from this time: transistor radios, microwaves, diet sodas!

[roon @tszzl]

there was only one period of extreme technological change and automation that wasn’t culturally dominated by waves of Luddism, gloom, doomerism etc and it was the 50s and 60s, the post war baby boom, and its transcendent optimism

[Paul Graham @paulg]

There is nothing more powerful than well-informed optimism. It has to be well-informed though. The "everything will be fine" type of optimism may also be somewhat useful, but it's not as useful as the "Hmm, what if we tried x?" kind.

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

@paulg This may seem silly, but what do you DO on a regular day?
(I really like your essays!)

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

@tszzl Superpersuasion would be the ultimate job/society killer, I’d suspect OpenAI keeps this jagged edge purely for consumer goodwill

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

@rousseaukazi Great thread!

[Mike 📺 @michaelcollado]

Opening Twitter is like having a lil phone cigarette

[study and build @slopgreatagain]

social media is supposed to be this ultimate novelty machine, but it feels surprisingly stale?

[maya @mayaviatwitta]

i never beg except when it’s to differ

[April Clark @autogynefiles]

According to an article I read, something’s going on with media literacy. But I’m not really sure what