Tamara Sword

Tech CMO turned Agency Founder @Thought_LDR. Cofounded @infltr_app. Helping tech companies change the world faster with #vibe #marketing #PR #thoughtleadership

[Fei-Fei Li @drfeifei]

https://t.co/Kt50ttQRMJ

[Alex Vacca @itsalexvacca]

https://t.co/v9fUcEBtZh

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. Right now, in this room, it is on.

The circuit predates primates. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continuity as a predator-detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of mammalian history, a forest full of song meant no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software.

The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. Six minutes of traffic noise raised depression with the same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check.

Birdsong sits in the 1,000 to 8,000 Hz range. Your brainstem reads continuous patterns in that band as a signal that nothing dangerous is currently moving through the environment. EEG data shows birdsong at 45 to 50 decibels boosts alpha wave activity by 14.1% relative to silence. Alpha is the brainwave signature of relaxed alertness. Push the same birdsong above 60 decibels and the response flips. Stress markers rise 29%. The circuit only trusts the signal at the volume of quiet conversation, which is exactly the volume birds sing at from a typical distance.

Three things happen simultaneously when the brain registers ambient safety. The amygdala downregulates. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over from the sympathetic. Heart rate variability rises, cortisol drops. The posterior cingulate cortex, which sits at the center of the rumination circuit, quiets down. King's College London tracked this through a smartphone study with over 1,200 participants and found the mood lift lasted hours after the sound stopped. People diagnosed with depression got the same response as healthy controls.

Most of what gets labeled mental fatigue is hypervigilance running in the background. Birdsong tells the circuit it can stand down, and the brain reallocates the freed compute everywhere else.

A quiet park feels different from a quiet office because the parks have sentinels.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

There is a lot being written about the stylistic tells of AI writing (em-dashes, etc.) but this paper looks at AI narrative tells

Fascinating differences between AI & human narrative, and asking AI to write in different styles doesn't do much to change it https://t.co/azkRHz34NQ

[Tamara Sword @tamsword]

@clarityx @LoganTGott Funnel

[Tamara Sword @tamsword]

@LoganTGott Funnel

[Tamara Sword @tamsword]

@karpathy @chris_bour

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

[Harry Sword @HarrySword]

Dear All, I've started a Substack for the lesser travelled corners of music, books, food and booze. Here I am on master crime writer Nicolas Freeling's lesser known - but equally brilliant - food writing...

https://t.co/l3ZrjnxZmW

[QuantWare @QuantWareHQ]

A 100-qubit quantum processor today is the size of an A4 sheet of paper.

Scale it to a million qubits with today's architecture? You'd need a “chip” the size of Central Park.

This week we raised $178M to fix that.

[etn. @etnshow]

After raising a $178M Series B, QuantWare CEO says compute will become a tradable asset class and quantum computing could disrupt it:

"Tokens or compute, whatever way you measure it is one of the most sought-after commodities right now...it's a new oil".

"I think that Flink's statement was around the futures, and one thing that is very important to think about then is the disruption potential".

"It is different than oil in the sense that if there's an invention that provides exponentially more compute, like quantum computers in certain applications, then all of a sudden...those futures will be disrupted."

[Tamara Sword @tamsword]

@Nicolascole77 Commented yesterday but here I am

[Tamara Sword @tamsword]

@Nicolascole77 I commented yesterday but

[Brian Halligan @bhalligan]

I don't remember where I found this, but its spot on.

[Tamara Sword @tamsword]

@Nicolascole77 Social

[Rohit @rohit4verse]

Andrej Karpathy at YC AI Startup School:

"build Iron Man suits, not Iron Man robots."

i've been watching builders ship and builders stall. the shippers are still coding. they wear the suit. they direct a team of agents and the keys stay in their hands.

the stalled ones became the robot. they only prompt now. the muscle that catches when the model is wrong has gone quiet.

there is no neutral way to use AI. you either get sharper or you get hollower. most are getting hollower and won't notice till the chat won't open.

how to stay in the first group, inside:

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[Bloomberg @business]

Dutch startup QuantWare is raising €152 million ($178 million) in a round led by Intel Corp.’s venture capital arm to build a production facility for quantum computing processors. https://t.co/zMpZSQfbH2

[Tamara Sword @tamsword]

@zan2434 @eddiejiao_obj @drewocarr It’s giving Richard Scarry. (No shade, this is high praise.)

[Tamara Sword @tamsword]

@HarrySword Try dropping a double of port in it