H. B.

Anti-populist. Moral realist. Fan of movies and the dismal science. No sympathy for tyrants. I make software. Do I know you from somewhere?

[Romy @Romy_Holland]

you can fuck up pretty bad at most ages and still have your life work out, but the people i know who wound up in bad relationships or with health downturns while single in their 30s mostly missed the boat on kids.

for all the talk of permanent records and getting into the right college when you’re young, it turns out that career paths are winding and forgiving across the course of a lifetime, but there is actually a relatively short window to find a partner and start a family.

[H. B. @theaichbee]

There is no reason to use Wispr Flow to talk to a frontier AI model. People keep telling me that they are doing this? Why are they doing this?

Text cleanup and parsing is trivial for a frontier model. Pointless extra step.

[H. B. @theaichbee]

@emnode @wil_da_beast630 Have you heard of jail? Have your heard of arrest?

[H. B. @theaichbee]

@RichardHanania I don't even understand the intended meaning of that guy's tweet.

[H. B. @theaichbee]

@emnode @wil_da_beast630 And note that even this says "created" equal. It does not say that you cannot alter that balance through your own actions.

[H. B. @theaichbee]

@emnode @wil_da_beast630 The person who wrote that was not a Christian.

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

First coffee of the day

[H. B. @theaichbee]

This is true. Small companies hate getting rid of good employees and usually move them to scale up rather than getting rid of them. At least, that was my experience. Never fired people who were assets, just moved them around.

[Dr. Mike Israetel @misraetel]

Here's a reason why AI-caused unemployment might be a lot smaller or slower than expected:

When you run a company, each of your employees does a set of tasks. Now let's say the employees start using AI to help with tasks, and after some serious years (or months lol) of tech improvement, the AI can basically do the whole job itself.

You CAN fire that employee that the AI is replacing, for sure.

But, what you have in that employee is a competent, trusted, vetted multi-functional real-world agentic system. They know how your company works, they get along with their co-workers, and you already have all the tax and employment paperwork filed for them!

If there is ANY other work that can be done at the company that AI can't do by itself, that person is a massive asset to simply repurpose for that work. I think folks that don't work for smaller companies or run divisions in companies sometimes don't realize how hard it is to find dependable talent. Once you have it, you're WAY more likely to repurpose it as AI creeps in than you are to simply let it go. In REAL companies, it's often the case that if you had a blank check to hire as many already onboarded, trusted, and competent people as you could, you'd multiply the size of your company overnight.

In fact, in many companies, there are whole classes of tasks that the company wishes it could do, but they simply don't get done because there's nobody to do them! Getting humans that already work for you freed up means firing them might be the last thing on your mind. I mean, unless they do like DEI or something. JK FOLKS STAY CALM!

(Oh and once robots are at scale, this will be less of a thing, but it's going to take a long time for that to become reality. And when it does, we'll be well into the free money machine that robots will enable and worrying about human employment will look a bit out of date.)

[H. B. @theaichbee]

@RealDianeYap @wil_da_beast630 Marriage is usually like this. I know of very few marriages where the wife doesn't handle all the money.

[Nate Silver @NateSilver538]

The fact that California elections often can't be resolved for weeks is kind of insane and not common in other electoral systems around the world.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

"There’s a reason why virtually every economically successful society has graduated from a social order that stresses the claims of kin into one that stresses the rights of individuals. Living in a society of individuals governed by impersonal institutions, we have an understandable wistfulness for the imagined world of warm communities and thick familial bonds. But we forget how suffocating that social world is, how parasitical it is on its most productive members, and how poisonous it is for any prospect of economic development."

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

The breakthrough drug that has doubled pancreatic cancer survival time, was borne out of years of hard work and investment

Much of it at the NIH, which has now had funding slashed by RFK Jr and Co in favour of pointless pseudoscientific quackery which will lead to nothing

[H. B. @theaichbee]

@charlesmurray This selects too heavily for parental income. You need major and a proxy for test scores like National Merit or Presidential Scholar candidate.

[H. B. @theaichbee]

@skyzyks @charlesmurray Caltech went test blind (not even optional) for several years. The signal is gone.

[H. B. @theaichbee]

@RichardHanania If my husband ever announced to other people that he's "so proud" of me, I will gag.

[H. B. @theaichbee]

@yacineMTB "My tender flower, you were not made for the hard soil of this world..."

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

I've never been at a medical conference where the results have been greeted with a standing ovation

Tremendous breakthrough in pancreatic cancer treatment

Through science

Hard work, rigorous research, clinical trials.

Science

Not the quack pseudoscience of social media

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

Bill Gates hate is truly depressing.

You can be a nice guy, stay way from explicitly partisan culture war issues, and save millions of lives. You can make your money building a real product that people use and appreciate.

It doesn't matter. If you're too rich, they hate you.

[H. B. @theaichbee]

@mtracey The guy is a skeeze. Seems relevant.

[H. B. @theaichbee]

@datingbyblaine That guy had an entertaining list.