tonyr

[Zeke Hernandez @profzeke]

Does #immigration make #inventors more productive? Or do more #productive inventors emigrate?

The answer is both, but 85% of the effect is because migrating *makes* inventors more productive.

Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not!

https://t.co/flYkJsDZxi

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

The American nuclear arsenal has been around so long that the memory of how to fix & maintain it is fading

Like we lost the knowledge of how to make something codenamed “Fogbank,” which is used in nuclear weapons, for decades. And the reasons almost seem like a parody.

[John B. Holbein @JohnHolbein1]

Does affirmative action in government hiring negatively affect the quality of service delivery?

Evidence from India says no.

"Improvements in diversity can be obtained without efficiency losses."

https://t.co/U6xnPllWup

[Cecilia Ziniti @CeciliaZin]

🧵 The historic NYT v. @OpenAI lawsuit filed this morning, as broken down by me, an IP and AI lawyer, general counsel, and longtime tech person and enthusiast.

Tl;dr - It's the best case yet alleging that generative AI is copyright infringement. Thread. 👇

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

hindsight is 20/20
(and the lenses will cost extra without single market access)

#bregret

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

One side effect from AI is that the corpus of human knowledge from mid-2023 on will have to be treated fundamentally differently than prior to 2023.

A huge amount of what you learned or think you know about how to evaluate images or text is no longer valid. Not an exaggeration.

[tonyr @tonyr]

#ESAJuice is far and away the best-named astro mission ever!

[European Space Agency @esa]

🎥 Heard about our @ESA_JUICE launch? Want a quick catch-up on the details? Watch this one-minute summary of the #ESAJuice mission!

👉 https://t.co/fyRmYPzQ0Z #ExploreFarther #DestinationJupiter

[Aaron Levie @levie]

The bad news: AI will take our jobs

The good news: AI will mine bitcoin in our bodies so maybe we don’t need jobs

[tonyr @tonyr]

Seems a pivotal moment

[Tim Wu @superwuster]

Went to Google trial today -- on subject of whether Google has a monopoly on "general search services." DoJ, on cross-examination, managed to turn Google expert Mark Israel into a de facto government witness. A few notes

[Cory Doctorow NO LONGER ON TWIT TER @doctorow]

Next person I hear say old Superman was a conservative is getting a sock in the jaw. Action Comics 179 https://t.co/cfDHmgRgOP

[Devon ☀️ @devonzuegel]

Wow! @Waymo’s driverless vehicles file 76% fewer property damage claims compared to human-driven cars, according to insurance provider @SwissRe: https://t.co/gBbmyKurWx h/t @bhargreaves

[Jim Fan @DrJimFan]

Can GPT-4 teach a robot hand to do pen spinning tricks better than you do?

I'm excited to announce Eureka, an open-ended agent that designs reward functions for robot dexterity at super-human level. It’s like Voyager in the space of a physics simulator API!

Eureka bridges the gap between high-level reasoning (coding) and low-level motor control. It is a “hybrid-gradient architecture”: a black box, inference-only LLM instructs a white box, learnable neural network. The outer loop runs GPT-4 to refine the reward function (gradient-free), while the inner loop runs reinforcement learning to train a robot controller (gradient-based).

We are able to scale up Eureka thanks to IsaacGym, a GPU-accelerated physics simulator that speeds up reality by 1000x. On a benchmark suite of 29 tasks across 10 robots, Eureka rewards outperform expert human-written ones on 83% of the tasks by 52% improvement margin on average. We are surprised that Eureka is able to learn pen spinning tricks, which are very difficult even for CGI artists to animate frame by frame!

Eureka also enables a new form of in-context RLHF, which is able to incorporate a human operator’s feedback in natural language to steer and align the reward functions. It can serve as a powerful co-pilot for robot engineers to design sophisticated motor behaviors.

As usual, we open-source everything! Welcome you all to check out our video gallery and try the codebase today: https://t.co/BHiNmqPoWE
Paper: https://t.co/bdh9TYQtHm
Code: https://t.co/lqKiaM2yYJ

Deep dive with me: 🧵

[tonyr @tonyr]

@NASA At 3,860,000,000 miles, would the #OSIRISREx capsule now be the record holder for the longest distance travelled by any object that launched and then returned to earth?

Congrats @NASA @OSIRISREx ! What an amazing technological achievement!

[NASA @NASA]

TOUCHDOWN! The #OSIRISREx sample capsule landed at the Utah Test and Training Range at 10:52am ET (1452 UTC) after a 3.86-billion mile journey. This marks the US's first sample return mission of its kind and will open a time capsule to the beginnings of our solar system.

[tonyr @tonyr]

Absolutely! Apple keeps proving this again and again.

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

First to scale is more valuable than first to market.

[Scientific American @sciam]

A jawbone from eastern China that displays both modern and archaic features could represent a new branch of the human family tree https://t.co/oRpsA1d9XC

[New Scientist @newscientist]

In space, no one can hear you flush - but a data leak means that it is possible to tell when astronauts on the International Space Station are urinating, a security researcher has discovered. https://t.co/8EntIKZ4NM

[tonyr @tonyr]

This is the key question of far greater import.

[Dustin Volz @dnvolz]

Microsoft: "The method by which the actor acquired the key is a matter of ongoing investigation."

[Scott Galloway @profgalloway]

Almost half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by American immigrants or their children, and more than half of unicorns (private companies worth more than $1 billion) are founded by immigrants. https://t.co/x77zymDLCv #nomercynomalice #4thOfJuly

[tonyr @tonyr]

#SCUgrad #SCU2023

Congratulations to Fr. Maria Joseph on your Computer Science Ph.D. !

[Dr. Robert Rohde @RARohde]

This is getting ridiculous.

OISST provides a real-time daily index of ocean surface temperature (60 S - 60 N). For the last month it has been continuously reading higher than in any previous year and still shows no sign of settling.