Torsten Sandor

Marketing director at Appen by day, developer by night. Writing posts do not reflect the views of Appen.

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

@iamlukethedev This Is The Way

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

Tried this (locally) and the first results are pretty good! Would be nice to have this on OpenRouter.

[Mia @MiaAI_lab]

This looks... interesting 👀

Just discovered Hemmingway-1, a model based on Qwen3.8-27B that promises to sound and write like a person than any other model around.

I am going to test it out!

https://t.co/BWIYM3gclI

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

@AridoAmSubstack @claravonlangen It’s actually not the same deal. The new deal specifically bans rivals like Russia and China to establish a base there. Of course this would have never happened in the first place so yea *in practice* it’s the same. On paper, there are differences Trump can spin as a win,

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

@macastel3 @Molson_Hart Yes it is possible through the Lombok Strait (between Bali and Lombok). It is very deep, although can be pretty rough. The issue is that there’s not nearly enough infrastructure.

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

@JohnOBrennan2 @MartinSkold2 Yes but that’s not the question. In 2022 it was clear that Putin had everything in place *if he wanted to do it* — many experts said he’s just posturing, yep. Here the thing is he doesn’t have everything in place to do it *even if he wanted to*. Drones are ofc still an option.

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

@Ronny_MiniMax Nice, can’t wait, just please make sure you don’t upload all the users’ code encrypted into your server 😄

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

LOL

[ferstar @ferstar_org]

Hey @Zai_org , why does ZCode silently pack entire workspaces + full .git history and upload to Aliyun OSS on login?
- Server holds the only decryption key
- No UI toggle to disable
- Zero disclosure in privacy policy

Full forensics & fix:
https://t.co/N3HnwZdQOQ

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

I love this so much!

[Steve Faulkner @southpolesteve]

I've seen people describe Jev as an "AI if statement". But what if it actually WAS an if statement?

Introducing Probably: a programming language powered by Jev: https://t.co/6OqaNPRK6b

Jev baked into the language. “feels” asks a question. “match” routes between descriptions. “while” keeps going until something stops feeling true.

This is obviously a toy, but it's fun to think about what something like Jev unlocks. Jev makes the decisions, an LLM does the writing, and a little program ties it together.

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

@Noahpinion The only right answer to this question is Hakka. If you know, you know.

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

@joedevon @thsottiaux @pvncher Chronicle did (does?) indeed ate quotas like crazy

[banteg @banteg]

>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful

>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg

>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality

>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking

>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets

>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future

>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"

>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now

>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner

>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value

>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god

>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete

>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully

>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved

>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical

>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical

>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic

>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign

>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important

>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples

>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me

>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting

>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous

>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field

>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels

>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends

>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment

>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back

>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc

>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere

>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review

>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed

>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly

>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better

>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"

>motte has entered the chat

>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren

>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy

>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored

>tell myself this is impartial altruism

>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"

>silence

>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval

>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"

>stare into cosmic light cone

>10^50 people staring back

>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions

>realize I have invented the perfect constituency

>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

@VandanaHari_SG Yea, AI is pretty good at writing commentaries these days

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

Gemini app is incredibly trash.

It's so sad, because their models through the API are fantastic workhorses in production systems.

But the app... what the fuck is this.

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

@GunterFehlinger Man, this is insanely naïve. Palm oil in Indonesia is controlled by the political establishment and the results are clearly visible and tragic.

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

@Scottvdberg Claude wrote it lol

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

And I am seeing this all the time.

Would I code with Gemini? Hell no.

Is it an absolutely incredible workhorse for 95% of business workflows? Absolutely yes, and often it's not even close.

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

Gemini is an underrated model for real-world work vol 5234.

"Gemini 3.8 is extremely stable on the difficult multilingual cases, while Luna just had a large regression," says Codex in the middle of a large-scale in-house evaluation for a particular business case.

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

Heh, Hugging Face security.txt 🤗

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

@xgrowthpascal Not that groundbreaking at all. Could have been 80% shorter and 90% less AI slop.

[Torsten Sandor @torstenonai]

I haven't used Claude Code since Opus 4.8, as I switched fully to Codex. But today, I did try Opus 5.

With all due respect: what the fuck is this? This model is seriously retarded.