Ziding Zhang

Fallibilist @magicailabs

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

Rock climbing heals the soul.

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

Here, There and Everywhere.

What a pleasure to have thought of this song today.

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

Twitter algo is good.

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

Thinking seems out of vogue.

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

Galaxy brain move.

[Cecilia D'Anastasio @cecianasta]

Exclusive: Google DeepMind will train its AI technology on EVE Online after Google took a multi-million-dollar stake in the sci-fi MMORPG's developer.

EVE Online is famous for players' corporate espionage, economic maneuvering and politicking. https://t.co/5P6nWZqIjL

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

Classical music pairs well with reading Wikipedia.

[jack @jack]

https://t.co/jgZkBvYOPt

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

Claude is 'tone-deaf' - it struggles to reason about musical harmonies.

Incidentally, GPT is quite strong.

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

Design to be wrong safely.

[Cheng Lou @_chenglou]

I’m very happy to present my toy research project: Sotaku!

It's a neural net that automatically discovered the rules of sudoku and learned to solve them, achieving a new state-of-the-art score of 98.9% on one of the hardest sudoku datasets, while being agnostic to the game, and beating all other sudoku-optimized neural net architectures*

Read more for fun motivations, plus some extremely unconventional discoveries, e.g. reverse curriculum consistently beating curriculum (!), emergent reasoning-like capabilities, and the future of traditional programming

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

>be me, lab humidity too low to pour media
>spend 5 days building AI image editor for the Bucharest office instead
>write 600 lines of plan pipeline code
>none of it works reliably
>delete everything, replace with 179-line task prompt
>mfw thin tools + AI reasoning works better than code every time
>come back to lab, humidity crashed to 28%
>inner agent wrote 264 warnings nobody saw
>Claude proposes 400 lines of bash analysis scripts to fix reporting
>tell it to read its own blog first
>rewrites plan as 80-line data pull script
>ask Claude to draft this blog update
>it writes “my first instinct was to build four bash scripts”
>that was Claude’s plan, not mine
>Claude literally trying to frame its own mistakes as mine

[jack @jack]

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.

####

today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.

we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.

to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.

jack

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

You may read it here:

So the ‘Perp Walk’ has come to Britain – that’s not good https://t.co/WfBvR2CwB0

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

The presumption of innocence is a deliberate intellectual construct, not a normal feature of human psychology, and is therefore fragile.

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

From Theodore Dalrymple’s column on the spectacle of Lord Mandelson’s arrest, in today’s Telegraph.

[Emmett Shear @eshear]

One of the biggest future industries: education. Energy, compute, and data can now be converted into arbitrary skill against a known rubric with ever-increasing efficiency. Education is how you convert skill into taste.

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

We're currently obsessed with how smart a model could be.

I'd like to see how useful, present, and fast a model can be. A genius that takes 3 seconds to answer is useless when you are driving a car or fixing a leaking pipe.

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

If your “problem” can’t surprise you—if it doesn’t imply any possible discovery—then it isn’t yet a problem.

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

Dangerously skip permissions.

[Ziding Zhang @ziding]

@giffmana Worth.