no-thing-ness @nothingness

222K likes. The fixed pie fallacy is probably the single most destructive delusion on the planet. The belief that wealth cannot be created—only distributed—has done more than any other to stop people from lifting themselves and others out of poverty.

The Vegapunk of Hyenas @Yeenie_Mcbeenie

4 days ago

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And my favorite, from Boyan Slat: "Problem-solvers take an issue and cut it up into small, solvable chunks. Problem-sellers do the opposite: bundling various remotely-connected issues together into one big, scary problem. The consequence is that problem-sellers make problems look insurmountable when they're not." (Boyan knows a thing or two about this: He has done more than anyone to keep plastic trash out of the oceans.)

@Janne_HG This is BS. You *imagined* this was the limit of your IQ. During my mathematical trajectory, I experienced dozens of time this feeling of hitting my cognitive limit. Then some time later, the stuff became transparent. All mathematicians I know talk about similar experiences.

In light of the US government banning Fable for non US people (and Anthropic pulling it off cc) It’s more and more important that we develop systems that can’t be shut down, nor taken away. I’m grateful I got a glimpse of the future, I hope I get to spend more time with it

0xSero @0xSero

3 months ago

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"But have we not destroyed the environment with our natural science? No! We have made great mistakes – all living creatures make mistakes. It is indeed impossible to foresee all the unintended consequences of our actions. Here science is our greatest hope: its method is the correction of error." —Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World.

This is free advice from an expensive psychologist. If you’re an anxious person, do everything for fun. Go to a job interview for fun. Submit documents for fun. Start a blog for fun. Anxiety feeds on importance. Don’t make everything a matter of life and death.

I want to be clear that I’m not criticizing Fable for: 1. Pricing 2. The bio/cyber safeguards (yes they’re overeager, but I can deal) 3. The 30-day retention policy These things all seem fine. It is solely the silent sabotage that creates an awful precedent to which I object.

Fable: "write me a rhyming poem with six four line stanzas, each stanza removes another vowel. the first has no u, the second no u or i, etc."

How The Beginning of Infinity contributed to Ireland's Olympic gold medal in the men’s lightweight double sculls: irishmirror.ie/sport/other-sp…

I've had access to Fable for a bit. A genuine jump in capability, I could feed it a 15 page design document for a project and it would work for 9+ hours and deliver terrific results. But working with it is weird & weirder is coming Lots of examples: open.substack.com/pub/oneusefult…

“In the next 10 years we are going to be entering what I feel like is a new renaissance.” Nobel Prize laureate Demis Hassabis was awarded the Nobel Prize for using AI to predict the structure of proteins. For him, AI is a tool that will help scientists make even more discoveries in the years to come. Hassabis took part in our Nobel Prize Dialogue ‘The Future of Science With AI’ which discussed how AI might transform science in the future. Watch the full event at nobelprize.org/events/nobel-p…

"Let me fall if I must fall. The one I am becoming will catch me." - Anonymous Don't put off taking the risk. If you are bold enough to do it, the future version of you will take it from there. Powerful Moves Create Powerful People.

Yes, I had a very severe reaction to my second Moderna shot. But part of being a responsible scientist with a large platform is not extrapolating my personal experience to the entire population. I also have a rare autoimmune condition called Parsonage-Turner syndrome (diagnosed in 2013), so I may have been particularly vulnerable to side effects. Who knows. Given my bad experience with the first mRNA vaccine I've ever taken, I have made the personal decision to avoid them in the future. However, it would have been incredibly unscientific and highly irresponsible of me to take this personal experience of mine and start telling millions of people online to not get vaccinated for COVID. There's a reason quack alternative medicine practitioners plaster personal testimonies all over their websites. They sound convincing to a lot of people. But it's purely manipulation. Personal testimony, even a large collection of them, isn't a substitute for real, population-level data. I am not an expert on vaccines, the COVID vaccine, or epidemiology in general. So when I experience a serious side effect taking something with a non-zero rate of serious side effects, I understand that my personal experience likely isn't an indication that we're all being lied to about safety. You should understand that as well. The impulse to extrapolate a very negative personal experience to the entire population is very strong. But responsible scientists, and especially those with large public platforms, should resist that impulse.

I'm glad you asked, here is my problem with Pangram. I respect that you are building a business that seems to offer a seemingly workable product with some legitimate uses like catching students cheat. Where I get off the train is the social norm your account is effectively pushing through your paid browser extensions of automated, moralized AI detection policing everywhere. This effectively encourages AI detection policing outside the contexts where it is legitimate like technical report writing, and that is making our discourse worse. If your goal is to prevent the "dead internet problem," this is clearly not the way. I also strongly disagree with your public, non-business justification of these practices by pointing out that AI writing cannot be verified (presumably as well as the human writing). Which is evidently not true, and I'm sure deep in your heart you know that too. P.S. I also don't think you genuinely understand my motivations here, assuming you were saying those things in good faith. As a journal editor, I know how bad AI slop can get. I have also been unusually open about my own AI use in writing long before Pangram was even a thing. Things will have to change in terms of how we interact with each other for better or worse, but I don't think your efforts at propagating your product outside of its legitimate uses is helpful, at least outside of the classroom.

Max Spero @max_spero_

a week ago

@akoustov @pangram Genuinely man what is your problem? I respect if you personally don't have use for the tool. If you don't mind seeing AI content then you're not my target audience. Do you truly wish there was no way to tell whether something is AI-generated? I don't think you fully understand

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Negativity & pessimism is killing so much potential. People stop trying & they join the chorus of resignation… And by “fitting in,” they lose the life they could have had. Be the biggest optimist you know. Go create a fantastic life. Try for unreasonable things.

@kharma_7 Walking. Adding just a couple miles everyday is so good for your body composition. Makes it insanely easy to stay lean

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine. In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on: - retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels - RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life - small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol - Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection - this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil

2 weeks ago

This is actually insane. 97% of people taking the standard of care for metastatic solid tumor got worse by seven years. But with lorlatinib, that number was only 45% in the same time! This is an ENORMOUS jump in the quality of cancer care.

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"Have we not destroyed the environment with our natural science? No! We have made great mistakes – all living creatures make mistakes. It is indeed impossible to foresee all the unintended consequences of our actions. Here science is our greatest hope: its method is the correction of error." —Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World.

"For anyone who wants to promote truth and enlightenment it is a necessity and even a duty to train himself in the art of expressing things clearly and unambiguously--even if this means giving up certain niceties of metaphor and clever double meanings." —Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations.

I have been using Claude to translate lecture notes on topics in hep-th by Japanese authors (some of them I found here), and it's been a wonderful experience. It hardly takes a few minutes, gives pristine translations and full fledged latex pdf, and it doesn't make any mistakes. Tried this while I was studying gauge theory last night.