Ted Suzman

@TimSuzman Nice. Can shoot extra fast if you press tap spacebar and click the mouse at the same time. Excellent sound effects

Every little detail was his decision, like the little orange "cheetah" that follows your mouse.

My 5-year-old (now 6) made a computer game. Wallbreaker. The night before, he dreamed the whole game. He used cursor (this was back with Sonnet 3.5) and dictated to me since he didn't know how to spell yet back then. He built the first level in one day. "Last night I dreamed I made a game. And today I’m playing my dream." All the sound effects he voice-recorded into my iPhone. wallbreakergame.com

@TimSuzman Oh man I remember learning this magical incantation. File opening/reading was pretty confusing really, lots of boilerplate that has to do with OS implementation details. Not beginner-friendly!

Day 2

I found the textbook I used to teach myself programming when I was 11.

@TimSuzman betrayal at krondor (where we found an infinite money glitch)

@TimSuzman Master of Orion II Heroes of Might and Magic SimAnt

The best computer experiences as a kid weren't just fun, but also made me think better. Each of these was better than anything I learned at school: Sim City Sim City 2000 Other sim games Civilization, Civ II Typing stuff into the DOS prompt to see what happened The Incredible Machine Return to Zork Myst Starcraft Lemmings Railroad Tycoon Fractint (fractal generator)

@slotkinjr @Waymo The safety advantage might compound with more self-driving cars, because then automated cars would be more likely to encounter each other rather than (less safe) human drivers

As a neurosurgeon I care a lot about road safety. By now you’ve probably seen @Waymo’s stunning safety results (like 91% fewer serious crashes). But they didn’t just publish data headlines. They released the raw CSV files and data dictionaries. I did a much deeper analysis. A fascinating story emerges when you analyze how they’re achieving this. This isn’t incremental improvement - it’s categorical. We’re looking at the potential elimination of traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality. The intersection breakthrough: Waymo has essentially solved intersection crashes, with 95% fewer injury incidents than human drivers in the same locations. That’s transforming the deadliest driving scenario. The national math: If every US vehicle performed like Waymo, we’d prevent 33,000-39,000 deaths annually and save $0.9-1.25 trillion in societal costs. Even partial adoption at 27% would save ~10,000 lives per year. In terms of magnitude, this would be the equivalent of eliminating every pedestrian death nationally in a year. The physics signature: Here’s what fascinates me: 47% of Waymo’s contacts involve less than 1 mph delta-V. They’re not just avoiding crashes; they’re converting unavoidable incidents into gentle bumps. It’s like having physics itself on your side. We’re not talking about marginal safety gains. The data represents a fundamental shift from harm reduction to harm prevention. The methodology matters: I used their dynamic geographic benchmarks (comparing like-for-like road conditions) and verified the findings hold across San Francisco, Phoenix, LA, and Austin. The safety advantage actually increases in more complex urban environments. Link to raw data below…. Notes on my approach: Analysis based on 96 million miles of Waymo Rider-Only (RO) data through June 2025, utilizing Waymo's dynamic geographic benchmarks to compare Waymo Driver performance against human drivers under similar road conditions and operational design domains. The projections for national impact (deaths prevented, societal costs) involve several assumptions. Given Waymo's zero reported fatalities, the direct serious injury reductions were mapped to national fatality statistics using established NHTSA-derived ratios that correlate serious injury crash rates with fatality rates. This extrapolation assumes that Waymo's observed serious injury prevention capability would translate proportionally to fatality prevention. Societal cost savings are estimated by applying average per-fatality and per-injury economic costs (e.g., medical, lost productivity, quality of life) as published by NHTSA, scaling these national averages to the projected number of avoided fatalities and injuries based on Waymo's safety performance. These figures represent the potential annual impact if the Waymo Driver's safety profile were widely integrated into the national fleet. @ethanteicher

@jeremyphoward Agreed! Another similarity: - Some debts have high interest rates; others are lower

Tech debt is like other debt: - Longer you hold it, more it costs - Costs accumulate over time - Pay it off ASAP - Sometimes worth taking on debt, to do something important faster - Some take on debt without thinking: can I pay it off - Taking on more debt to pay off debt is bad

@TimSuzman Yeah it makes me really want Claude Code (Opus 4.1) running on high tok/sec hardware like cerebras.ai

Now that an AI can build an entire project in 10 minutes, it feels frustratingly slow. I could iterate another 10x or 100x faster easily.

@michael_nielsen > In a few cases such as progesterone and paroxetine hydrochloride, the disappearance gradually spread across the world, and it is suspected that it is because earth's atmosphere has over time become permeated with tiny seed crystals. Had to double-check that I was on wikipedia

I re-post this periodically, but disappearing polymorphs are one of the most incredible things in nature. Example, one of many: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappear…

@vinylsfca Ok it just crescendoed add stopped — guessing it was fireworks after all

@vinylsfca Yeah I hear it too, sounds like fireworks except the pattern is really regular

Does anyone hear that loud banging in San Francisco?

@RichardMCNgo @HiFromMichaelV Yeah it’s strange to me that people use stock market caps as a signal of economic health — seems more like a measure of imperfect competition (since with perfect competition economic profits would be competed away)

Based on other things he's said to me, I'm guessing @HiFromMichaelV would argue that this is a sign of health, but I don't yet understand his worldview well enough to reconstruct the argument. (Something about ensuring that capital isn't overconcentrated?)

What's the best explanation for why, despite China's economy booming, the Shanghai Stock Exchange has been flat for decades?

@caleb_friesen @alexandr_wang Ah I good points; I think the statement was in the context of startups though, so probably wasn’t meant to apply to eg lottery tickets.

@RoboTeddy Meme celebrities are a counter-example, e.g. Chewbacca Mom or the cranberry juice skateboard guy. Ordinary effort, extraordinary results. Lotteries are another example. Early Bitcoin adopters. The list goes on. I guess the word 'luck' isn't in @alexandr_wang's vocab.

@eshear Betrayal at Krondor was amazing, don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone mention it before. Puzzle chests, tactics in fights… Also discovered an infinite money glitch with gambling and barding

(Betrayal at Krondor and StarFlight, two of the best RPGs of all time)

Why is it that the RPGs of my childhood had such vast and meandering open worlds, and somehow as computers have gotten more powerful the worlds have gotten more closed?

@paulg Depends on how happiness is measured. See the two charts in ted.suzman.net/p/the-progress…

Happiness = the number of digits of wealth.

@eshear OK turns out this rabbit hole goes even deeper than predictive processing... chatgpt-45 convo here: gist.github.com/RoboTeddy/a0c1… (uploading a markdown transcript since native chatgpt sharing doesn't work on chats with images)

@eshear OK chatgpt-45 confirms that this is what's going on. Wild!! Now I really wish we could somehow intercept brain -> eye signals, which apparently must encode a sort've visual field that can be diffed against; figure out how that encoding works, and display it on a screen.

In a human being, what’s the ratio of the number of nerve impulses (roughly, bits of information) going from the brain to the eyes, vs going from the eyes to the brain?

@adamimos @eshear x.com/RoboTeddy/stat…

@RoboTeddy @eshear What did chatgpt say? I'm pretty sure that the brain -> eye connections are almost all (not 100% but close) efferent connections that are saccading and things like that, and are not doing what I consider the more interesting predictive processing thing of diffing like in cortex.

@NavinFS @eshear

@RoboTeddy @eshear Share the conversation. Sounds like chatgpt is just being agreeable