Ythan Pratt

Preserve and protect the good, true, and beautiful.

The delivery robot experiment is going great

@Mashgin after months I’m still puzzled by this experience. Why does your self-checkout POS prompt the user for a tip?

How much are you supposed to tip the self checkout robot?

@davi49452 @Benioff @adcock_brett Riveting vision of the future. “They promised flying cars, instead we got humanoids that can either flip a package, or flip a hamburger, or fold a towel”

@ythanpratt @Benioff @adcock_brett It's astonishing that some humans have no capability to imagine a future that's better than their present.

Figure 03. Impressive. 🤖🦾🦿@adcock_brett

@Benioff @adcock_brett Can it grab packages that aren’t thrown at it?

@Benioff @adcock_brett Impressive that it can do exactly one thing

@foundmyfitness “Micro-dosing exercise” or “workout snacks” as @hubermanlab would say. I like to do half mile sprints on my treadmill at 10mph.

If you work at a desk, incorporating "micro-exercise breaks" into the day can greatly improve your metabolic health. A 12-week study found that doing 3-minute exercise breaks every hour during the workday (e.g., marching in place, push-ups, squats, heel raises) improved fasting blood glucose, insulin sensitivity, and even waist circumference, blood pressure, and HDL cholesterol. These metabolic benefits happen because muscle contraction stimulates insulin-independent glucose uptake. This is especially beneficial after meals. Big upside for a low time and effort investment!

@markgadala Just wait until you realize how your X data is used

This is wild. 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history. Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots. Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget. Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard. The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.

THREE BIRD. 🦅🇺🇸 #WinterParalympics

RT

The world is a museum of passion projects

People now need 'studies' to believe things that were obvious to everybody 2,000 years ago.

@mnwild Iron sharpens iron

7 ➡️ 97

.@pmarca breaks down his reading diet: "I have an almost perfect barbell strategy, which is: I read X and I read old books." "It's either up-to-the-minute what's happening right now, or it's a book that was written 50 years ago that has stood the test of time." With @lennysan

Twitter hack: email the best tweets to yourself and your feed with improve by 10x 🚀

prediction re the end of spreadsheets AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness. think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row. The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero. this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure. The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.

My information consumption is now 1/4 X, 1/4 podcast interviews of the smartest practitioners, 1/4 talking to the leading AI models, and 1/4 reading old books. The opportunity cost of anything else is far too high, and rising daily.

According to @SBakerMD (and I believe him) the guy (verified 81 yo) in this video started sprinting at 66. Super impressive! PS: First person to comment on the indoor lighting slowing him down needs a MRI.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” — J.R.R. Tolkien

Striking image from the new Anthropic labor market impact report.