Antpan

"Problem is that nobody seems content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them." signalvnoise.com/svn3/reconside…

@SahilBloom The IRS cares.

Two words that changed my life: Nobody cares. When you’re winning, nobody cares. When you’re losing, nobody cares. It doesn’t mean nobody loves you, it just means nobody cares about your life as much as you do. It just means that you are in control. It’s on you. Nobody cares.

@VictorTaelin All we really have is computational irreducibility. 😉

@RealRossU @eBay Belt and Road Commerce

I was just told that @eBay is aware of this, but is choosing to not do anything about it. First time I have felt discriminated against since going free. Gee, maybe I should start my own ecommerce website. What'll I call it...?

@probnstat It is just based on geometric brownian motion, imho there is no deeper truth in these formulas. Just looks cool 👍

Black-Scholes Equation in Mathematical Finance

Cool paper out tonight on uncertainty estimation in generative AI [1]. You can use generative AI in medical imaging to flag anomalies, and enhance images - but wouldn't you like it to tell you how confident it is in its prediction? 💡The paper enhances a VAE (variational auto encoder) with a SLU layer (Stochastic Laplace Uncertainty) - after the VAE makes a prediction (like generating an image or flagging an anomaly), SLU uses a Laplace approximation to figure out how confident the model is about that prediction 💡The Laplace approximation looks at the curvature of the model’s loss function (how the error changes as you alter the parameters). If the loss function is flat (low curvature), the model is less confident, and if it's steep (high curvature), the model is more confident. By calculating this, SLU figures out how confident the model is in its prediction. Bonus Q: can you see a connection to 2nd-order Tweedie's formula? **answer below in comments, +link to the paper

Published by the MIT Press and written by a leading research mathematician—Prof. Joel Hamkins (who has been a faculty member at Oxford University), this book stands out among those I shared earlier, as it also includes chapters on graph theory, game theory, and order theory.

@hyperliberalism @miniapeur Interesting have to check this out! Is it really a math problem collection or rather a programming exercise book?

@miniapeur SICM is fun. mitpress.mit.edu/9780262028967/…

I'm looking for mathematics book full of problems to solve and, ideally, their solutions. I want to start solving at least one problem a day and it's easier if I can just browse through a book. It should be at least undergrad level. I am open to a book covering several topics or specific topics such as linear algebra, probability, analysis, statistics, etc.

Ask ChatGPT: If you were the devil and wanted to keep an entire nation sick, what would you do?

I'm so pleased to present a new book with @stripepress: "The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025." Over the last few years, I interviewed the key people thinking about AI: scientists, CEOs, economists, philosophers. This book curates and organizes the highlights across all these conversations. You get to see thinkers across many, many fields address the same gnarly questions: “What is the true nature of intelligence? What will change from the millions of machine intelligences running around? What exactly will it take to get there?” Settled answers are unavailable; we’re all running unsupervised. But between these discussions lie, I hope, some insights on the most interesting and important questions of our era. Link below. Enjoy!

👀 You have got to be kidding me. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…

@yotzol Wow, this is so true! One of my best teachers in high school was a former opera singer, always had a friendly yet authoritative aura.

@visegrad24 @RBrzoska They now also have the same problem as Japan: Low birth rates!

Poland’s GDP per capita was less than 7,000 USD when communism ended. Now, after 35 years of a free market economy, it is at 47,000 USD. In two years or so, we should overtake Japan, says entrepreneur @RBrzoska about the Polish economic miracle. 🇵🇱🚀

@ChShersh True programmers start counting at zero. So let me push the following change: ++ 0. C ... -- 5. Rust

This is my Top 5 of Programming Languages as of 2025. 1. Python 2. Typescript 3. Kotlin 4. OCaml 5. Rust

@DrNeilStone Yeah like the CIA made up the term conspiracy theorist...

The fascinating thing about conspiracy theorists is how they just completely make things up. Totally invent stuff. And people believe them...

I thought about this for a longtime and I guess it all boils down to the dichotomy between *cooperation" and "competition". In nature there is a complex web of predators. E.g. a fat, "greedy" rat becomes a delicious meal for some cat. Similarly a cat that becomes lazy will face competition from other similar or larger cats. There is almost no rent-seeking in nature! Whereas our so called capitalism is imho not real capitalism, as the central banks and government protect entrenched special interest groups. There is always another subsidy, another government bailout, another big (&monopolist) pentagon/NASA contract, another zoning law, another tax exemption, etc. True libertarianism is actually not that far from true socialism, in that it has never been really implemented. The problem is how to keep government in check. The founding fathers of the united states basically were masterful "prompt engineers", who due to great suffering under the ruthless British empire, have foreseen a lot of flaws and implemented counter measures within the american constitution, which has put America on a tremendous run. But I guess the creation of the central bank and the abolishment of gold and silver as legal tender, at least in its current form, are imho the major loopholes / defectd in the US governance system. As it enables a lack of accountability, which is actually - again imho - more severe than the mere money printing. I guess there is more to it, therefore I recommend reading Human Action from Ludwig Mises (or perhaps a modern, shortened summary) and also one of the books of the great Michael Hudson, analyzing a lot of the issues within our system and tracing it back to ancient times.

I have become less libertarian over time not because my ethics have changed but because adversarial tech has gotten more efficient at extracting value from unsophisticated people. Used to lose 5-10% of people like this, but now it's 50, 60% and the water is still rising.

@attilablenesi Writing from it! Great work!

Give Grok Android Beta a try, let me know what you think. play.google.com/apps/testing/a…

@KettlebellDan Where is X payments?

what’s next on your list towards making 𝕏 your everything app?

@dhh @lights_n_poetry What about Redundancy and Disaster Recovery? Is it still similar or did you (slightly) increase your risk parameters by going on-prem?

@lights_n_poetry But sure, if you're running such a small operation that your cloud bill is a nothingbugger, I wouldn't bother either. $10 million straight to the bottomline isn't a nothingbugger for us, though! I get to personally keep a large share of that!! 😄

Our S3 exit is going full steam ahead for a final departure this summer (when our 4-year contract expires!). Look at that beautiful Pure NVMe gear! 😍

@TinaAzureM @pikuma The mathematical definition of equal cardinality (i.e. equal infinity) is that you can 1:1-map, i.e. enumerate, one set in terms of the other. Turns out you can't do this for all infinities equally, so by this definition there are multiple types infinities.

@pikuma the implication that some infinities are bigger than others is inherently flawed since infinity is always infinity and infinity is always equal to infinity. the real difference between the top and the bottom is the rate at which people are driven over

Are you an ℵ₀ person?