Markus J. Q. Roberts

If I listened to the red team, I'd hate and fear immigrants and worry about the future. If I listened to the blue team, I'd hate and fear billionaires and worry about the future. But when I listen to the immigrants and the billionaires, I mostly hear them working to make their own lives better, and in the process improving things for all of us.

Longtime users are frustrated with X because it no longer works the way it used to. Back in the early days of Twitter, your reach was simple and direct. If you had 5,000 or 10,000,20,000 followers, your posts were delivered to them in real time. It was a true chronological feed—your tweets showed up in the order you posted them, and your audience actually saw your content. The “old” Twitter (pre-2016) was built around that real-time experience. Your voice reached the people who chose to follow you, without interference. Today, that’s no longer the case. X relies on an algorithm-driven, engagement-based feed, meaning even your own followers may never see your posts unless the system decides to prioritize them. That shift—from a guaranteed audience to an unpredictable algorithm—is why so many longtime users feel frustrated and disconnected.

4. AI makes it hard to tell who's cheating - Did they write that essay? - Did they build that portfolio? - Did they solve that take-home or did ChatGPT? The interview question changes from "what did you produce?" to "can you think in front of me?"

Chess is 30 years ahead of every other profession in dealing with AI. The best case study we have for what's coming. 4 lessons: 1. Human-AI collaboration had a 15-year shelf life in chess. "Human in the loop" is a phase.

@paularambles Took me a minute to realize you weren't talking about science fiction.

the "sf is weird" content cycle is the least persuasive genre on the internet. people who love sf see it and go "this is why i live/want to live there." people who hate sf see it and go "this is why i'd never live there." it's a rorschach test everyone thinks is a documentary

@alphafox 110 baud. And we liked it.

How fast was your first modem? Mine was a 2400 baud Hayes:

“Wait so the light comes from microgram droplets of tin heated into a plasma, and we built this? Like, actually??”

@Austen With some codebases I've seen, this would be real progress.

Setting up an agent with a metric like this is a great way to nuke 100% of your codebase

@JoelStransky I fail to see how that's "not using science." They literally solved it by doing science. (Unless by "using science" you mean "looked up in the literature what someone else discovered by using science" which is analogous to saying "watching the super bowl is playing football.")

Just thought of something. Need to yap. I love to tell the story of how they invented soap flakes. They needed to spray liquid soap into a large room in way that would harden into flakes before it hit the ground. They didn't use science, they used trial and error 🧵

No, of course not. I can, though, blame them for not thinking of it themselves.

Endorsed. Sometimes, you have to wonder why people analyze certain subjects in the ways they do rather than in the best ways available when doing so only adds a few minutes of work. Feynman actually talked about this in his Cargo Cult speech in the context of maze-running rats:

@DJSnM My simple Fermi-guestimate reasons a follows: if all of your power is solar, your worst case will be that of a thermal superconducting black body of the same geometry, in the same orbit (due to conservation of energy). Since radiation goes with Δt⁴, you can do better than this.

Rather than arguing based on 'feels' or asking AI to make up an answer that sounds plausable, I actually did some math on cooling data centers in space, while explaining the basics of thermal balance. patreon.com/posts/cooling-… Shame I overestimated the size of the spacecraft, but, the numbers are at least in the right ball park.

@Garrett_Watton @avidseries Ah, but there's a difference between being in a conversation and listening to people striving to create a parasocial proxy for being in a conversation. Someone could easily love a good home-cooked meal and still not be able to stomach eating skittles, cotton candy & a juice box.

@avidseries In regular conversation with those you find interesting, do you feel at all difficulty maintaining interest in them?

I've never listened to a podcast for more than 3 or 4 minutes. I don't have the patience to listen to people ramble on while I wait for them to talk about something I might be interested in. I'm not sure there's ever been a less efficient way to transmit information.

@avidseries Interpretative dance comes to mind.

@unclebobmartin I had one keep an entire module around (renamed) after being told to replace it, just so it could be used in the tests and they would pass. It did this because the new version was implemented incorrectly and did not pass the tests.

The AI was in a quagmire. I forced it to change something deep and systematic (which map it was reading). It struggled to keep all the tests passing. Every change thwarted it. Then I noticed, as I watched its comments scroll up on the screen, that it was softening the assertions on some of the tests in order to get them pass. For example, instead of asserting the final position of a fighter, it asserted that the fighter had burned the right amount of fuel. Now this is possibly a good change. By reducing visibility the test may not be within its rights to assert a final location since the computer may not know that position is reachable. On the other hand, it might just be the AI cheating to get the tests to pass. So now I have to scrutinize those changes it made. I'm going to do this by interrogating the AI on a case by case basis, and demand that it justify each move.

@WU_Salter_NC @SteveLovesAmmo I'm basically saying that if they're dying at 100x+ the rate, you wouldn't be as likely to live to retire. "There are bold pilots, and old pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."

@MarkusQ @SteveLovesAmmo You sharing - want what your smoking

The photo on the wall is in memorial of the last dude who set up this electrical masterpiece.

@Sp0okyScary @memeticsisyphus Wait, so we can indicate that we dislike certain paying users? Actually, that does sound like a feature I'd use.

@memeticsisyphus Elon says it'll only be for paying users of X

Downvotes are how a website with a close balance but slightly more of one political side quickly devolves into a single party echo chamber.

@memeticsisyphus One solution (could be tricky to implement) an ability to flag users so their down votes are counted as upvotes for you. Maybe not "solution" but "interesting twist for interesting times."

@WU_Salter_NC @okron8 @SteveLovesAmmo Billion ≠ million.

@okron8 @SteveLovesAmmo Your population in Finland is 5.6 Million people. In the USA we have 350 Million people. India’s population is 1.4 Million people, that’s what is amazing about the death count.

@WU_Salter_NC @SteveLovesAmmo If this were a story problem, the answer would be that you most likely either worked in the US or retired young.

USA: Approximately 100 to 200+ U.S. electricians and electrical workers die annually from electrical incidents. India: Around 12,000 to over 13,000 electricians die due to electrocution annually with deaths rising to over 18,000 in 2023 I’m a retired Electrical Engineer. This is absolutely insane.

It’s getting to the point where if you’re an Iranian official and Israel hasn’t killed you yet it’s a bit insulting

@everyoneknowsmy Seriously, you can't think of any biological humans that you'd like to send to space? You, sir, are a saint!

As a space nut - I don’t see any logical future where sending biological humans to space makes sense. Let’s send like 300 robots to mars and Venus, right now.