Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass

877 posts

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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass

Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass

@ThomSnodgrass

Technology and moral sentiments in the age of unreason. AI researcher, poet, scapegrace, Passage Prize winner.

Katılım Haziran 2020
496 Takip Edilen140 Takipçiler
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
Poison Control: And you’re 100% certain your toddler swallowed a penny? It wasn’t a coin battery? Me, a rationalist: 100%? Well, no. I mean I saw him put a penny in his mouth, but I suppose I can’t rule out a demon—a genius malignus—deceiving my senses. But if we f
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
If life is strictly about the narrow elimination of biomarker distress, we really should stop having children. Not cut back. Eliminate procreation. The science is clear. > raising babies increases cortisol > disrupts REM sleep > shrinks hippocampal volume > elevates resting heart rate > raises inflammatory markers
Bryan Johnson@bryan_johnson

Friends, stop drinking alcohol. Not cut back. Eliminate. > alcohol increases cortisol > disrupts REM sleep > accelerates epigenetic aging > shrinks hippocampal volume > elevates resting heart rate > raises inflammatory markers > impairs glucose metabolism for 16 hrs One drink does that.

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Vivid Void
Vivid Void@vividvoid·
@nekoyamamanager I'm learning about America from the Japanese
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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
Ben Franklin ran away from home at 17. Hemingway drove ambulances on the Italian Front at 19. Frank Ramsey was dead at 26. It’s odd—and historically unique—that we treat 21-year-olds as kids.
Ian Bach ☯︎@Ian8ach

There’s a lot going on here, looks like fraud, but one thing that’s also super clear watching this vid is that these are kids - 21 yr olds. You can feel it in the way they talk and hold themselves. They’re in over their heads and it’s a little gross our industry valorizes it.

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Ogiel (Moe Lane)
Ogiel (Moe Lane)@Ogiel23·
Paul Ehrlich has died. He was 93. He is survived by 8,300,678,394 people (134% increase from 1968), with a daily worldwide average calorie intake of 2,800 kcal (a 22% increase).
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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
@deanwball I think the real SWE unlock right now is the existence of a good orchestration layer, not (at least not directly) better “on their own” software dev or task-completion time horizons.
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Dean W. Ball
Dean W. Ball@deanwball·
This is why I think coding agents are a larger relative boost for non-SWEs than SWEs. You cannot yet vibe code complex software with tons of failure modes and edge cases for deployment to millions of people with heterodox hardware, usage patterns, skill levels, etc. My projects don’t need all that, but a professional SWE’s professional projects probably do. So the relative advantage I gain is very high, and there are almost no downsides for me (especially since I am reasonable enough not to do risky stuff eg Clawdbot). Whereas the SWE, yes, stands to gain huge productivity benefits, but also has to ensure that all the “professional-grade” needs are met. The trouble, though, is that doing this requires *the SWE* to be richly familiar with all aspects of the codebase, and keeping track of all those agent outputs is not easy, arguably in some cases and for some engineers it is harder than writing the code “by hand” (I.e., merely with heavy assistance from AI-as-autocomplete instead of AI-as-SWE). I am sure engineers on the whole are benefiting greatly, but this is a real blocker—a great example of real jaggedness. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly this gets resolved; will agents be able to produce legitimately professional-grade software “on their own” soon? I actually don’t have a strong opinion on this, but I’d guess that, yes, agents will have scaled this capability soon, certainly within a year.
Dean W. Ball@deanwball

FWIW I no longer keep the Claude app running on my desktop because, after the Claude Cowork update, the app inevitably soft crashes into massive resource consumption. One imagines this relates to the vibecodedness of Cowork, though the Claude app rests on a very poor foundation.

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Fernando 🌺🌌
Fernando 🌺🌌@zetalyrae·
I wrote a short story: an aphasic space station monitors an anomalous object, while keeping the last two humans alive. Read “Julia” at the link below:
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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
Funny that it’s the villains in Atlas Shrugged whose companies all have names like “United Train Corp.” Rand couldn’t imagine a culture so greased that earnestly signaling patriotism or institutional seriousness would be an entrepreneurial move.
The American Housing Corporation@americanhousing

For a half-century, America has critically under-built family-sized housing in our most dynamic cities and neighborhoods, rendering them childless and unaffordable. It's time to save the American Dream. Introducing The American Housing Corporation.

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Palmer Luckey
Palmer Luckey@PalmerLuckey·
@micsolana This is actually a great reflection of their own values. "They may not do the right thing, but they do say the right words!"
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Fernando 🌺🌌
Fernando 🌺🌌@zetalyrae·
I'm 25% through, but this novel is so, so good.
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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
@owroot It’s the way pre-industrial markers like sabers and pack animals creep in, already relics, but hinting that many of the men sent to die still believed in glory and the power of ancient weapons. “War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid.”
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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
@unaliveolives @AlexGodofsky I didn’t make a normative claim but sure I think 1. Juridical personhood is good 2. The government banning a book published by Comcast (or Anthropic, Oprah, or the pipefitter’s union) is bad
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Emil
Emil@EmilMieilica·
@ThomSnodgrass @AlexGodofsky Unions are grups of people too and speech predates money by millennia so not as inextricable as you claim
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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
It’d be fun if Dijkstra were alive to comment recent AI developments. (It’d be fun if Dijkstra were alive period.)
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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
“…computer science would consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from [natural language] to a sufficiently well-defined formal system. We would need all the intellect in the world to get the interface narrow enough to be usable…”
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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
@MorlockP Everything on Giedi Prime was great while everything on Arrakis was still visually sumptuous but very dumb.
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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
By show’s end the nostalgia is for *itself*. Whatever emotion the finale wrings out of its flabby denouement is not so much from story or character but rather your own recognition that you watched a set of actors grow up and say goodbye to each other.
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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
Even wilder is how the role of nostalgia so totally changed. At first the nostalgia is for the 1980s: for biking around with your friends, for Eggo waffles, for the Amblin Entertainment version of childhood adventure, and for a certain vision of small-town America.
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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass@ThomSnodgrass·
My wife and I finished Stranger Things 5—a Marvel-tier slog—and I was trying to remember what I once found so charming about the show. I went back to the very first episode and was impressed with its restraint and naturalism.
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