Tom Neill

@WillManidis @zebird0 x.com/TomJNeill/stat… - has been true for a long long time

@zebird0 man how are you just going to keep stealing my bits relentlessly. x.com/WillManidis/st…

I wonder if typos will become high status in the future Because it’ll confirm that you wrote the thot yourself with no AI

@GaryDelaney Fun fact, one of America's other big chip companies actually did start as a potato chip company: readtrung.com/p/jr-simplot-b…

I’m not saying we’re behind American on technology but their biggest chip maker is called Nvidia and worth five trillion dollars whereas ours is McCain.

@ankurnagpal Daffy? daffy.org

What is the best platform these days to set up a donor-advised fund and donate appreciated stocks?

@andrewjb_ @txp_io transport?

request for @txp_io input: in the new year, we're planning a debate on 'theories of everything': housing vs energy vs talent vs.....? who/what should our 4th slot be?

@Austen This is exactly how it works for every school in the UK

Yes

@thomasforth The author has to first tick a box that says they have consent to add you. Bulletproof system

Can someone be subscribed to a free substack just by adding an email? Is that what's going on here?

One of my nichest beefs, and I think I'm quite unusual in this, is that I hate substack. Not people who write on it, I just hate the actual user interface and design choices and I refuse to do it as a result. Have abandoned big yearly subscriptions on it too I hate it so much.

@ankurnagpal The queue: wimbledon.com/en_GB/atoz/que…

Wimbledon tickets There's nothing cheaper than $3,000+ USD... per ticket Even for early round games Am I missing something or is this just where the free market now nets out?

@BenRamanauskas @hmtreasury The real move would be to voluntarily increase your Council Tax bill.

You can get the ball rolling by sending an email - @hmtreasury would love to hear from you! accountsreceivable@hmtreasury.gov.uk

Luckily for Coco and Dan they both can pay more tax if they want. You can very easily make a donation directly to HM Treasury (or the DMO if you want to help pay off the national debt).

@koomen @aloo I think there's some fear left over from the "GPT-wrapper" days that allowing the user access to the system prompt is revealing that the emperor has no clothes. But I don't think that's accurate - as you say the tools and the UX are where the real value lies.

@aloo These are all great ways of helping me bootstrap my own system prompt but I should be allowed to see and edit it myself! Treating prompts like complicated black boxes that users aren't technical enough to understand is IMO old world thinking. They're just english.

I wrote an essay about Gmail’s useless email-writing AI assistant: “AI Horseless Carriages”. link and TLDR in thread

@s8mb It also never considers the counterfactual, e.g. typing on a laptop is worse for the environment than using AI: blog.plinth.org.uk/paragraph-poll…

“AI uses as much electricity as the bottom 117 countries” – or ~3% of global electricity use. “AI image generation uses as much energy as half a smartphone charge” – or ~3 Watt hours, which is about 1/10 of a penny’s worth of electricity. These framings are used to mislead.

@thomasforth bbc.co.uk/future/article…

Thinking about building a big mirror.

UK driving test prices haven't changed in 16 years, over which time inflation was 57%. Now there's a ~6 month wait-time for a driving test and 100s of private companies selling "fast track tests" - basically ticket touts. Who could have predicted it?

@davepl1968 Try standing on the mirror and looking down

One of my favorite Microsoft interview questions was: "Why does a mirror invert the image horizontally but not vertically? Why are you backwards but not also upside down?"

@JamesDLamming Not sure this is right. Tech makes things cheaper, and that makes it more widespread, not necessarily more decentralised. It also makes things more centralised, e.g. the world's largest data centre has as much compute capacity as all the world's smartphones combined.

History of technology is a history of decentralisation. New technologies emerge that require large economies of scale and have high costs. Those costs reduce and smaller and smaller versions emerge and proliferate

@Altimor @itsurboyevan There's also a decent argument that by making existing models go further/do more, you reduce the risk that people are caught unawares by latent capacities

@itsurboyevan I think of myself as building a nuclear reactor while warning about the risks of nuclear bombs. I'm pursuing the upside, which I am very excited about, and the downside is tangentially related and downstream of the same raw material, but fundamentally a different technology.

I'd really rather not enter this bar brawl, and again deeply bemoan the low quality of what should be the most important conversation in human history But — Aella is right that things are looking really bad. Cogent and sensible arguments have been offered for a long time, and people simply aren't bothering to address or even understand them. A short reading list which should be required before one has permission to opine. You can disagree, but step 1 is to at least make an effort to understand why some of the smartest people in the world (and 100% of the top 5 ai researchers — the group historically most skeptical about ai risk) think that we're dancing on a volcano 1. intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fir… 2. lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWD… 3. amazon.com/Superintellige… 4. lesswrong.com/posts/LTtNXM9s…

@LukeTryl What happens if it's a tie? I would guess Alexander and Frankie know that Leanne and Jake is the most likely end, so can't they pair up and stop it?

If you’re faithful only makes sense to do a hyper cautious game at this stage. So route (esp given no reveal post banishments) must be 1. Frankie/Charlotte out 2. Other of Frankie/Charlotte out 3. You had suspicions of Alex & he gave Frankie money out 4. Leanne and Jake win

@steventey @dubdotco @tremorlabs Nice, I'll look into that over the next few weeks. We already have event hosts using dub for generating short links so might as well automate that process.

@TomJNeill @dubdotco yessss exactly! if you are feeling adventurous you can even use something like @tremorlabs charts and build the analytics dashboard directly into a custom admin panel, using our Analytics API here's an example: oss.gallery/projects/dub

If you run a directory site, highly recommend using @dubdotco to track link clicks: ◆ Advanced analytics with geolocation/device/browser data ◆ Give sponsors a dashboard to track their clicks in real-time Docs in comments 👇

@alexfmac Broadly agree with this, but think it's too Westminster-centric. A lot of the problems you mention are really Local Government responsibilities. We should do something similar for people running Councils, as well as giving them more autonomy to get stuff done.

An idea to address Britain’s problems:

Love how it took 1 hit piece from the FT to finally motivate the UK tech community to say enough… and realise we have the resources and talent to unfuck the country.

@maccaw ChatGPT is pretty good for this

We really need a better way of finding npm packages. For example, currently I'm trying to find a good html -> markdown library. npmjs's search just doesn't cut it.