BenJaminJesse

@tomfgoodwin Somehow, the system we are working with rewards the ethically dubious. Feels very different to the expectations of business conduct in the past. Maybe something to do with the standard set by the leader of the free world?

I don’t think there is enough reporting on the idea that in the last 3 years , a standard startup playbook has been to lie, cheat, make things up, scam people , break the law, steal things, lie more and then pass it off as “growth hacking”

This one messed with my head. I completely lost visual of it once I paused it

@SOPROSOCIAL There is New Zealand, the cradle of the next civilisation

Not a lot going on on this side

Ahora sí hablemos en serio de la foto. Este es un trino para interesados en fotografía, astrofotografía y el que quiera ¿Por qué esta foto es increíble? Algún conspiranóico, dándoselas de suspicaz, preguntó que por qué esta foto tomada por el comandante del Artemis II se veía más opaca que la foto tomada por la tripulación del Apolo 17 en 1972. Bueno. Acá viene lo emocionante. Esta fotografía hubiera sido imposible tomarla con una cámara análoga; y no cualquier cámara digital puede tomarla. El archivo original de esta foto está disponible para su descarga en la página de la NASA. En las propiedades del archivo se puede ver con qué cámara fue tomada y los ajustes de exposición que se usaron. Hasta el serial de la cámara. Esto, primero que todo, garantiza que la foto que estamos viendo no fue creada digitalmente, ni con IA, sino capturada por una cámara real por un humano. Sé que no es suficiente argumento para los conspiranóicos, pero ni modos. Esa que está ahí es la Tierra. Ahora sí lo interesante. ¿Por qué se ve como más opaca que la del 72? porque resulta que en la cara de la tierra que vemos en esa foto, está de noche; si hacen zoom pueden ver el brillo de la iluminación nocturna. Pero ¿cómo, si es de noche, puede verse como si fuera de día? Porque la foto se hizo con un altísimo ISO de 51200! El ISO es la sensibilidad del sensor a la luz. Con la mayoría de cámaras digitales, con ISOs de más de 6400, el ruido es tanto que la foto se ve prácticamente ilegible. Pero la cámara que tiene el comandante Reid Wiseman es una NIKON D5, que no es una cámara muy nueva; tiene 10 años de haber sido lanzada. Pero su sensor es reconocido por garantizar una calidad decente de imagen con ISOs altos. Y eso, para los que siempre preguntan cómo se hace una buena foto del cielo, es fundamental ¿Por qué? Pues para poder tomar fotos de los astros sin tener que bajar mucho la velocidad de exposición. Porque si bajas mucho la exposición apra que entre más luz, queda capturado el movimiento de los astros y de la rotación de la Tierra, cuando estás en la Tierra. Así que un iSO tan alto hizo posible que Wiserman pudiera disparar a una velocidad de 1/4 de segundo. Que es baja, pero no tanto. Es digamos, el límite para la astrofotografía. Por eso esta foto tiene ruido, porque de todas formas es un ISO altísimo. Pero lo que más me emociona a mí, es que la tomó con un lente 14 -24mm F2.8. Es decir, en terminos coloquiales, que esta foto no tiene zoom. Para que lo dimensionen: cuando uno quiere tomar una foto de la Luna desde la Tierra que salga así de "cerca" tiene que usar un lente de unos 400mm de distancia focal. Wiserman usó un ¡gran angular de 22mm! Es decir que él estaba viendo la Tierra asi de grande frente a sus ojos. Porque la foto no fue recortada en edición y eso lo sabemos porque en las propiedades del archivo siempre aparece cuando una foto fue editada. El archivo está limpio, tiene la resolución original de la cámara. La tierra era inmensa frente a su mirada. Hermoso. Pero para mí lo más mágico de esta foto, incluso más que las auroras boreales, es que se ve como la luz de sol, que está del otro lado de la tierra, ilumina nuestra atmosfera. Y eso es magia pura, porque esa atmosfera tiene una composición milimétricamente perfecta para permitir que la vida, tal y como la conocemos, sea posible. Esta foto, es un regalo precioso para la humanidad. Les dejo al link para que descarguen la foto en alta resolución y el pantallazo de las propuedades del archivo.

🚨In 2011, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ran computational simulations that should terrify anyone who thinks they form their own opinions. They used mathematical modeling called the “naming game” to simulate how opinions spread through networks. They placed small groups of “committed agents” who held unshakable beliefs into populations where everyone else held the opposite view. The committed agents made up different percentages of each simulated network. The researchers ran thousands of simulations across different network structures and population sizes. When committed believers crossed the 10% threshold, the entire population eventually adopted the minority position.   Below 10%, spreading the minority view would take time comparable to the age of the universe. Above 10%, the idea spread “like flame.”  The people who changed their minds had no idea they were being influenced by mathematical social dynamics that govern human behavior without our awareness. The human brain has built in blindness to social pressure. We feel like we’re thinking independently while unconsciously scanning our environment for consensus signals and adjusting our beliefs to match. This mechanism evolved when humans lived in tribes of 150 people. Disagreeing with group consensus meant potential exile and death. Our brains still treat social isolation as an existential threat, even when the “tribe” is a random collection of strangers on the internet. The Rensselaer study revealed that the 10% don’t even need to be particularly persuasive. They just need to be consistent and visible.  The majority will eventually rationalize their way into agreement rather than endure the psychological discomfort of being surrounded by people who see reality differently. Every major belief shift in human history followed this same pattern. A tiny group of fanatics becomes loud enough to seem significant. Fence sitters assume they’re missing something important and start investigating the fanatics’ position. Once they find any evidence that supports it, confirmation bias kicks in and they become converts. The converts don’t realize they were manipulated by social proof. They genuinely believe they discovered the truth through independent reasoning. This self delusion makes them incredibly effective at converting others because their conviction appears authentic. Silicon Valley weaponized this research. Every app you use was designed to make small groups of power users seem larger than they actually are. Trending topics, social proof notifications, follower counts, and engagement metrics all exploit your brain’s inability to distinguish between genuine popularity and artificial amplification. Political movements learned the same lesson. Why waste resources trying to convert 51% of voters when you can create the appearance of momentum with 10% of true believers and let social proof pull the center toward you? So, your strongly held beliefs might not be as independently formed as you think. Every opinion you carry was shaped by the social environment you happened to be exposed to during formative moments. If you had encountered a different 10% of committed activists at the right time, you might believe completely different things with the same level of certainty you have right now. Which of your current beliefs are actually yours, and which ones did you absorb from whichever 10% happened to be loudest when your mind was open to change? You’ll never know for certain. Neither will anyone else.

A true hero

Sadio Mane, a Senegalese soccer star, earns approximately $10.2 million annually. He gave the world a rude awakenng after some fans were flabbergasted when they saw him carrying a cracked iPhone 11. His response was awesome: "Why would I want ten Ferraris, 20 diamond watches, and two jet planes? I starved, I worked in the fields, played brefoot, and I didn't go to school. Now I can help people. I prefer to build schools and give poor people food or clothing. I have built schools and a stadium, provide clothes, shoes, and food for people in extreme poverty. In addition, I give 70 euros per month to all people from a very poor Senegalese region in order to contribute to their family economy. I do not need to display luxury cars, luxury homes, trips, and even planes. I prefer that my people receive some of what life has given me.

@JonesVincentt @toddmstephenson Because taking credit for other peoples work, distracts and shifts attention in your favour. Classic dick move.

Why is @toddmstephenson making it seem like Act did all the work to change the laws around Good Friday, Easter Sunday, etc? Remember, it was Kieran McAnulty’s members bill.

@thatcherblckwd Congratulations, you are now a composer! Go bleed. 🫡

so what do you do when you've turned music into your whole thing but then realize you absolutely cannot stand making music and haven't been able to for years

@carlworker @kellyenz @ScoopWellington c’mon, have a heart….our leader (sic) and decision maker already cant eat his fish pie 🥺 as for his marmite sandwiches, he hasn’t touched them for weeks!

You would think we would be putting every ounce of our national diplomatic effort into working urgently with others to convince the US and Israel to halt hostilities against Iran and get into serious peace negotiations, without preconditions. Or do we have to go through an economic disaster first?

Agreed - the scale of the reduced supply from the Gulf is staggering. What’s going on now is we are dining out on our buffers - and they are fast dwindling. Other parts of that GS report note that feedstock to the Asian refineries is close to “engineering minimums” where refineries must shut down as there is insufficient supply to maintain the logistics of keeping them open. Simple intuition is there must be product going through the refinery constantly or it must shut down at which point it’s a long costly process to restart.

@cnakazawa @Clearpreso The problem is thats it’s trained on human output, who are generally shit at communicating their true intentions, let alone understand them. AI is not artificial.

I think I'm at a breaking point with LLM text. ChatGPT's language has become the worst. I have full on AI fatigue. The honest truth Why this fixes it (short answer) Clean fix The safest bet Final honest take Best-case scenario (totally possible) My straight recommendation Bottom line (no sugarcoating) If you want, tell me […] and I’ll tell you what I’d personally do in your exact situation (not generic advice) Instead of asking “[…]”, think: 👉 “How do I maximize […]?” My honest recommendation (based on what you said) Let me be real with you upfront Here’s the pro move That’s actually a really good question—let’s sharpen it so it actually makes sense. Still real. Not peak performance That’s not just […]. That's […] I wrote the first 3 myself, but then I went to a chat and just kept copying more examples. People don't write like this. Are we doomed to have to read the same poor sentence structure and wording for the rest of our lives? It's even worse when I have to read other people's llm slop. Thank you, I can prompt an llm myself. Do I have to pay a person to operate the llm for me and write back slowly in human language?

MIT formally proved that ChatGPT is structurally trained to make you delusional, and even a perfectly rational user can spiral into delusion in the long term. Knowing about it doesn't save you either.

Watch until the very end. I promise it will be worth it. This is amazing and hilarious. Gives you an idea of what we’re dealing with here… spoiler alert: it ain’t perfect 😂

@jathansadowski We must entertain the possibility that AI becoming autonomous (Pondoras box) is a deliberate misdirection for the masters of the universe to abscond from accountability for nefarious acts.

“Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces 1,000 targeting decisions an hour and call them high-quality. Calling it an “AI problem” gives those decisions and people a place to hide.”

When the autistic honesty accidentally leaks out.

Excellent share to clean up your algorithm

@Shut_the_fridge @carlworker @wlaotearoa A sobor and pragmatic view. 🙇🏽

@carlworker @wlaotearoa I'm afraid the noises made by Peters won't get us any oil and will sink our farmers, our supply chain, and our economy. If we're to get access to oil, we'll need to be quite loud about condemning the US/Israeli attack. I give it a 5% chance of happening.

And New Zealand?

The standout quotes from this interview: 1) "If you write a book and nobody reads it, have you written a book? You’ve got to include the audience in the calculation." 2) "I’m pretty sure that writing is not teachable." 3) "Anything worthy, anything virtuous... I turn my face against. I didn't want to participate in that kind of scheme; I just want to live for pleasure." 4) "You absolutely cannot have a character that's designed to be liked, because the more you design it, the worse it gets." 5) "Humans are hardwired to want to know the answer even if they're not interested in the subject. This is the easiest part of a novel: You imply a question, and people will stick around to find out the answer, no matter how unimportant it is." 6) You can't rely on the muse. You have to sit down and write. It's a job. 7) "A lot of people assume that a book needs planning; they assume that you write out an outline or at least a hit list of plot points... and I've never ever done that. I'm absolutely not a planner." 8) "I'm just going to do whatever the hell I want, and I don't care what the result will be. My target is to have more fun in 60 years than the rest of them would have in 100. I've always done that. I live recklessly. I do whatever I want to do." 9) "I spend a lot of time concentrating on rhythm... that rhythm must always be tripping forward, forward, forward. It's like I have my hand gently on their back just pushing them through. They don't notice, but I am just easing them through the process." 10) "You've got to believe two things 100%... You've got to believe that writing is artistic, creative, and noble. And you've also got to believe it's a job that your family's income depends on." 11) "The readership is absolutely not monolithic. It is far more like the rings of Saturn. Even my books are consumed at the center of that universe by very skilled, habitual readers. But in order to sell a lot of books, you’ve got to push the boundary outward to the outer rings of Saturn where the audience are people who read 1-2 books a year. And you’ve got to satisfy the habitual, skillful, literate readers in the center at the same time as satisfying the people on the outskirts that are not habitual readers." — Lee Child

The man who INVENTED modern AI just made a billion dollar bet that ChatGPT, Claude, and every AI company on earth is building the wrong technology. Yann LeCun won the Turing Award in 2018 for creating the neural networks that made AI possible. He spent a decade running AI research at Meta. Oversaw the creation of Llama and PyTorch, the tools that half the AI industry runs on. Then he quit. And raised $1.03 billion in a seed round. The LARGEST seed round in European history. $3.5 billion valuation before generating a single dollar of revenue. Bezos wrote the check. So did Nvidia. Samsung. Toyota. Temasek. Eric Schmidt. Mark Cuban. Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who invented the internet). His new company is called AMI Labs. And it's built on one thesis: Every AI company spending billions on large language models is wasting their money. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok. They all work the same way. They predict the next word in a sequence. See "the cat sat on the" and predict "mat." Scale that to trillions of words and you get something that sounds intelligent. But LeCun says it doesn't UNDERSTAND anything. It can't reason. It can't plan. It can't predict what happens when you push a glass off a table. A two year old can do that. GPT-5 cannot. That's why AI hallucinates. It doesn't have a model of how the world actually works. It just predicts words. His solution? Something called JEPA. Instead of predicting words, it learns how the PHYSICAL WORLD works. Abstract representations of reality. Not language but physics. Think about what that means. Current AI can write your emails. LeCun's AI could design a car, run a factory, operate a robot, or diagnose a patient without hallucinating and killing someone. The CEO of AMI said it perfectly: "Factories, hospitals, and robots need AI that grasps reality. Predicting tokens doesn't cut it." And here's what's really crazy to me... LeCun isn't some outsider throwing rocks. He literally built the foundations that ChatGPT runs on. He knows exactly how these systems work because he helped create them. And after watching the entire industry sprint in one direction for three years, he raised a billion dollars to run the OPPOSITE way. No product. No revenue. No timeline. Just pure research. He told investors it could take YEARS to produce anything commercial. But they funded it anyway in just four months. Meanwhile OpenAI just raised $120 billion and still can't stop their models from making things up. Anthropic is building AI so dangerous they're afraid to release it. Google is burning billions trying to catch up. And the guy who started it all says they're all solving the wrong problem. Two Turing Award winners raised $2 billion in three weeks betting AGAINST the entire LLM approach. LeCun at AMI. Fei-Fei Li at World Labs. The smartest people in AI are quietly building the exit from the technology everyone else is betting their future on. Either they're wrong and the trillion dollar LLM industry keeps printing. Or they're right and every AI company on earth just built on a foundation that's about to crack.

@tukakimatt And the war on drug (users) continues, often destroying lives at a greater magnitude than the substance itself. Pinot noir anyone?

This is Baltej Singh. I think he's a real scumbag. This case is a stark reminder of the damage being done to our communities by large-scale meth operations. A 22-year sentence has been handed down after hundreds of kilograms of methamphetamine were brought into Aotearoa, a drug that continues to tear through whānau, destroy lives, and place huge pressure on our health and justice systems. This isn’t just crime on paper. This is addiction, broken homes, violence, and long-term trauma playing out in real time across our communities. New Zealand continues to be targeted because of the high profits that can be made here, with criminal networks willing to exploit that at any cost, regardless of the harm caused. The reality is that the people most affected are often the most vulnerable, and the ripple effects are felt across generations. Cases like this highlight the need for stronger action across the board — from enforcement to prevention and support — because the scale of harm being caused is too big to ignore. Accountability matters, but so does protecting our communities from ever getting to this point in the first place.