ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ 🛡️

What if AI is like Flowers for Algernon.

We’re reimagining a 50-year-old interface - the mouse pointer - with AI. 🖱️ These experimental demos show how people can intuitively direct Gemini on their screens using motion, speech, and natural shorthand to get things done 🧵

as i get older i realize the biggest epidemic is dudes with no real identity if running gets cool they become runners. if tattoos get cool they cover themselves in tattoos. if being sober trends they become born again monks, mullet, coffee snob, golfer, carnivore, cowboy, whatever the algorithm tells them whole personality built out of social contagion thats why these dudes get smoked at everything. everyone can smell the fraud no weight behind anything they do because none of it came from their soul. just trend hopping be something real even if its ugly

This is the way I think we're most likely to get truly creative AI. x.com/DanielMiessler…

The article: danielmiessler.com/blog/the-main-…

This guy used AI to put himself in Game of Thrones and fix everything

This is crazy. The hacker installed a dead-man's switch that will wipe your computer if you revoke the GitHub token they stole from you. Revoking the token is what triggers the wipe.

@eligaultney We're Charlie.

@DanielMiessler as in it will get dumb and really sad next? who is algernon and who is charlie in this scenario?

Just had a crazy idea as a response to this excellent article by Lars Faye. I think Lars' best argument was the benefit and enjoyment of manually wrangling with ideas in code. What if we created some sort of new pseudo-code language that's like a step more technical than a spec, where you can actually try ideas and see how they work, but without building everything fully? So it's like playing with ideas when writing prose, except it's doing so with functionality of an application. Maybe this won't work because the details of the particular languages will make a difference, but I think the bigger issue is getting the ideas right. So maybe it's possible to make an intermediary language that lets us play in this way, come up with a clean idea, and then add THAT to the spec as well. Like, here's what I REALLY mean... And then we'd have the ability to use the pseudo-code as a language for talking back and forth with AI about the idea, but without all the bloat of the actual language and without abstracting the ideas so far from us that we don't understand what we built. Thoughts? larsfaye.com/articles/agent…

This is really cool thinking from @trq212 here, but I think I disagree with the solution. He makes a great point about Markdown being more difficult to share and communicate ideas with, because formatting and visuals can make things super easy to understand. My problem with the approach is that, by trading editabilty for readability, we’re separating we humans even further from the creation process. I value Markdown because I value text. And I value text because I see it as one step away from thought. I believe thinking is the one thing we should be careful not to outsource, and I worry what this idea smuggles in is a major step toward making our creations opaque to humans. Not just AI's creations, but ours as well. The reason I value Paul Graham so much is because of the idea compression work that goes into writing super clean prose. It's difficult to write clearly because it requires thinking clearly. Text makes your ideas naked, and I like that. - What is the problem, exactly? - What should we do to solve it? - Why is our solution better than alternatives? I love the challenge of crystalizing this kind of critical stuff in pure text before any technology is involved. If we're not writing that text ourselves, and then editing it, it starts to feel a lot like bringing a strong robot to the gym. I worry that if we vibe-think to AI and have it spit out amazing HTML, we're instantly disconnected from the idea. Like where did the idea go? It started as vibes and got put through a woodchipper and turned into someone else's HTML. Can I see it in 4 simple bullets? Can I stare at it? Can I grapple with it. Can I tweak it? It's an idea. I need to be able to wrestle with it. Of course we can ask the AI to summarize its brilliant HTML document into four bullets, but we'll have lost through compression and expansion some percentage of the original. Maybe I'm being overly emotional here. I just feel like if you didn't put the hard thinking and writing work into the original idea, and then maintain it in a format that's easy for humans to read and edit, then you have somehow surrendered something Holy to the machines. I say this as a total AI maximalist. But I get the point he's making, and I think it's super valid. It's hard to explain or convince people of things with a giant text file. Formatting massively helps. Images massively help. Even an interface or a video or something. So we're synched on that. I just think it might be better to come at the output we both want in a different way. - MARKDOWN: Easy for humans to write, hard for humans to read. - HTML: Hard for humans to write, easy for humans to read. Maybe the solution isn't moving the first step to HTML where it becomes more opaque to both agents and humans (plus the versioning issues Thariq talked about). Maybe the solution is something crazy like document pairing: like you have the thought file and you have the presentation file(s). The proposal is to ask AI to just write HTML, right? Well why not just have a separate but linked file for that? One is for crystal-clear human creation and sync between human and AI. Simplicity, clarity, precision, and human editability. And then AI can produce whatever from that. Images, diagrams, videos, or whatever. And if you want, yes, a full HTML file that contains all of them. And that can be what you use to present or share the idea with audiences. (Plus there's the fact that some file formats are literally directories, which could be shared with lots of related content, and then there's also things like .mdx that allow for richer content in Markdown, etc.) I hate the idea of multiple files, but I think it's far preferable to losing the transparent, editable connection to the idea that you get with text. Plus, the better and cheaper AI gets, the more trivial it will be to have the core thought file plus n-number of associated versions or formats that are useful for different audiences. Basically I think it's much easier for AI to make a rich and shareable version of clean, editable thought, in the form of text, than it is for humans to stay connected with ideas as opaque HTML. And I think the human thought-to-text connection is the most important thing to preserve. Still thinking it through, however, and massive thanks to @trq212 for the push for all of us to evolve on this.

Jarred tried rewriting Bun in Rust and it passes 99.8% of the existing test suite we're not being ambitious enough

@fchollet @Plinz How about the idea of wanting to spread the joy of gardening?

Dungeon Crawler Carl and YouTube are the future of media and art. That's all I got. Have a good Saturday.

@robertgraham My conjecture: The sensation of authorship of one’s own actions allows for the creation of praise and blame. which are good for culture and society, and therefore genes.

Richard Dawkins is very smart, but the first thing people assume in response to his article is that he was stupid. Nope, he was smart. For example, he asks the question how evolution created this "consciousness". LLMs like Claude are very useful and smart, and so are humans. We can imagine how survival-of-the-fittest would select for "intelligence". But what evolutionary advantage does "consciousness" bring? (If you'll recall, Dawkins is the second most famous evolutionist after Darwin).

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection. You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum. You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom. You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine. You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two. You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

@RachelTobac @SwiftOnSecurity I think it’s more that certain content gets the reach and most doesn’t. The meta has just changed.

@SwiftOnSecurity reach across the board here isn't really what it used to be, it's a sad thing to witness

Been doing this account for 12 years with 100% original stuff, huge debuff of my posts the last 2 months or so. I'm not gonna really pursue it rn, but yeah something weird is going on and kinda nerfed my drive so you're not seeing a lot I normally would. ☹️🤷‍♀️

@trq212 I hear you on that. We definitely agree there. I just wonder if there's a third option that doesn't disconnect us from the text/thinking.

i dont disagree, the worst parts of this are when you create a report or deck which expands on your thought too much, adds a lot of AI writing, etc you can create on the fly editing experiences in HTML but it’s finicky more work to do here but i still think html is better directionally, people were just not reading the markdown files