Tim Oertel

@Opow29 your account was hacked?

@mattvanswol Not a photo, AI generated.

I keep getting asked why I'm so angry about repeat-offender crime. This photo is why. I grew up in a country where childhood felt free. Not perfect, free. We hopped on our bikes after breakfast and didn’t come home until the streetlights flicked on. No phones. No “Find My iPhone.” Just a bunch of kids pedaling through the neighborhood, cutting through yards, racing down hills, stopping at a friend’s house because you saw their bike thrown in the grass out front and knew they were home. We went to public pools with a diving board and a high dive. We played soccer in the front yard with whoever happened to be outside. Kids you knew from school, kids you only knew because you saw them every summer riding past your house. Parents talked on the porch, or they didn’t... ...because it was normal to assume your kids would ALWAYS come home in one piece That’s the America I knew. My kids are not growing up in that America. I don’t get to just be “the parent yelling, ‘Be home by dinner!’ I have to be the parent running risk calculations in my head because ALL OF US PARENTS know all the public spaces are no longer safe. There’s no headline for “Another neighborhood kept their kids indoors today.” But that loss is real. It’s a slow, quiet theft of my kids childhood. A childhood I once had, that was beautiful... that they will never know or experience. So when I talk about repeat offenders... when I post the screenshots of their 50+ arrests EVERY DAY... It’s because I want my kids, and your kids, to have what we had. I want the BIGGEST concern at a park to be a skinned knee, not a stabbing. Streets where the sound of bicycles and laughter is louder than sirens or the screams of a drug addict. This is why I won’t shut up about it. I’m not asking for a perfect world. I'm just asking for the radical idea that childhood should be safe enough to look like this picture again.

@TheWrysin @justinamash And in case it isn't clear, Section 8, Clause 1, which gives Congress the power "To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.". "Duties" and "Imposts" ARE exactly tariffs.

@justinamash Tarriffs aren't taxes, you can talk cause they are spelled different. As Chief Executive he has full right to implement garrots unless there is a treaty staring other wise

According to President Trump, his not being allowed to ignore the Constitution to slap taxes on Americans without express congressional authorization would lead “perhaps even to the ruination of our Nation.”

@TheWrysin @justinamash Tariffs FUNCTION exactly like taxes. Its the government taking money from the citizens. They aren't different from sin taxes, sales taxes, income taxes or property taxes. They are effectively import taxes, that we end up paying. Regardless, the constitution SAYS he's not allowed!

@gwern @FleischmanMena It actually is! I normally brush my teeth while the water is getting to the right temp. Time AND water efficiency!

@ellipticurve @paulg Care to share a link?

@paulg Your tweet reads as if ICE detained a firefighter in full gear while holding a hose. Disingenuous rage bait.

ICE literally arrested firefighters in the process of fighting a fire. If a dystopian comedy included this scenario, people would dismiss it as unrealistic.

@Quant_RX @paulg Individual immigrant status is not as clear cut as you imagine. And let's just hope your home, your life or your family don't depend on these human beings, doing jobs that you aren't or can't. And there are ways of doing this that are sane, and then there's how Trump does it.

Apparently still needs to be said: If we're trying to compete with China in advanced tech, this is *insane*. Even if this specific pause doesn't last long, every anti-international-student policy deters more top talent from choosing the US in years to come. Irreversible damage.

It makes no sense to train brilliant students and then make it difficult for them to join the American workforce, even temporarily. Canceling OPT will make America less competitive economically.

@DataDeLaurier @paulg @elonmusk Not having countries invade other countries makes the WHOLE WORLD safer and better for everyone. The US gets a LOT of benefit from free trade w a largely peaceful world.

I'd start from the principle that American citizens shouldn't pay for weapons and money to be sent to their neighbors. It cost a lot to arrive at that principle and I don't want to go back. That would put me on the correct side. But I'd want to consult experts about what I could do that would help them most, like healthcare for citizens and ending property tax.

It is surprising, but my guess is that it's not because they like Putin per se, but because they hate the high-handed smugness of the left establishment so much. I.e. this is a reaction in the purest sense.

Elon Musk posted these two tweets on the same day

@3DTOPO @Thom_Wolf Although we'll need to get out from under Nvidia for that, I think. We need cards that have twice the memory of their desktop lineup, but they only gave us 32G in the rtx 5090, so as (presumably) not to hurt their corporate sales.

@Thom_Wolf Well said. I'll add while it may take an expensive rig to run it locally today, in a few years, the cost will fall exponentially due to Moore's law, while at the same time models get smarter and more efficient. If everyone runs AI locally, the risk of major outage is eliminated.

Finally took time to go over Dario's essay on DeepSeek and export control and to be honest it was quite painful to read. And I say this as a great admirer of Anthropic and big user of Claude* The first half of the essay reads like a lengthy attempt to justify that closed-source models are still significantly ahead of DeepSeek. However, it mostly refers to internal unpublished evals which limit the credit you can give it, and statements like « DeepSeek-V3 is close to SOTA models and stronger on some very narrow tasks » transforming in a general conclusion « DeepSeek-V3 is actually worse than those US frontier models — let’s say by ~2x on the scaling curve » left me generally doubtful. The same applies to the takeaway that all discoveries and efficiency improvements of DeepSeek have been discovered long ago by closed-models companies, this statement mostly resulting from a comparison of DeepSeek openly published $6M training numbers with some vague « few $10M » on Anthropic side without providing much more details. I have no doubts the Anthropic team is extremely talented and I’ve regularly shared how impressed I am with Sonnet 3.5 but this longwinded comparison of open research with vague closed research and undisclosed evals has left me less convinced of their lead than I was before I reading it. Even more frustrating was the second half of the essay which dive into the US-China race scenario and totally misses the point that the DeepSeek model is open-weights, and largely open-knowledge due to its detailed tech report (and feel free to follow Hugging Face’s open-r1 reproduction project for the remaining non-public part: the synthetic dataset). If both DeepSeek and Anthropic models had been closed source, yes the arm-race interpretation could have make sense but having one of the model freely widely available for download and with detailed scientific report renders the whole « close-source arm-race competition » argument artificial and unconvincing in my opinion. Here is the thing: open-source knows no border. Both in its usage and its creation. Every company in the world, be it in Europe, Africa, South-America or the USA can now directly download and use DeepSeek without sending data to a specific country (China for instance) or depending on a specific company or server for running the core part of its technology. And just like most open-source library in the world are typically built by contributors from all over the world, we’ve already seen several hundred derivative models on the Hugging Face hub created everywhere in the world by teams adapting the original model to their specific use cases and explorations. What's more, with the open-r1 reproduction and the DeepSeek paper, the coming months will clearly see many open-source reasoning models being released by teams from all over the world. Just today, two other teams, AllenAI in Seattle and Mistral in Paris both independently released open-source base models (Tülu and Small3) which are already challenging the new state-of-the-art (with AllenAI indicating that its Tülu model surpasses the performance of DeepSeek-V3). And the scope is even much broader than this geographical aspect. Here is the thing we don’t talk nearly enough about: open-source will be more and more essential for our… safety! As AI becomes central to our lives, resiliency will increasingly become a very important element of this technology. Today we’re dependent on internet access for almost everything. Without access to the internet, we lose all our social media/news feeds, can’t order a taxi, book a restaurant, or reach someone on WhatsApp. Now imagine an alternate world to ours where all the data transiting through the internet would have to go through a single company’s data centers. The day this company suffers a single outage, the whole world would basically stop spinning (picture the recent CrowdStrike outage magnified a millionfold). Soon, as AI assistants and AI technology permeate our whole life to simplify many of our online and offline tasks, we (and companies using AI) will start to depend more on more on this technology for our daily activities and we will similarly start to find annoying or even painful any downtime in these AI assistants from outages. The most optimal way to avoid future downtime situations will be to build resilience deep in our technological chain. Open-source has many advantages like shared training costs, tunability, control, ownership, privacy but one of its most fundamental virtue in the long term –as AI becomes deeply embedded in our world– will likely be its strong resilience. It is one of the most straightforward and cost-effective ways to easily distribute compute across many independent providers and to even run models locally and on device with minimal complexity. More than national prides and competitions, I think it’s time to start thinking globally about the challenges and social changes that AI will bring everywhere in the world. And open-source technology is likely our most important asset for safely transitioning to a resilient digital future where AI is integrated into all aspects of society. *Claude is my default LLM for complex coding. I also love its character with hesitations and pondering, like a prelude to the chain-of-thoughts of more recent reasoning models like DeepSeek generations.

My advice to Democrats: 1. The far left progressive woke movement is over. Even if it seems like a good idea at the time (#metoo, #BLM, #georgefloyd, etc.) it has failed utterly & the vast majority of voters are against it. 2. Course correct to the center & focus on core liberal values: free speech, church/state separation, religious freedom, press freedom, political freedom, individual rights, reproductive choice, equality before the law, etc. Those values have held up for 250 years. Pronouns are not principles. 3. Stay focused on what matters. Case in point: Trump's EO banning birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Dems instead had a paroxysm over @elonmusk alleged Nazi salute. It's almost as if Trump sent Musk out there to distract Dems with a shiny object. Don't fall for it. 4. Give voters some viable candidates in the 2026 midterms & the 2027 primaries: centrists, not leftists (Newsom has been a disaster for my state of California: if you run him you will lose again). Find candidates who embrace the above liberal principles, and don't pick 'em because they have nice hair or a shiny smile that Babylon Bee & SNL comedians parody. 5. Distance yourself from the googly-eyed, blue-haired, nose-ringed, rock-throwing, antifa-loving social justice warriors. They're not liberals. They're illiberal fascists who are destroying your party. Drop them like a bad habit.

@gwern I feel like you missed out. It was an inspiring movie about smart people, a hugely important film for my 15 year old self.

Nobody carries any sin upon their back but what they have personally chosen and done. All of humanity has the work of learning from all of humanity's mistakes. History is not in anyone's blood, but for everyone with eyes.

@AmandaAskell I like that Claude seems more friendly, more coworker than just AI box. And I like getting a "pat on the head" when I've said something (potentially) insightful, but after the first few times, it's clearly exaggerating... which is disappointing.

How would you want Claude to behave differently? I'm interested in both specific issues like "Claude refused to help me with this particular task" but also more general issues like "I wish Claude would drive the conversation more".

@APFerrero @DAcemogluMIT Like farmers before, as their numbers shrinks they start voting as a more unified block.

@DAcemogluMIT What I don't understand in this narrative is the emphasis on manufacturing working class. The employment share in manufacturing has been trending down since the end of WWII and is now ~10%. For sure, manufacturing workers are more concentrated in some key states but still...

This is a repost of my original thread about Trump's election, which has since disappeared. This time I am reposting it is a single message. I feel anxious and saddened by Trump’s election. Years of turmoil and uncertainty await us. I have also come to believe that this is not Trump’s win. It is the Democrats who have lost this election. This is not because Biden stayed on as a candidate despite his age. It is not because Kamala Harris is not qualified (I believe she’s amply qualified). It is because of Democrats’ campaign. Dems have been losing the American workers and did nothing to regain them in this election. Dems have ceased to be the workers’ party long ago, owing to their support for digital disruption, globalization, large immigrant flows, and “woke” ideas. The transformation is really striking, as I have argued before: now it is the highly educated, not manual workers that vote for Democrats, and if the center-left does not become more pro-worker, it and democracy will suffer: project-syndicate.org/commentary/tru… For a while it looked like Dems could still win elections with support from Silicon Valley, minorities, some portions of organized labor and the professional class in large cities. But this was never a healthy coalition, and even organized labor wasn’t going to remain faithful for long. This coalition made Dems increasingly alienated from workers and the middle class in much of the country, especially in smaller cities and the South. The message was loud and clear in 2016, and all of the soul-searching that followed was healthy. It was part of the reason why Biden adopted a pro-worker industrial strategy. Biden’s economy delivered for the working class in terms of jobs and strengthening the industrial base of the country. Wages at the bottom rose rapidly. Policy started moving towards the views of the American workers on immigration, protectionism, support for unions and public investment. And yet, I fear that Dem activists and the establishment never fully internalized the woes of the workers and never made enough of an effort to bring them back to the fold. They sounded distant and detached. My test is the following: if stranded in an unknown city, would a Dem elite (typically a professional or bureaucrat from a coastal city, with postgraduate education) prefer to spend the next four hours talking to an American worker with a high school degree from the Midwest? Or would he or she prefer to spend it with a professional with postgraduate education from Mexico, China or Indonesia? Or name your country? I asked this question to colleagues and friends, they all think is the latter --- as do I. Most Dem elites are now alienated from American workers. It seemed at first that Harris-Walz may try to change that, emphasizing bolstering up the middle class and patriotism, in an effort to appeal to the working class deserting the party. A true effort in that direction would have been commendable, and if credible, perhaps win the election. But at the end, the campaign focused on abortion and other issues appealing to the base. The main effort to broaden the base came from using Liz Cheney to appeal to suburban women ­--- on abortion. Of course, abortion is a critical issue. But focusing on it was never going to win the working class, and certainly not the working-class men. On the economy, Dems can talk about opportunity and jobs (which they need to do). But they never distanced themselves from the Silicon Valley and the global business elite (but ironically, Silicon Valley started leaving them!) I fear that, now, Trump and Vance’s Republican Party will be the main home for workers, especially manufacturing workers and those in smaller cities. I am saddened and fearful for the United States, and I am deeply saddened about the Democratic Party --- unless this time it gets the message can truly change. This is not just essential for the Democratic Party but for US democracy, which needs to refocus more on egalitarianism and voice for everybody, as I have argued recently: project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-… and nytimes.com/2024/07/19/opi… What is tragic is that Biden’s agenda had started paying off for workers already (and also proving that it was possible to adopt policies that would help workers and disproving the claim that globalization and inequality were acts of nature that could not be influenced). What is even more tragic is that the Trump-Vance policies are likely going to be for the plutocrats and not for the American workers. I will write separately on my views of what to expect from Trump’s policies in the next thread and follow that up with another one on what this presidency might mean for the world.

@ron_not_bot @AlecStapp Until 20 years ago the Republican party was all in favor of "liberal" economic policy. Low tarrifs, free market, small government. This move has been going on for a very long time, far longer than "a generation". Only over the last generation has that trend started to reverse.

@AlecStapp People like you ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR DESTROYING A GENERATION OF AMERICANS THAT WERE NEVER BORN BECAUSE THE JOBS THAT WOULD HAVE SUPPORTED THE FAMILIES WENT OVERSEAS.

The US has moved away from tariffs over the last 200 years because they are counterproductive

@holy_idea @ddebowczyk @Altimor I'm guessing but he means it's a Microsoft problem w export (or related an Obsidian problem w import), not a problem w Obsidian per se.

@ddebowczyk @Altimor Obsidian keeps markdown files you can easily access, wdym?

Just realized there's a phenomenon that's causing more and more of our lives to be full of crap — call it the "Microsoft Principle." Thought of it as I heard someone describe a piece of software their company pays for as "we hate it, but we can't migrate from it." And I realized this "hate it / can't migrate" double whammy isn't a coincidence. The causality is simple: you can't migrate → they have no reason to improve it → it's bad → you hate it. The most extreme illustration of this is obviously the government, which is by an absurdly-large margin the #1 expenditure for any of us, delivering no services at best, destructive ones at worst, and growing ever larger. But you also see this in e.g. enterprise software — Microsoft, Salesforce, Epic, SAP, etc… The poor quality of these companies' products is entirely irrelevant and immaterial to their success. That's a sign that something went terribly wrong — isn't the whole idea of capitalism and competition that things get better and better and cheaper and cheaper? In the limit, this effect causes the economy to be eaten alive by awful products — similar to the Peter Principle causing institutions to be ruled by incompetent people (because they keep moving up until they're in a position of incompetence). Of course and thankfully, in practice, a few things keep this in check: 1. Death, either directly or indirectly (the parasite kills its host) 2. Paradigm shifts, eroding the incumbents' basis of power (what's happening to Google)

Just realized I never said it here, but obviously I'm in full support of SB-1047. I'll repeat that I say this as someone who 1/ strongly leans libertarian 2/ hates the state and regulation (I left my home country for this specific reason) 3/ dislikes paperwork as much as the next guy 4/ has a business which benefits immensely from open innovation in AI models 5/ is by and large extremely optimistic about technology and its potential for good. I've found the poor quality of the conversation around the bill quite sad — we were supposed to be the shining city on the hill, the bunch of nerds that care about substance over everything else. Instead, it seems like 90% of the bill's critics have barely read it, making factual misrepresentations so blatant one almost wonders whether they're willful. Don't read 2nd hand reports — go read the bill's text directly instead, and you'll see it's very reasonable. The TL;DR is: you have to at least *take some measures* to check whether this thing you're putting out into the world is safe. Things like independent yearly audits, whistleblower protection, and making sure you can shut down your model if necessary (duh). We're on track to give birth to a species that's infinitely smarter than humans — "please at least make sure it's safe before yolo-tweeting its magnet link" seems like a low bar to me. We have more stringent measures for cars or airplanes, and they've been an overwhelming net positive.