MIT CSAIL

What if you could "reprogram" the way everyday things like bags & walls look? MIT's "ChromoLCD" tool could bring that idea to life. It uses LCDs & LEDs to stamp high-res designs onto surfaces, possibly creating customizable fashion pieces & smart homes: bit.ly/40S9vpX

A first-of-its-kind study from MIT measures how successful AI is in completing thousands of tasks done by workers in the US economy. Across these real-world tasks, they found that AI capabilities are improving quickly, but performance is rising smoothly: bit.ly/3Q1JQZD

What if you could "reprogram" the way everyday things like bags & walls look? MIT's "ChromoLCD" tool could bring that idea to life. It uses LCDs & LEDs to stamp high-res designs onto surfaces, possibly creating customizable fashion pieces & smart homes: bit.ly/40S9vpX

Happy April Fools' Day! Here's a few of our favorite MIT hacks — in other words, clever pranks on campus. Images 1 & 4 v/Boston Globe

A MIT professor taught the same lecture every January for 40 years, and every single time it was standing room only. I watched it at 2am and it completely rewired how I think about communication. His name was Patrick Winston. The lecture is called "How to Speak." His opening line hit like a truck: your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas in that order. Not your GPA. Not your pedigree. Not your IQ. How you speak is what separates people who get heard from people who get ignored. Here's the framework he drilled into MIT students for four decades. He said never start with a joke. Start by telling people exactly what they're going to learn. Prime the pump before you pour anything in. He called it the "empowerment promise" give people a reason to stay in their seats within the first 60 seconds. Then he broke down the 5S rule for making ideas stick: Symbol, Slogan, Surprise, Salient, and Story. Every idea worth remembering hits at least three of these. The part that floored me was his "near miss" technique. Don't just show what's right show what almost looks right but isn't. That contrast is when the brain actually locks something in permanently. His final rule before any big talk: end with a contribution, not a summary. Don't recap what you said. Tell people what you gave them that they didn't have before they walked in. I've used this framework in pitches, interviews, and presentations ever since watching it, and the results are not subtle. Patrick Winston passed away in 2019, but this lecture is still free on MIT OpenCourseWare. One hour, watched by millions, and it costs absolutely nothing. The most important class MIT ever put on the internet isn't about code or math. It's about how to make people actually listen to you.

Where can linearized dynamics be trusted w/contact? MIT's "Contact Trust Region" answers this using manipulation theory, differentiable simulation & control. It enables manipulation w/less compute than RL, powering robots to be more energy-efficient: tinyurl.com/mw48m2wf

An introductory course about deep learning, courtesy of MIT: bit.ly/4in6rsJ

A prompt you can use in Claude to help build & launch apps, v/@milesdeutscher.

A cheat sheet to data structures, v/@PythonPr.

21 years ago MIT researchers got a computer-generated gibberish paper accepted to a predatory journal. Generate your own here: bit.ly/SCIgenCS

The MIT paper that showed space can be more powerful than time in computers. Full video: tinyurl.com/yr787s2n

The life of a computer programmer in the 1940s. Images v/Computer History Museum

A take from 1963 that aged pretty well.

Is there a "secret sauce" driving the development of AI models? FutureTech researchers at MIT CSAIL found that at the frontier, sheer scale drives LLM performance, but proprietary techniques & algorithmic advances matter more away from it: bit.ly/4l76v2g

Classic Windows XP wallpapers — which one did you have? v/TJ Kelly

Happy birthday Joseph Fourier, whose 1822 equation allows us to listen to mp3 audio files today: bit.ly/4rx7ZW4