Randyn Bartholomew

@lilareadsbooks I only read The Vegetarian. How's this one compare?

rereading han kang's human acts and the shift to second-person narration in the middle still feels like a gut punch. it drags you in, makes you complicit.

are things blue, or are things red? the blue things hypothesis has trouble accounting for blood, clown noses, and the chinese flag. but the red things hypothesis can't explain jeans, sapphires, or even the sky. overall i think it's very much an open question

@BobMurphyEcon @DrGeneCallahan It maps exponents onto the unit circle in the complex number plane. It's useful but has no more to do with God than any other formula

Years ago--back when people actually went to blogs--@DrGeneCallahan had a post titled something like "A short proof of God's existence." And he just wrote Euler's identity. At the time I thought it was hyperbole, but now that I know more math, I think he's right.

@TheGreatB00ks No love for Fitzgerald?

LISTEN: We only have a certain amount of time to read, and we want to use that time to read great books. And if we are going to take the time to read great books, we need great translations that pass along the wisdom of the ancients. Use Fagles or Lattimore. Not Wilson's.

We are asked about Wilson's translation often. We do not recommend it - at all. Here are a few reasons why:

@peterwildeford Would love to see more... a list of relevant quotes from each of the above?

So far 22 members of Congress have publicly discussed AGI, superintelligence, AI loss of control, or the Singularity: 🔴Sen Lummis (WY) 🔵Sen Blumenthal (CT) 🔴Rep Biggs (AZ) 🔵Sen Hickenlooper (CO) 🔴Rep Burleson (MO) 🔵Sen Murphy (CT) 🔴Rep Crane (AZ) 🔵Sen Sanders (VT) 🔴Rep Dunn (FL) 🔵Sen Schumer (NY) 🔴Rep Johnson (LA) 🔵Rep Beyer (VA) 🔴Rep Kiley (CA) 🔵Rep Krishnamoorthi (IL) 🔴Rep Mace (SC) 🔵Rep Lieu (CA) 🔴Rep Moran (TX) 🔵Rep Moulton (MA) 🔴Rep Paulina Luna (FL) 🔵Rep Tokuda (HI) 🔴Rep Perry (PA) 🔴Rep Taylor Greene (GA)

This is from the head of Alignment at Anthropic:

Robotic traffic cones! 🚧 In China, emergency response teams are testing robotic traffic cones that can secure accident sites in under 10 seconds. Instead of sending responders onto active roadways to place cones by hand, these robots deploy directly from the emergency vehicle. Once released, they drive themselves into position, forming an instant safety perimeter around the scene. They can be activated remotely or operate autonomously, reducing the time it takes to secure the site. Great to see more, and more unconventional applications for robots!

Do people realize how quickly neural networks are speeding up the progress in robotics these last few years? Balance is pretty good (spatial awareness less so) youtube.com/watch?v=MYDZ2C…

We’re bringing Gemini 2.0’s intelligence to robots. 🤖

@allgarbled It was pretty much true until about 400 years ago. Then things started getting wild

The author of Ecclesiastes said “there is nothing new under the sun” which was pretty true when he said it, but turned out to be more a product of its time than any kind of eternal truth.

You may have a feeling that powerful techniques in AI are starting to come together, but no one can know for sure when they will really click into place

I think we can confidently say that throwing pattern-seeking animals into an info environment that assembles reality on the basis of individual preferences and personalized algorithms was an extremely shitty social experiment

@timothy_gumm @RealEmirHan That is in fact a plot hole. (Still a great movie)

@RealEmirHan It’s a flawed ending. Taylor should have known he was on Earth because the apes spoke English.

It's pretty weird to see some journalists still, in 2025, trying to paint extinction risk from AI as some kind of fringe concern. Some quick reminders: 1. The 3 most cited AI researchers of all time are vocally concerned about this. One of them believes the risk of extinction is higher than 50%. 2. The CEOs of the 4 leading AI companies have all acknowledged this risk as real. Two of them openly believe that there are currently Russian Roulette odds of extinction. 3. Half of surveyed AI researchers believe that there are double-digit odds of extinction.

SMBC is definitely reading @TheZvi 😂 (Link in comment to the article SMBC is most likely referring to)

Truth:

@ESYudkowsky @gfodor You have changed your opinion, Sir!

@gfodor Even people who don't read, take their license to talk about things from the titles of books that other people are supposedly reading.

Nate Soares and I are publishing a traditional book: _If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All_. Coming in Sep 2025. You should probably read it! Given that, we'd like you to preorder it! Nowish!

Nice one Seth!

I'm honored to have a story included in Volume 41 of Writers of the Future, which comes out today. Check it out!! You could buy it here: bit.ly/WOTF41amazon youtube.com/watch?v=cAzVaz……… #writersofthefuture