Joshua S McConkey

Blind Faith vs Biblical Faith “Faith is believing when there is no evidence.” Or so they say. I have heard this from non-Christians and even from some Christians. It’s not always meant as a slight. People sometimes say it as if believing something with no evidence is a form of spiritual virtue, or even to be admired. They are wrong. 🧵

@Cambam0I0 @MickWest We will make transgender surgery for minors illegal everywhere. What you do as adults, up to you.

Today we celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility! 🏳️‍⚧️ It matters because no one should have to fight to be seen, respected or safe just for being themselves. Yet trans people face high rates of violence, discrimination, and barriers to healthcare. Be kind. It doesn't hurt! ❤️

@lugaricano AI cannot be liable.

Famously (there is a beautiful Works in Progress piece on this) in 2016, Geoffrey Hinton told an audience in Toronto that medical schools should stop training radiologists, since AI would soon outperform them at reading scans. Ten years later, there are more radiologists than ever, and they earn more than they did then. Hinton was right about the task, but he was wrong (so far!) on the future of the radiology profession. Times have never been better for them. The gap between those two claims, the difference between tasks and jobs, is the subject of a paper I have written with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, and that we release today: "Weak Bundle, Strong Bundle: How AI Redraws Job Boundaries." (Very relatedly we are also finishing the first draft of our book "Messy Jobs" on AI and Jobs!! You will be the first to hear). We start from the observation that the growing literature on AI and labor markets measures the AI shock by task exposure: people count how many tasks AI can perform in a given occupation AI can perform, and infer that more exposure means more displacement. Eloundou et al. published a paper in Science in 2024 that started this literature, and many follow the same logic. The inference they make is that the more exposed tasks, the worse the outcomes. This is incomplete, because labor markets price jobs, not tasks. A radiologist does not just sell image classification, but does many other jobs: triages cases, communicates with other physicians, trains residents, makes the difficult decisions, and signs a diagnosis. The market buys a bundled service. The question AI poses is not whether it can do one task inside the bundle. The question is whether that task can be pulled out. Thread (1/3) dropbox.com/scl/fo/689u1g7…

@agingdoc1 What does this mean for those on it?

Ketogenic diet dampens excitatory neurotransmission by shrinking synaptic vesicle pools cell.com/cell-reports/f…?

Math, physics, reality. Which "God" decided this would be the best way to setup the universe? Source: M. G. Raymer, Brian J. Smith, arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0…

🚨BREAKING: ANTHROPIC IS GIVING AWAY THE SAME CERTIFICATION THAT DELOITTE IS MASS-TRAINING 15,000 EMPLOYEES TO GET. It costs $0. You need a laptop. That's it. It's called the "Claude Certified Architect." Think of it like the AWS cert but for AI. If you were around when AWS certs started, you know what happened. They went from "cool to have" to "you're not getting hired without one." That took about 5 years. This is going to happen way faster. Look at who's already moving: Accenture - training 30,000 people on Claude Cognizant - rolled it out to 350,000 employees Deloitte - opened Claude access to 470,000 people Infosys - anchor partner These aren't startups experimenting. These are billion dollar consulting firms restructuring their entire workforce around Claude. And the certification they need? You can take it right now from your bedroom. Let me be real though. This is not one of those "watch 2 videos and get a badge" type certs that nobody respects. This thing is hard. 60 questions. 2 hours. Proctored. Webcam on. No breaks. No googling. They drop you into real scenarios like designing a customer support agent that handles refunds or setting up Claude in a CI/CD pipeline. The wrong answers look right on purpose. They're the exact mistakes real engineers make in production. 720 out of 1000 to pass. People who took it are saying the agentic architecture and multi-agent orchestration sections are brutal. Most of the exam is about building AI systems that actually work in the real world. Not prompting. Not chatting with Claude. Architecting production systems. All the prep? Free. Anthropic put out 13 courses on their Academy. No paywall. The cert itself is free for the first 5,000 people. After that $99 per attempt. How to get it: 1. Join the Claude Partner Network (free) → partnerportal.anthropic.com 2. Start the free prep courses → anthropic.com/learn 3. Register for the exam → anthropic.skilljar.com 4. Take the official practice exam 5. Book the real one when you're ready It launched 10 days ago. Almost nobody has it yet. That's the whole point. Get it before it becomes the thing everyone has.

@XiXiDu LoL, imagine supporting people like Merkel.

They couldn't have sent a clearer message that they are not our friends. Trying to get third-party aid to Ukraine cancelled during the biggest attack on Europe since WW2 while funneling billions to the aggressors war machine through higher oil prices and depleting Patriots.

@Teslaconomics @SpaceX Latency issues mean distributed satellite networks cannot be used for trillion parameter model training, and complex heating of 100MW space single installations means you cannot hold all the training in one large data center in space. But these are amazing for inference.

Right when you thought Starship was huge… check out the size of @SpaceX’s AI Satellite Mini. And this is the mini version since it’s 100kW. Future satellites will go to the megawatt range. Wow…

@lumpenspace @Plinz Federal Reserve banks sorta do work to smooth out economic dips.

as a 3-meta contrarian, what i'd really like to know is: what is one thing you believe in that the rest of the world also believes in but your ingroup considers kinda cringe?

Learn amazing skill in minutes.

Regular drones give advantage to defense. AI drones will give advantage to offense.

@J7UiBMjH8b @DruckerDaniel @AlexLerchner What are rocks missing that we have?

@DruckerDaniel @AlexLerchner The paper point is that LLMs have nothing more than rocks. So you could also ask "what are rocks missing that we have", and it would be an identical question

🧵1/4 The debate over AI sentience is caught in an "AI welfare trap." My new preprint argues computational functionalism rests on a category error: the Abstraction Fallacy. AI can simulate consciousness, but cannot instantiate it. philpapers.org/rec/LERTAF

I've wasted my life.

Here’s the link to give Replit Agent 4 a shot: replit.com/refer/couvertp… (Btw you’re getting $10 credits for free using this link)

@JOBhakdi Manufactured Consent

You can't make this stuff up. EU giving Merkel, of all people, the "order of merit". It's hunger games on steroids.

Footnote: When I say “democratize” I’m not talking about egalitarian ownership like in Marxist utopian communism. I don’t think that works, since pure democracy turns into mob rule and the emergence of party strongmen and finally authoritarian dictatorship. I mean, instead, a power-law distribution of ownership as likely the most stable arrangement. Something similar to what the framers of the US Constitution tried to achieve in the distribution of government power. I think a power-law distribution of ownership is not just long-term better but also much easier to achieve than egalitarian ownership. So who knows? — maybe the effort to democratize space won’t fail after all.

A remarkable finding about God's name in ancient Hebrew. How was this not realized a thousand years ago? youtu.be/m6z7JMvHiIs?si…

GPT-5.4 Pro solves the first of the FrontierMath Open Problems! Two days ago, I sent @AcerFur a potential solution to this problem and was sent to @GregHBurnham for verification (prior to any other solution). We are confident it's correct and waiting to hear from the author!

We just posted a paper solving Erdos #846, which was solved by an internal model at OpenAI (cdn.openai.com/infinite-sets/…). While the problem can also be derived from an earlier paper in the literature, the proof by the internal model was one of the first instances where I smiled reading the proof.

@cybertruck @grok, how much is the base model with FSD added?

New version of Cybertruck now available to order in the US This is our most affordable Cybertruck yet. Tough as nails with ultra-low cost of ownership – Starts at $59,990 – Dual Motor AWD w/ est. 325 mi of range – Powered tonneau cover – Bed outlets (2x 120V + 1x 240V) & Powershare capability – Coil springs w/ adaptive damping – Heated first-row seats w/ textile material that is easy to clean Also – Steer-by-wire & Four Wheel Steering – 6’ x 4’ composite bed – Towing capacity of up to 7,500 lbs – Powered frunk Order via tesla.com/cybertruck/des…

New podcast on AI (full episode). Links below. A Motorcycle for the Mind 0:00 If you want to learn, do 2:13 Vibe coding is the new product management 6:49 Training models is the new coding 10:13 Is traditional software engineering dead? 13:07 There is no demand for average 14:12 The hottest new programming language is English 18:36 AI is adapting to us faster than we are adapting to it 22:56 No entrepreneur is worried about AI taking their job 26:46 The goal is not to have a job 29:49 AIs are not alive 32:55 AI fails the only true test of intelligence 36:49 Early adopters of AI have an enormous edge 39:37 AI meets you exactly where you are 43:02 Always leverage the best intelligence 44:37 If you can't define it, you can't program it 49:37 The solution to AI anxiety is action