CEO of Softmax: Applied developmental cybernetics research
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Nov 24 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
As someone w a computer science background, I was very confused the first time I encountered math ppl insisting a tensor wasn’t a matrix. Bc they are both clearly multidimensional arrays. But then I realized…mathematicians always use strongly typed languages in their heads!
To a computer scientist structure, functions, interface, and constraints are all both clearly separated and interconvertible. A tensor is a matrix you’re treating like a tensor. You can make mix them, a class is a bundle of all four, but it’s not required.
Oct 17 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
At the heart of physics is the idea of a frame of reference.
A frame is a boundary, something that separates this from that.
A frame of reference is a boundary which contains a decoder and codebook that are used to interpret the boundary’s flux as a description of the world.
The codebook is a coordinate map which indicates what perspective the codebook should take interpreting the flux.
Sep 28 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The NPC theory: “most people” don’t really have deep inner lives where they yearn for meaning and purpose, they’re just incentive-following automatons who will do whatever satisfies their hardwired drives. Just sheep following the trends.
It’s paired with a second, usually unstated claim. Most people are NPCs, but not us…not the ones having this discussion. We are the special ones, the real people who actually care about the world, who are really paying attention. The ones who are fooled by surface appearances.
Aug 22 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Every time you dunk on someone’s stupid, evil, unacceptable behavior and message, imagine yourself serving them. A slave on the line every other hater, towing the blocks up the pyramid, building the idol of oppression you hate. Attention is care, energy, fuel: starve them out.
You are a living fountain. Your presence and attention matter. They matter more than any of us can directly understand. And they pour out from us at all times.
Aug 11 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
Since the cool kids are doing it, my quantum gravity prediction below! Epistemic warning: crackpot physics from someone who isn't a physicist. Epistemic upside: I think I have one maybe actually correct idea buried in it.
Ok, so there's just one quantum field. Likely in C^4 interacting via CP^3 ala Twistors or teleparallel gravity, so we'll go with that. A "particle" excitation in this field is a probability density, basically a (mixed-state) spinor.
Jul 24 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
Google exists bc of a grand bargain: scrape the open web, and profit from directing traffic to the best sites. Around
2010, the betrayal began. YouTube artificially ranked above other video, then over time maps results injected, shopping, flights, events. Now AI answers.
It’s funny-sad watching it because while Google makes billions in the short run, they’re systematically destroying the very foundations of their own business and have been for a decade. Google is cancer.
Jul 14 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
METR’s analysis of this experiment is wildly misleading. The results indicate that people who have ~never used AI tools before are less productive while learning to use the tools, and say ~nothing about experienced AI tool users. Let's take a look at why.
I immediately found the claim suspect because it didn't jibe with my own experience working w people using coding assistants, but sometimes there are surprising results so I dug in. The first question: who were these developers in the study getting such poor results?
Jul 6 • 23 tweets • 6 min read
A greater theory of system design: what’s wrong with modernity and post-modernity, how to survive the coming avalanche, and how to fix the major problems we are facing.
In the beginning, we managed the world intuitively. Early human tribes did not set quarterly hunting quotas, did not have rainfall-adjusted targets for average gathering per capita. We lived in the choiceless mode:. meaningness.com/choiceless-mode
Jun 24 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
A greater theory of system design: what’s wrong with modernity and post-modernity, how to survive the coming avalanche, and how to fix the major problems we are facing.
Part one: Systems are Models. But what’s a Model?
I promise this gets practical at some point, but first we have to lay some groundwork. If you find the groundwork obvious or you’re willing to just take my word for it, feel free to skip it. But ultimately, without the background you can’t even really understand the proposal.
Jun 20 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
I found an old list of blog post ideas that I will probably never write, but I thought it would be fun to turn them into a thread. I wrote these years ago, fun to see the trajectory of my journey. I find them all delightful, even if some are wrong in retrospect.
Power is like radioactive ore…drives the engine of an organization but dangerous to everyone who touches it. Needs to be contained and channeled.
Mar 9 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
When I was CEOing at Twitch one of the thing I’d do every batch of interns was a very short presentation on the origins of the company and then a Q&A. One of the questions was always, “Where should I work and what job should I get, or should I start a company?”
It’s an interesting question to try to answer for an intern I didn’t really know, because of course the actual answer is dependent on that person and their life. So I had to figure out how to articulate the framework I used.
Feb 28 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
@arithmoquine It is shocking when you first discover the degree to which non-commodity outcomes are constrained by talent not capital, and how little you can do with money unless there’s an existing machine to buy from.
@arithmoquine Think of money as water flowing through a system of pipes and turbines powered by the flow, and access to capital as the ability to open valves in the pipes. You can spin existing turbines faster but directing water doesn’t create new turbines.
Feb 22 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Epistemic status: wild speculation but also I’m clearly right
There is a single general factor — we could call it maybe somatic integrity — which determines a large fraction of the total variance in attributes between people.
It’s appears to be mostly inherited, bc it appears to be driven by things like low mutation load, lack of environmental insults, healthy womb environment, etc. It’s mostly baked by the time you’re born and can only go down from there.
Jan 17 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
All heuristics are the same when they give you the right answer, because the right answer doesn’t change depending on how you arrive at it.
So when you’re picking a heuristic, you’re really choosing what kinds of mistakes you want to make. And that depends on what kind of failures you can tolerate.
Jan 12 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
0) Causal resonance is an important idea that I have quite seen defined anywhere so I’m going to take a whack at it.
1) you can view any system as an agent, or as a channel
Dec 10, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I got prescribed a drug you took once a day for ~120 days, preferably at the same hour. So I set an alarm on my phone, carried my pills with me everywhere, and took them. When my MD asked about compliance and I said I hadn’t missed any pills, they expressed significant surprise.
Reflecting on why I had such high consistency was interesting. There’s no way I’d have spontaneously remembered to take the pill at the same time without a system. I’m not particularly disciplined! I’d even say the opposite. I was surprised every evening when my alarm went off.
Oct 3, 2024 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Catalysis lowers the free energy requirements to access some part of the state space. Constraint does the opposite by increasing instead.
So if you understand the world as a space subject to thermodynamics, catalysis and constraint are the two fundamental actions any agent can take to change the world.
Sep 30, 2024 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The idea of a sufficient statistic is one of the most powerful ideas that I somehow missed in my academic education even though I took a fair amount of statistics.
Like ~everything else in statistics, it was invented by Sir Ronald Fisher but had fallen out of favor because of the rise of descriptive statistics. With inferential statistics coming back in fashion sufficient statistics have come back too.
Jul 13, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Agency thread:
The thing that struck me about this is how much it is really about blame-management rather than solution-management.
Does an automated camera barking at people actually make them move? Who knows, but no one can accuse the dumb camera of discrimination — because it doesn’t discriminate on any basis at all, reasonable of wrong.
May 21, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
In biochemistry there are “autocatalytic sets”. Each peptide catalyzes the formation of the next, until the last peptide catalyzes the production of the first one again. This is a “critical” system (criticality is ~the boundary between order and chaos) ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
In a normal state space the % of critical states is small. Basically, it’s hard to find one sampling at random. They’re also not in any predictable place, there’s no way to know if a state is critical without testing it. So it seems finding those 3 ideas is impossible!
Apr 9, 2024 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
Apropos the recent controversy: the word delve is rarely used in English. Except used by LLMs, and in formal register Nigerian English.
This has sparked controversy bc making fun of someone for using “delve” and sounding like an AI (which it does indicate in a probabilistic way) could reasonably feel like an attack on a Nigerian using their formal register.
This has sparked controversy bc making fun of someone for using “delve” and sounding like an AI (which it does indicate in a probabilistic way) could reasonably feel like an attack on a Nigerian using their formal register.