Crypto Educator & Woodworking Artisan. I explore decentralized finance (DeFi) and craft timeless pieces from wood. Proof that true value is built, not printed

Colorado Springs, CO
Joined August 2022
Woody Ar retweeted
Jamie T is a criminally underrated writer. He's a classic poet-singer and his influences range from English punk to garage, dnb, ska, and all kinds of stuff. He is endlessly surprising and always authentic.
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After playing some pinball on our Polycade cabinet, Trista and I revisited VR pinball on our Quest 3, and we both thought it was a meaningfully better and more fun experience in VR. There is an interesting wrinkle: @PinballFX used an efficient custom engine for a long time, but they switched over to Unreal Engine for their current games to more easily support the wide range of platforms they deploy on. Pinball FX uses Unreal, but they left the older version available as PinballFX Classic, which makes for a nice comparison. After downloading the 40x larger new application, you find that it has tons of customization features and environmental effects, but most tables drop frames even on Quest 3. The Classic version is locked at an unfortunately low resolution, but it feels more solid when actually playing pinball. Quest Game Optimizer can adjust resolution and frame rate if you are willing to go through the Side Quest dance, making a fairly dramatic impact on the visuals. I just gave Meta a nudge about maybe allowing QGO into the official store, but ideally the developers would add a few lines of cold to the old application to default to different settings for the different Quest headsets. Touching an old application is a bigger ask for a developer than most users appreciate, though. Both the old and new versions are kind of a mess with preventable visual aliasing. Here is a post I wrote ten years ago about aliasing for GearVR developers, long before Quest existed: facebook.com/100006735798590… sRGB framebuffers and sRGB textures with mip maps, MSAA, go light on specular shading effects. < Dr Manhattan it’s 1985 meme >
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We're starting to leave the territory where you'd test an LLM by e.g. "create an svg of pelican on a bicycle". As one idea to generalize it, I was interested what Opus 5 would do if I gave it the first paragraph of the Lord of the Rings, a 1M token budget (~$10) and asked for three js render of it. Opus went off for ~2 hours and wrote 5500 lines of code that (procedurally) rendered the story. It's kind of janky but fun. But it's a bit mindboggling that the LLM has to place and orchestrate various polygon assets in (x,y,z) coordinates and write code that animates it all, and that it even does anything at all. I also like this kind of examples because no one in their right mind would ever spend the time to write something this custom but LLMs have all the stamina and patience in the world, so it's an example where we go from "no one would ever do this" to "sure, why not, it's ~free". There might be a lot more. But I'm excited about creating hyper custom worlds that you can imagine dropping players into, e.g. here to participate in the LoTR story as a spectator NPC, or one of the characters, or etc. Something like an ephemeral GTA of X on demand. Last thought is that the domain of worlds/games exposes a weakness in LLMs: they can't easily audit their work because they aren't able to efficiently and natively perceive videos or play games within them. Here, Opus 5 had to very slowly and painstakingly take screenshots at different points, and it messed up a few times and created a bunch of jank. An example of raw capability (multimodal, gameplay) that I think is still quite lacking.
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Woody Ar retweeted
We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model. We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations to inform how we release these results. github.com/openai/math
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I need you guys to understand just how insanely good Meta Muse is at idea generation. Look at your “ideas” tab. The AI labs - OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google - were always showing the same three use cases: use AI to plan a vacation, meal plan and grocery shop, and generate workout plans. I told every lab that the public was bored by those use cases (also that many people were in money-saving mode and weren’t planning vacations or elaborate dinners) and needed something else. Meta’s generated ideas are easily 20x better than any other AI lab’s.
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In their words, “It's always great to be at one of the premier conferences in computer vision and, more importantly, to have so much of the community in one place. Beyond the papers and talks, conferences like ECCV are a great opportunity to catch up with old friends, meet new people, exchange ideas, and see what everyone has been working on.”
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Woody Ar retweeted
thinking of going outside the mission. what other parts of SF should i visit?
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Woody Ar retweeted
Here's the links for my conversation with Gary Gallagher: YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=XyXBwO5j… Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2MAi0B… Podcast: lexfridman.com/podcast
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Woody Ar retweeted
You asked how I created my brandbook demo Here's how: amirmushich.link/flipbook My 3D page flipper for your images, pages, docs Supports different aspect ratios, swipe sounds, cover & pages editing, export as HTML & more This is a v1-demo, and I'll update it next week so save this one & follow this page for updates
Claude-made HTML brand guidelines concept: open sourced on GitHub. Link - in the article below:
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Woody Ar retweeted
Motion design / AI models comparison: Seedance 2.0 / Seedance 2.5 / Wan 3.0 Full results - in the article below 👇
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Sam on where decision models fit in a harness and how to use Jev with LangChain langchain.com/blog/building-… xitter.cf/jaminball/status/21082…
Next up on First Pass: a conversation with @samecrowder from @LangChain on decision models. Jev from @typesafeai took the world by storm. Then OpenAI and Databricks released producs (Decisions API and ai_decide function) So what are Decision Models? We dig in!
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Woody Ar retweeted
We’re expanding our Cyber Verification Program to give security professionals broader access to our most capable models. Through this program, verified security professionals can access Claude Mythos 5.1, Opus 5.5, and Sonnet 5.5 with safeguards designed for defensive work. We’re also opening up new tiers to allow for authorized offensive work, like penetration testing and red-teaming. anthropic.com/news/cyber-ver…
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Woody Ar retweeted
Reasoning from scratch, round number 6! An introduction (and implementation) of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). 00:00 Introduction 01:54 What makes a reasoning model different? 04:25 Reasoning traces and model capability 08:29 Accuracy and format rewards 11:34 Aha moments and DeepSeek-R1 training 14:41 Reasoning effort and answer length 18:38 RLHF and RLVR 23:04 GRPO vs. PPO 26:40 GRPO explained with a cooking analogy 31:43 The KL term and simplified GRPO 35:04 Loading the pretrained model 36:07 Loading the MATH training data 39:26 Sampling model responses 46:30 Computing verifiable rewards 49:55 Computing advantages 51:54 Token and sequence log probabilities 55:29 Implementing sequence log probabilities 57:37 Fixing the inference-mode error 1:02:24 Computing the GRPO loss 1:04:37 Putting the GRPO step together 1:09:19 The GRPO training loop 1:12:57 Training settings, logging, and checkpoints 1:17:24 Running training and inspecting outputs 1:19:28 Loading and evaluating checkpoints 1:22:33 MATH-500 results and training stability 1:24:05 Memory requirements and next steps
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Woody Ar retweeted
Tired of not winning
Donald Trump “erupted” during a meeting with his top national security team last week, reportedly yelling expletives at those present, according to NBC News. The report says Trump is “exasperated” by the lack of progress in ending the Iran war and the lack of a clear strategy. One Trump ally said, “The president is exasperated. I don’t think he believed it was going to be this difficult to get the Iranians to agree to a deal.”
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Woody Ar retweeted
Complementary remarks from Gary Marcus and Terence Tao on OpenAI’s giant math drop Making sense of a new regime in math garymarcus.substack.com/p/co…
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Woody Ar retweeted
Time for every AI account to pretend they deeply understand number theory again to opine on the importance of the latest math breakthroughs.
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Woody Ar retweeted
Every robot starts on a board you bought. The good ones end up on a board you built.
Microduck got its new brain! Our first fully custom SBC in a Pollen robot! It replaces the Radxa + board sandwich from the prototype. Built by Seeed around the same Rockchip CPU but including better memory, better WiFi/BT, dual NFC antennas, user-facing status LEDs, an RGB flashlight, and major improvements in cooling, cable management and boot speed. First revision arrived, and we got everything running on it within a day. Pretty good day :) A big milestone on the road to shipping!
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Woody Ar retweeted
I've published detailed notes and an annotated transcript to accompany the video of the keynote I gave at @WeAreDevs World Congress North America in San Jose on Friday - here's my rundown of everything that's happened with LLMs and agents in 2026 so far simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2…
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