Keeping open a door of possibility • cohering my collaborative tribe • garage lab building era
pdx
Joined May 2013
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steven retweeted
It'll certainly be a few years at least before I'm having any children but I'm definitely very interested in understanding what the future of education tech might look like and finding ways to train mentat kids.
LLMs are shifting a lot of SW econ, and lots of compute is and hardware is changing right now. But what people expect that will look like and what it will actually look like a few years from now will probably be very different.
I'd definitely be very interested in having the CPUs I'm building be a part of a new computing ecosystem rebuilt from scratch, and doing so in a way designed to be better for the humans using it.
E-ink and stylus stuff is neat. I've written before about how we need more multisensory computing, including richer audio interactions. I really don't like the idea of computers and AI being simply an excuse for people to shut their brains off.
I think a very serious project to understand what a better child-friendly computer look like, a genuine bicycle for the mind that produces Mentat kids rather than ADHD iPad kids, would be a very valuable project that would yield huge returns in time for a lot of computing and human-computer interaction.
steven retweeted
feel like there's a good schizo take about corn, the American media industry, the ritualistic consumption of popcorn while watching movies, and the curse of the angry corn god(dess?)
steven retweeted
We can't brute force compute all possible moves in Go, a static game with a simple 19 x 19 grid, yet somehow people think we're going to simulate a dynamic system of trillions of cells each containing trillions of molecules.
If you had an exponential amount of compute you could solve simulate biology exactly and wouldn't need to run any experiments.
Some of you will think "of course, but that's an unrealistic assumption" and others will think "no, you need experiments even with that much compute. That's just How It's Done".
You would of course need evaluations once you have a solution, but you don't in principle need experiments to find it: Experiments are a way to save compute, dating from a time when it was much more expensive.
And I think the presentation is exponential but real systems aren't irreducibly exponential. AlphaFold worked, after all.
steven retweeted
"I used to be satisfied just playing video games. Then I found I required more… unusual entertainment."
"Hunting and killing live human beings?"
"No. Vibecoding useless software."
Stories shape how we see the world and help us coordinate with each other. And because they’re so easy to share, they can influence what we collectively create.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that reality imitates art.
Spam texts are getting sophisticated.
"Where are you? I'm at the cafe near the hospital?"
I've been near and in hospitals recently. There's probably ad-spy info on this some where linked to my name due to in-hospital purchases.
It's now easy to link hacked-dox info + commerically available ad-spy info to create increasingly situationally aware social engineering attempts.
steven retweeted
Alcoholic cybersec friend at Fortune 500 insurance company texted to tell me he received an email from his boss thanking him on his diligence patching every PHP box overnight but he was drunk all day yesterday and didn’t know anything until waking up 30 minutes ago
My kid's playing with an extra wide double sided adhesive roll.
> i cut him a strip
> here kid, go run an experiment
I start to leave and when I look back over my shoulder I see he's immediately adhered it to the gas-insert fireplace pane and it's melting. 🫠
> oh wow never do that experiment again please!
> but what happened when you did? ...
steven retweeted
This has me rethinking my role here on this planet, as a sentient being, biological organism, member of human society, maker of software, etc. This requires a different approach entirely.
steven retweeted
I need 1password to build me a feature that systematically rotates my passwords every month, and sends the updates passwords securely to all the services I'm signed up for.
Security just can't be a wild west like this anymore, we need secure protocols
steven retweeted
So at what point are we just going to say that the economics of software development have shifted enough that an insecure, slow language designed for hacking stuff together by hand in a weekend doesn't have any reason to exist anymore?
That kills a LOT more than just PHP.
I would probably trade a year+ of life for access to stimulants.
As a guy with inattentative ADHD and comorbid anxiety/depression, it does a lot for my root chemistry that would be onerous to replicate with the environment if it is at all possible to do so.
There's a lot in my life that's challenging and not obviously solvable because I'm a spouse with a partner in a medical residency, and an often solo parent with a high demand young child.
When you have a wafer of time with a life mate you get to acutely experience what you took for granted because it was previously in relative abundance. Subtract even more from available attention to attend to a child, and you end up with a relationship with almost no attentional allocation.
We've worked through identifying and effectively remedying these absenses as best we can and I still find lots of life challenging. So finding medication which enables me to function above anxiety/depression and executive-under-activation has been life changing—when it occurs to me to take them.
Anyway, cheers to better living through chemistry.