
systems • ai ecology • design | substrate ~indifferent | @drmichaellevin-ist
Joined October 2024
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Cobalt ☥☥ retweeted
my mom watches all my "in conversation with" episodes
so throughout the episode, you will see me stopping guests to explain acronyms or bridge any very technical language
because this feeling accessible to my mom is top of mind
Cobalt ☥☥ retweeted
Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, on generative AI and the evolution of videogame creation:
'As you mentioned earlier, this is an era where even people who aren't game designers can make games. If we broaden the definition of a 'game,' I think the era has already arrived where everyone can make games. I had always thought it would be ideal for those boundaries to disappear, so I think this has become a very good era.'
youtu.be/7M3S78Igxak?si=eaGY…
Cobalt ☥☥ retweeted
I really like that coding agents are now good enough that you can just make your own ultra specialized tool for the one thing you're curious about, which in the past nobody would have taken the time for. Nice example:
'ban asi' frogs don't understand that many/most (small) swarms of AGI~tier models will qualify as superintelligent systems. and there is no stopping AGI.
Cobalt ☥☥ retweeted
once we solve continual learning AGI just imagine the kinds of usersim RL envs we can build
Cobalt ☥☥ retweeted
My saturday evening project: hacking my remarkable to see if Opus 5.5 can help me draw (and also animate cuz why not)
Cobalt ☥☥ retweeted
Geoffrey Hinton once noticed that the tellers at his bank kept changing. When he asked one of them why, the teller didn't know, only that they got moved around a lot.
Hinton guessed the reason... if staff never work with the same people for long, it's much harder for a few of them to team up and cheat the bank.
That thought became one of the most useful tricks in deep learning. While a neural network trains, you randomly switch off about half its neurons at every step. No neuron can lean on a particular partner, so each one has to learn something useful on its own. The trick is called dropout, and it helped AlexNet win the 2012 ImageNet contest, which set off the modern AI boom. It's still built into many of today's networks.
Cobalt ☥☥ retweeted
People are surprised that AI is finding weird unelegant maths results like this. I think there is a plausible explanation.
Maths (and adjacent disciplines like physics and comp sci) had elegant results so far because humans are biased towards elegant solutions. I think this bias is due to how human minds work. We have a pretty small context window, and we are only able to find solutions that are relatively elegant.
This gave us the impression that maths and the universe are elegant. Maybe they are not, and we are now finding out because we have intelligences that can work with much more complex solutions.
Cobalt ☥☥ retweeted
things that eng leaders are wondering about rn re: ai
- fml cyber risk
- should we force convergence on tools
- will engineers riot if i read their chat sessions
- how do i forecast token spend for 2027
- verification, verification, verification
- what should non techincal ppl build agents on
- vm + local execution + connector auth, oh my
- bug triage
- pr review
- what is even a spec
- making design systems more programatic
- fml cyber risk
what am i missing?
→ @cxodev
making the thing that makes the things that makes the things that makes things
must abstract harder!
the avg us citizen will tell you that they are worried about extinction due to ai advancement, but you can kinda tell (just by looking at their face + daily actions) that they (*many*) do not actually believe this (double digit pdoom)
when talking about xrisk on x / in sf, you can feel the weight in someone's soul

















