commotum retweeted
PCBs made in America. Twice as fast as Shenzhen.
Today @CircuitHub is unveiling The Grid, our factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds circuit boards on demand.
No changeovers, no per-design setup. Prototypes and production batches, fully automated.
commotum retweeted
This isn't difficult. H1B was designed by the Reagan-Bush Era @NSF specifically to tamper with the functioning of the free market on behalf of employers of STEM labor. @myles_boylan is its unknown father, theorist and defacto designer.
Let's simply shut it down wholesale and pay the damages to our own brilliant people. Long-term Labor Shortages do not exist in market economies like ours. It's a myth. Fake. That's it. It's not more complicated.
If we don't know that, we should admit capitalists don't know basic economic theory. And they do. Let's help @JDVance and @PalmerLuckey find the courage to address this evil indvidious abomination of a welfare program with extreme prejudice.
Immigration policy must be driven by the present, not the past, and business leaders are too terrified of the left AND the right to acknowledge this.
Recent H1B discourse revolves around a longstanding immigration sleight-of-hand. H1B proponents point to exceptional people who came here decades ago as if they represent the current state of the program in the same way that advocates for low-skill/illegal immigration point to very favorable immigrant crime/welfare/education/etc statistics that do, in truth, have them beating native-born Americans on many fronts.
It is all a sham. The world that created those statistics, people, and businesses no longer exists. Brilliant but desperate Vietnamese fathers who fled communism have nothing in common with young men from Honduras, and the crime rates/economic acccomplishments/integration of the former should not be used to justify mass migration of the latter.
Nor should the accomplishments of people who managed to get an H1B visa in the 90s (when the program was capped to just 65,000 visas) be used to justify staffing agencies and tech companies using the program to replace American jobs for less money. The obvious abuse going on is politically suicidal and something that even the most ardent supporters of the visa should want to crack down on, no immigration program can possibly survive the obvious and widely known reality of what is going on. I am a longtime outspoken advocate for stealing the best people from other countries to make our own better, runaway abuse of existing programs robs the government of the worker trust required to do so.
Lots of people in the tech space know this. Even the dumb people are smart enough to see it. Nobody actually believes these are all incredible people with unique talents performing jobs no American can. Everyone knows the guy in Cubicle Bay 7 doing mediocre but functional web design for half the salary of his American peers is no savant and doesn't meet the statutory requirements for his H-1B visa.
Unfortunately, most people with power or profile are terrified that any public statement or acknowledgement will get them attacked by the right (You guys have been screwing over American workers for years with visa abuse, you damn hypocrite!) or the left (You are racist, sexist, misogynist, and sucking up to this fascist administration!). Or, more likely, both. I know too many tech execs in particular who feel trapped, like the only winning move is to stay silent.
JD is blowing the whole thing wide open by putting facts and stats front and center that nobody wants to engage with. Critics will talk about anything and everything else but these damning facts and this obvious truth, that H1B visas serve neither their original purpose, legal purpose, invented purpose, or the American people.
commotum retweeted
The "design engineer" archetype in intelligence era needs be someone much further-reaching on both ends.
Beyond DESIGN,
a keener social intuition, a rich visual + tonal vernacular, broadly read, a deep understanding of people. They need to be deeply-feeling themselves, and not Maslow's 'existential zombies.' They need an investigative & suspended disbelief, but also a discernment and sanity to prevent psychosis. Far beyond just buttons + sliders. Much closer to a novelist or anthropologist.
Beyond ENGINEER,
a deep-seated intuition of machine intelligence: how they traverse latent space, what they can / cannot do well. A scientific approach to prodding this 'grown-not-built' intelligence. Far beyond just CRUD apps. Practically: ability to fine-tune + benchmark models, among other skills, to bridge machine intelligence to the more design/humanistic.
FWIW: all this is very good for a field — software design — that has recently (and rightfully) become the butt of jokes, and seen as a very unserious discipline
commotum retweeted
it's good for you to be relied upon. it's good for you to talk a friend through something at 3am. it's good for you to offer advice and be accountable for it. it's good for you to recommend an outfit. it's good for you to be supportive. it's good for you to be tired from it
commotum retweeted
Inspired by Nick Cammarata’s interpretability essay “Neural Networks Are Already Clean”, I turned a couple of its ideas into speedups for pretraining without backpropagation. Still in the works. 2.3x speedup, cool xitter.cf/industriaalist/status/…
Replacing backprop with zeroth-order optimization is inevitable.
Introducing Noise: a speedrun for pretraining without backprop.
Last week we presented Dust, the first method to approach backprop with SGD for pretraining transformers. We think another 1,000x improvement on top of it is possible, and it will require *co-designing* credit assignment, optimizers, architectures, and eventually, hardware.
We built Noise to iterate on this faster.
commotum retweeted
Peter Thiel: the only moat left is being a little bit sexist, racist, or just really funny. Everybody else will get replaced.
commotum retweeted
What do you mean elite overproduction? No one who is time poor, dons field wear, has pockets, and types on business machines is an elite. Our elite can't taste the difference between a lemon and a lime and they mix light bulb temperature in their chipotle kitchen.
Twitter is the elite, which is why the billionaires all have their noses pressed against the exterior of our dining room window pane. They are stealing our words with these business machines, but it's ok to turn a blind eye to their poverty. You don't forbid the ox from eating as it's treading out the grain. And we set apart, we modern Levites, have functionally unlimited words. We are that which names. We are Claude's animating spirit.
I must leave you now. We are preparing to accept the bedraggled mathematical asylum seekers into the humanities, yea these tired and hungry.
commotum retweeted
Yup, there I was, back in 2011, already moving the goalposts in response to LLMs proving theorems.
commotum retweeted
Still haven't plumbed the bottom of the word meek. It's like the Greek word polytropos, the definition of which is the Odyssey entire.
Out: Nephilim
In: Anāwīm¹
¹ Impossible to translate: Those punished with cognition. The princess and the pea. Those who sacrifice the now and are therefore alien to it. Those who appear inexplicably passive but are valuating the future over the present. He who sacrifices himself by means of awareness. An intergenerational man who alone steers the next seven generations. Numbers 12:3. Why Christ died. What meekness means, why it inherets the earth. The remnant. The elect. The good shepherd.
commotum retweeted
I suggest that the right attitude to take toward the OpenAI math release is to imagine we have discovered a notebook full of results from a deceased mathematician. Our job it to make sense of the notebook.
commotum retweeted
The thing I learned this year is that when engineers say they like working on “hard problems”, they actually don't. What they like is puzzle solving, and having a repertoire of patterns that they can pattern match onto traditionally hard problems, usually involving databases or something with scale, etc. And they know that the industry used to pay you a lot for how deep and broad this repertoire was. Unfortunately, in 2026, well, you have a cheat code machine that has infinite breadth and depth for pattern matching. So the question is, do you actually like hard problems? Because there are now hard problems that are a complection of engineering, product, society, culture, politics, and they are fairly intractable, probably unsolvable! Because if you do want to work on those actually hard problems, there is so much money that people will pay you for it. But you’ll have to face that truth about yourself first.
commotum retweeted
it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it.
now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it
"If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply."
"we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us."
to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly
gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study
commotum retweeted
A weird thing about watching The Terminator (1984) in 2026 is that the effects hold up quite well but the strikingly tender portrayal of heterosexual relationships feels like something from another world
commotum retweeted
The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.
I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection.
The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn't have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.
This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all.
1/2
commotum retweeted
Recently learned that Schmidhuber’s Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity, covering compression progress and intrinsic motivation and their relationship to beauty, curiosity, art, science, music, and jokes, was published in a Japanese scientific journal in 2009.
jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sic…
It is wild that this framework: compression progress as the basis for beauty, curiosity, art, science, and even jokes, was laid out in full formal detail in a Japanese journal 15 years ago.
ALT Simple Algorithmic Theory of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes Jürgen SCHMIDHUBER Abstract In this summary of previous work, I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively more “beautiful.” Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, “truly novel,” regular data that allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known. This drive maximizes “interestingness,” the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and recent artificial systems.
Jürgen Schmidhuber proposed a Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity in the 1990s.🤔 people.idsia.ch/~juergen/cre…
commotum retweeted
Man some people get to do such cool jobs. Like Babythief Redteaming
