Jacob (@jvboid) header
Jacob (@jvboid) profile picture

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San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2022
Photo by Jacob (@jvboid)Photo by Jacob (@jvboid)Photo by Jacob (@jvboid)Photo by Jacob (@jvboid)Photo by Jacob (@jvboid)Photo by Jacob (@jvboid)Photo by Jacob (@jvboid)Photo by Jacob (@jvboid)Photo by Jacob (@jvboid)Photo by Jacob (@jvboid)
I hope this is a wake up call for a lot of you. Tech no longer provides you the safety you once desired, so that exact fear you ran away from is something you'll face in the next couple of years. Startups provide the biggest risk/reward ratio for your career and provide the same compensation in salary. Don't expect to get the same from big tech or corporate. Go build something that changes the world.
October’s layoffs so far: Netflix: ~1,000 (6%), mostly product and tech eBay: ~1,000 (9%), its second round this year HubSpot: ~660 (7%) EA: ~400 (3%), and BioWare is closing Dropbox: ~200 (9%), plus its CTO Amazon: hundreds across seller support, engineering and customer service Airtable: a big chunk of the team, after Bending Spoons bought it Microsoft: buyout offers to ~60,000, about a quarter of the company
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We brought a knife to a gunfight — one agent and quantum circuit against 40 agents swarm. I walked into the Gemini 4 Argon hackathon expecting to work on a voice and camera economy factiorio game. Teams were competing on how many agents they could keep up with. One team orchestrated 40 agents to create a playable game in 5 hours. Others cloned full games from single YouTube video, pulled hardware BOMs of research screenshots, and automated entire wet lab from a photo of a real lab bench. Times changed, hackathons had moved from clever code to high velocity token allocation. Then we sat down with Hanah Rahman, a UC Berkeley quantum researcher and @jvboid. Hanah can hold Hilbert spaces in her head yet was locked out of agent ecosystem simply because no univ teaches domain scientists what a context window costs, how tool contracts fail, or how to built an harness. So we teamed up to build My Little Brain to process 8 EEG channels into 10 band powers, mapping 4 biophysical tuning knobs (4 settings each, 2 bits per knob) onto an 8-qubit register. Picture a library of 256 small brain states benchmarked against CHB-MIT clinical seizure data. Pull books at random and you open about 128 before you find the target. Rather than brute forcing all 256 states, Gemini 4 Argon wrote QASM circuits over 5 iterative turns on IBM simulator, agent ingested top-8 rank verdicts, pruned away non-viable branches, and compressed its own circuit from 18 two-qubit gates down to 4. We wanted to see how an autonomous compiler could navigate physics-driven search spaces under strict hardware noise constraints.
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Jacob retweeted
I agree. Robots are the non-biologist's abstraction of how scaling in biology scales. Imagine people in the 1940s pouring money 100x money into automating the vacuum tube factory than inventing the transistor. Imagine putting everything into giant CPU factories instead of inventing the GPU. We are disproportionally thinking/resourcing innovation in biology as if it's car manufacturing. There is ample opportunity to improve, redefine and scale measurement in front of us. I recently talked to someone at a robot-first science factory with near billion in funding boasting how they measure ~1000 mutants a week. A team of 4 at Dyno scaled the equivalent assay multiplexing by 25x. 1 person can run it. The robot is scaling the wrong layer. I'm not against robots and I think they will have the role to play. But I think their impact on biology is overblown, especially on how it scales in performance per dollar deployed. The danger is we become so obsessed with vacuum tube factories that we don't fund the transistors of biology. Complex physical value chains are somewhat path dependent, once you build a highway instead of a subway, you have to deal with a lower efficiency, higher pollution world. Most current robotic approaches are a crude, and poorly scalable, way to scale biology.
Maybe controversial: the conversation about scientific bottlenecks is overfocused on automation. New measurement technologies deserve more attention. You could automate an assay that needs an entire facility – or you could REINVENT the assay so that it fits into just a few tubes.
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Feels like March 1, 2020 for Cyber. Not normal, something is happening. Internet lockdowns in a couple of months?
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anyone else received a critical security alert from @adcock_brett’s @hark_labs ai signing into their google account unprompted?
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make sure to opt out of data use by AWS AI services for every region at settings.aws.com/projects
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truly ridiculous
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[continued] I say "almost" because there is going to be one way to maintain secrecy. Software as a service with the executable hiding behind a network connection to the cloud. But as of now, we must assume that anything shipped as an executable, or even a firmware image, is as transparent as glass. It won't keep its secrets for any longer than it takes for somebody to be motivated to throw an LLM at it. I did not see this coming. When I wrote down the theory of open source, 30 years ago now, I thought closed source would be gradually driven towards extinction by cost gradients, but survive indefinitely in certain niches. I did not foresee it being wiped out in a technoapocalypse. Ironically, I thought one of the application areas in which closed source would persist longest was games. There are still some obstacles. In US law, decompilation of a binary is a derivative work of the binary that falls under whatever copyright it had. However, it is also settled law that if you decompile binary code to a precise specification of what it does, then generate fresh code from that without looking at the decompiled stuff, you're in the clear. This was the case law that allowed PC clones to exist, after Phoenix Technologies reverse engineered the original IBM PC BIOS. The two-step process - binary to specification to unencumbered code - will no longer takes a large number of programmers and years of development time. With an LLM, it's now a thing you can do in a day. Ubiquity will make it impractical to prosecute all the people who might skip the specification step. Source code can also be covered by patents. You can be able to see their source code for a patented technique and not be able to use it without violating the law. Linux has evolved practices for dealing with this problem - one is not shipping patented video codecs, but requiring you to download them as plugins from jurisdictions where U.S. patents can't be enforced. This presents patent holders with the impractical challenge of individually suing millions of end users, assuming it can even figure out who they are. To date, AFAIK, this has not been attempted. And that's about it. If there are any other ways left to retain software secrecy and lock-in than SaaS or patents, I can't think of any. Well, you could epoxy-pot a firmware ROM, I suppose, but that can be defeated with a heat gun and a dental pick. Device manufacturers will learn not to pay for an assembly step that has become useless. Forced migration from shipped binaries to tied cloud services will be tried - Adobe pioneered this, and Microsoft is pushing it as hard as they can given that their OS is a binary that has to run locally. Both companies are seeing massive user revolts over this. There is good reason to doubt that it's a strategy that can hold customers in the long term. Also, a lot of things can't safely be tied to the cloud at all, because they can't tolerate a random network outage. Machine tools, medical devices... A whole lot of proprietary software business models are going to collapse. Hard. One that I think might survive is tax software; being able to decompile it doesn't necessarily do you a lot of good because its actual value is tracking a ruleset that changes over time and has to be maintained by vendor specialists. But cases like this are unusual. I think some dirty laundry is going to get aired, too. It has long been rumored that the reason graphics card manufacturers are so stubborn in their secrecy is that they've all been committing massive intellectual-property theft on each other for decades. If this is true, it will be exposed, and the lawsuits will be entertaining. We're entering a new world, with a lot of ancient comfortable assumptions being blown up. It's going to be fun to watch. 2/2
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will claude keep giving me these free resets after they’re accountable to wall street
43%no, 1-time pumping
29%no, not in long run
0%yes, to compete w codex
29%yes, if ur data is usefl
14 votes • Final results
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instead of just deciding, imagine an entire toolkit of neurosymbolic operators 🤔 learning structured differentiable programs🤔 hope @tensacode 2022 inspired something github.com/TensaCo/tensacode…
hype-free explanation of jev: jev does not replace gpt / claude jev is just a *really* smart switch statement like if 2016 ml classifiers got 2026 levels of intelligence it's a new* type of tool that will make a lot of workloads insanely fast, cheap, and accurate * = and by new, i mean rebranded ~~~ it needs a predefined set of options and it will tell you which one to take it cannot: - write code - generate natural language - reason step by step / show its work - produce any output you didn't define in advance - pick from more than ~255 options in one shot but it can: - classify, route, score, rank - give confidence - pick the right branch, tool, model, or sub-agent - judge / verify / guardrail an llm's output - label tons and tons of rows ~~~ i'd imagine a lot of workflows that look like: llm proposes options → jev decides → code executes and i see this fitting *really* well with code mode and mcp ~~~ implying this will lead to agi seems incredibly far fetched to me, but i don't want to discount the types of applications that this will make possible
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Introducing a complete map of the male fruit fly brain and central nervous system, created in partnership with @HHMIJanelia. With over 166,000 neurons, this is the largest cellular brain map to date. Learn more: goo.gle/4qQTtIW
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goodbye twin brother. thank you so much for everything we’ve shared. i promise to use my time to the fullest
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Jacob retweeted
iiiiiiIIIT'S TIIIIME we proudly present: solidSF v1.0 hardware engineers, this one is for you a platform of platforms, amplifying or supporting all of the tools you love and hate folded into a clean mesh of cohesive hardware engineering excellence so what can it do?
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Introducing Prime Agent: A self-improving RLM harness for coding and long-running autonomous tasks. Designed to be both token-efficient and expressive through programmatic tool calling, context as a variable, multi-agent messaging, and a self-modifiable harness state.
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6/ and every region allocation and connecting edge is a decision you can read back. these are three views of ONE declared ward connectivity, each highlighting a different link: (nurse)→patient across frames, (state)→risk, state persisting over time, with the causal reason it exists. you're not stuck probing and reverse-engineering what the model learned because you wrote the graph that's the interpretability a declarative schema brings: the latent tensor is POINTABLE. like memory mapping for compilers but on the latent diffusion canvas: region bounds are struct offsets, the topology is a calling convention, a serialized schema is an ABI. two models sharing a schema can exchange latent state directly — no tokenization, no re-encoding. all yawn-able when the diffusion is implemented in torch on a GPU but very serious when we have to repurpose cat-video-gen optimized silicon for real work
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7/ (longpost) and this points us closer to the one PoC we have for general intelligence: the human brain. many neuroscientists have long argued that the cortex's functional connectivity is a reflection of the causal structure of its environment. large scale functional connectivity (macro-wiring) is largely specified by the connectome, fixed. wheras the micro-weights are learned by synaptic plasticity over a lifetime. fixed topology + learned weights. that's the split canvas engineering makes and the cortical connectivity matrix from post 2 in this thread? it's the SAME object as a canvas attention mask: source × destination, block-diagonal within a network, sparse specific cross-network edges, and every cell its own an operator type. the connectome IS a canvas topology to test this, I wired 23 Destrieux regions over 42 known cortical pathways (mostly within the default-mode loop, ventral visual stream, and A1→Wernicke→Broca, prefrontal→premotor→motor) and trained it on real TRIBE v2 cortical predictions. the canvas engineering approach saturates R²=0.825 on single-timestep dynamics which matches a fully-dense model at 19.6% of the connections and 5× faster! pause and chew for a second if this isn't clicking because I feel like we are very silo'ed in ML and could save a lot of time by learning from neurosci. (tho also please recognize that biology has never been as simple as scientists understand it to be; i'm just drawing a connection i haven't seen anyone notice yet). i will be unpacking this all in the future
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paper: commandagi.com/research/canv… code: github.com/commandAGI/canvas… docs + runnable examples (cartpole, vehicle fleets, hospital model, brain connectivity, more): commandagi.github.io/canvas-… $ pip install canvas-engineering 8/8
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5/ ok so that was the main idea, but there's a higher layer of abstraction: rather than allocating latent territory on the canvas by hand, the canvas-engineering library serves as a compiler for typed schema declarations which allows declaring complex relationships explicitly and transparently in code. you write the causal structure as a python object and canvas-engineering compiles that graph for you into regions and attention masks in this example I defined some of the large-scale structure within a hospital ICU ward with 6 patients, organ-level physiology, 4 nurses with fatigue dynamics, insurance/staffing pressure, and families. The canvas engineering compile_schema() call allocates and packs 199 regions and 1,077 connections on the diffusion canvas, heart_rate updates every frame, creatinine every 24, etc., etc. See the figure below for the 1:1:1 correlation between the schema, the casual structure, and the canvas allocation:
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3/ the split is: you fix whether an edge exists, its direction, its temporal extent. gradients (data or intrinsic losses) determine what flows along it and everything inside regions symbolic is macro. neural stays micro. and there's no interface between them, because the symbolic layer literally IS the attention mask. if there's no path between two regions, their independence is exact by construction, not regularization
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4/ with this framework, a standard markovian diffusion policy is just a two-node canvas where (observation) → action and (observation + action) → observation. multi-agent is more complex but still essentially each agent self-attending over its own obs and actions and coordinating only through declared cross-edges
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