It matters, but not a lot. You can mess it up, but not too badly. - John Green
Berlin & Zagreb
Joined May 2009
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"I only need to optimize for the worlds in which we survive."
- @verbine on AI saftey
I wonder if he tried talking to startup investors about their experience investing in both German & non German startups.
Sadly many DE startups get slowed by bureaucracy & sometimes their ambitions are too limited in scope.
"Maybe one day we will grow to serve all of DACH"
Germany's Chancellor Merz to investors:
If we agree on delivery dates, we stick to it. If you invite friends from Germany for dinner at 7, we will arrive at 6:58.
We are reliable, predictable, precise, and unsurprising. We are, in short, what investors like most.
So the good thing about clichés is this: they tend to be true. So if you pick the core of this assumed Germanness, you might actually like what you get.
Yes, we do have our own challenges, but Germany's DNA proves to be rather helpful in the face of a world which is harder and harder to read and to predict.
Sarah Cordivano retweeted
Europe needs the EU Inc. more than startups need the EU.
European leaders and beaurocrats need to get their act together and pass a PHENOMENAL law for incorporating startups in Europe.
They need to do some soul searching and realize that if they want Europe to stay developed nations and not the permanent underclass, they better make it very appealing to startups to incorporate in Europe. And they better take some political risks to do that.
Because now, in 2026, the ability of a nation to be part of the future is directly determined by its startup ecosystem. With AI taking over in the coming decade or two, there will be a new split between have and have-nots, and it will be determined by startups and AI adoption, and nothing else.
Wake up Europe! This is your one moment to do something vaguely Churchillian. Don't fuck it up.
xitter.cf/i/trending/21107075194…
Sarah Cordivano retweeted
People focus so much on the downsides — job loss, slop, possible human extinction — that they don’t consider the upside of agents taking all kinds of tedious life admin minutiae off your plate so you have more time to spend on valuable activities like watching shortform video.
Sarah Cordivano retweeted
RIP Margaret Hamilton.
A pioneer of software engineering and mission-critical code. From all I read, she was a true role model and a real (wo)mensch.
She never got as much recognition as other pioneers of computing. But as I was growing up a computer scientist, I often stopped to think of the amazing work she had to do to land us on the moon in the 60s, and it filled me with inspiration about how high we should aim today.
Apparently there's a short biopic about her, imdb.com/title/tt15201462/ . Does anyone know where to watch it?
Sarah Cordivano retweeted
A call for new aesthetics (of maps)
I've long wished that online mapping services were far richer and higher-density. They elide so much detail today! We have gloriously high-DPI screens... I want to wallow in cartographic filigree. AI of course now makes this possible: bayatlas.vercel.app
Sarah Cordivano retweeted
PRE-NOR’EASTER RAINBOW
We ended our live weather segments to this gorgeous display from Mother Nature. She can be so beautiful and ugly at the same time.
@6abc
Five names you are welcome to steal for your AI safety startup...
Turing Centurion
Kernel Journal
Rare Error
Parallel Peril
Neural Juror
Sarah Cordivano retweeted
Great article in the @guardian, quoting several of my colleagues:
"'A map is never neutral'"
Meet the cartographers who took on centuries of western bias. Equal Earth projection, adopted by the UN last week, provides alternative to 16th-century Mercator
theguardian.com/science/ng-i…
Sarah Cordivano retweeted
The hardest thing I've had to learn as an adult is "how much reaction is enough to elicit the change required in others to resolve the situation"
I'm much more pro-ai than the average person and i still think when the people who build it tell us that it poses a risk of human extinction it deserves our attention.
People in comments scoffing at ai risk are proving @verbine right. Caring about ai risk is deeply unsatisfying.
Believing AI doom is likely is an incredibly unsatisfying opinion to have: you look like an idiot every single day, until the day that no one exists anymore and you can't gloat.
Conversely, believing AI doom is a scam is incredibly satisfying: you feel brilliant every day, until the one day that you don't feel anything because you don't exist anymore. Satisfaction guaranteed!
This is why I inherently trust AI doomers more than the other side: they're holding what they know very well is an incredibly unsatisfying opinion.
Sarah Cordivano retweeted
Believing AI doom is likely is an incredibly unsatisfying opinion to have: you look like an idiot every single day, until the day that no one exists anymore and you can't gloat.
Conversely, believing AI doom is a scam is incredibly satisfying: you feel brilliant every day, until the one day that you don't feel anything because you don't exist anymore. Satisfaction guaranteed!
This is why I inherently trust AI doomers more than the other side: they're holding what they know very well is an incredibly unsatisfying opinion.
Sarah Cordivano retweeted
ever since someone pointed out that making inanimate objects the subject of verb is one of the most pervasive and telling LLM-isms I can't un-notice it
a person would have written "enter to open, esc to return, ctrl+c twice to quit"
