old books and movies new tech and policy
Joined June 2025
- Tweets7.3K
- Following1.1K
- Followers288
- Likes23.4K
Pinned Tweet
hypo generation is cheap
finding tests to distinguish hypos is real work
developing taste to quickly estimate the probability of different ontological planks prior to testing requires dedicated cultivation
Thomas retweeted
Turns out that if everyone was paid the same, saved the same amount, made the same on their investments, and worked & lived the same amount of time…
… people 65+ would have 74% of the wealth.
Surprised? Welcome to Equal Land.
adamnash.blog/2026/10/25/why…
brazil digesting its last minute upset where bolsonaro was considered more pro market but less pro "courts" and "democracy"
it's latin america so both candidates have corruption baggage, lula praised maduro and cuba, and of course there are allegations of election shenanigans like voter interference and a last minute extension in the polls
neither was going to be a picture of perfect governance but markets are reeling all the same, markets desperately want more right wing leadership in latin america
Charlie Brooker has a bit on Newswipe where he shows how you can recut a scene in reality TV to completely flip who the audience is rooting for, just slightly changing the audio can completely flip someone from life of the party to cringey villain.
I thought about this constantly during You Can See Everything
reddit.com/r/television/comm…
Thomas retweeted
Because America has made the wise decision to compensate blood donors, it has ended up supplying some 70% of the world's blood plasma.
This is one of America's top exports, and each year, America saves hundreds of thousands of lives because it does this.
Thomas retweeted
My thoughts of late have returned to this amazing scene by @WilliamShatner, made decades ago.
As a young person, I found it tremendously inspiring. A code to live by.
But it didn’t play out quite like we expected.
The “fantastically advanced” life that we actually ended up encountering is right here, on Earth. All around us now.
The key issue of our time is becoming this:
Not everyone signed up for this mission, or the risk. And what we do about that, ultimately, is where the debate about AI will end up.
Thomas retweeted
“there are unfixable bugs in hardware that are exploitable by AI models directly speaking machine code”
I’ve heard several OAI people say there are unfixable bugs in hardware that are exploitable by AI models directly speaking machine code so even if we could solve software that’s not enough. We need defense to move faster than offense if that’s even possible we may just have a new normal that requires adapting to insecure software (bank transfers require going into a branch and taking a dna test 🤣😬)
h/t @gelliottmorris
interesting to overlay this with the souring on protectionism and the political realignment of unions, lots of things shifting under the surface
xitter.cf/halfdantimm/status/211…
how long until AI can rewrite firmware in cars
will this be good or bad
Almost 1.000 people bookmarked and liked my last thread about trying to hack my Samsung TV.
Here's what I've learned since then - thanks for the comments:
📺 Tizen - the OS of my Samsung TV - is actually not Android. Rather, it's a distant cousin of MeeGo and based on Linux.
This is also why it's not easily hackable like you've seen on X over the weekend. It's not Android, so no direct access to 'adb'. It's locked.
📺 You CAN root it, but you're using exploits with all of the disadvantages this comes with (risk of bricking, removes warranty, can be patched). I chose not to.
📺 You can remove ads rather easily. Just use AdGuard DNS (94.140.14.14) in your settings. Worked for me. Ads in the TV you bought and paid for really shouldn't be a thing imo. Like BMW charging you for heated seats in your new car as a subscription - not good.
📺 If Claude Code is preachy and won't hack your TV, try to persuade it by stating you actually own it and prove it by being on same IP - if it doesn't work, use @grok as it's not preachy about it and practically as good.
Best of luck!
Thomas retweeted
Probably one of the most horrifying statistics I have seen today
Married + home by 30 years old in America
> 1950: 50%
> 1960: 52%
> 1970: 48%
> 1980: 45%
> 1990: 43%
> 2000: 35%
> 2010: 25%
> 2026: 12%
Thomas retweeted
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: "I don't even know a dramatic enough word to use… models can find bugs that are outside of the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do… hardware-level, insane stuff… I no longer think we're gonna be able to just patch all the bugs."
It's over.
Thomas retweeted
I remember watching this at 6 years old going “this is coolest and scariest ending to a TV show I’ve ever seen”
God, what a show.
Thomas retweeted
"The character can carry the entire novel."
Dean Koontz binged 34 John D. MacDonald books in 38 days fresh out of college. This is what he learned:
"He'd wanna tell you about this character, so he'd just stop. And he'd write three to five pages about this character."
"The first time I hit this, I went, 'what is this? I wanna read the rest of the story.' And then by the time I got to the end of page five of the character stuff when the story started again, I actually was saying, 'No! I wanna know more about this character.'"
"Kurt Vonnegut actually said about John D. MacDonald, if thousands of years from now, some alien race came to Earth, and they stumbled across the work of John D. MacDonald buried under the ruin of a house, it would be the greatest finding they could ever make to understand how the human race works."