Working on applying technology to the world

Joined September 2016
Vibecamp live tweeting until I get bored or lose connectivity
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Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) retweeted
We f’d up defining electrons as negatively charged and pi as only half a turn.
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Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) retweeted
observability is expensive, it's much cheaper to just have no idea whether or not your shit is working
Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) retweeted
This is pretty remarkable. This summer I took either a placebo or vaccine for E. coli. We don’t have a working one. Three days ago I purposefully ingested E. coli. And I feel completely, totally fine right now. Mostly bored. Happy Halloween. We might have a working E. coli vaccine (or I found out I’m naturally immune to E. coli the hard way).
Bro, how is this real?
Congrats to the VC who prompt injected my scheduling agent to put time on my cal next week without checking with me
> There must be stakes. Real winners, real losers, real blood. Generated humans cannot die, feel pain, or cry with genuine joy.
I believe the next frontier for Mr. Beast is violence. People underestimate how well MrBeast understands attention mechanisms. He has tested and combined them tirelessly. If he doesn't use one, it's not for ethical reasons but because he's optimizing for a different metric. Everything is optimized. Status, resources, suffering, games of chance. Frequent camera changes, faces in every frame, specific color palettes. He operates from first principles, discovering what attracts attention through relentless experimentation with watch time. Sex is notably absent from his toolkit, not because he's unaware of its power, but because he's maximizing audience breadth to include children and navigating platform rules. His innovation with "kindness content" was recognizing that high-stakes moral scenarios (escaping poverty, helping the vulnerable) could justify less palatable attention mechanisms like discomfort or what you might cynically call the soft torture in his "challenges". Violence has moral justifications but triggers disgust; sex has a strong moral-political component so it gets relegated to self-expression narratives. Neither scales like he needs. Mind you, he only embraced "narrative" and human-interest stories after the first-order mechanical elements hit diminishing returns in the formats he could implement. As an example, just showing loads of money is fine at first, but then you need to tell a story: how all that money will help a father of two pay for his daughter's medical treatment and soften an implied,but not outright told, risk of divorce with his beautiful wife Sharon. In the end, all of that is fluff for the display of MONEY. MrBeast is a low-throughput flesh interface between the algorithm and video production, the closest thing we have to a human implementation of foryou.serve_next(). Does that mean you could replicate his success with just a Sora-like high-quality video models? I don't believe so. There must be stakes. Real winners, real losers, real blood. Generated humans cannot die, feel pain, or cry with genuine joy. MrBeast currently uses contrived methods to satisfy audience schadenfreude. Advances in robotics could let him mechanize gore while keeping human participants engaged through high-fidelity teleoperation. You get to see a human enough form get slashed in half, and then a real human reap the rewards from that act of violence. You don't have to contend with the moral quals of what just happened: no one got hurt but you got the pornography of it, i.e. the action (someone got slashed) abstracted from its function (but they didn't bleed out and die) Too many are focused on plastic love and not enough on plastic blood.
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Cool feature from Court Listener
I was going to make a snarky comment about how this happens all of the time, but LLMs will soon make search so good that this never happens again
being ramanujan in madras discovering mathematical properties that he didn’t know were already famous elsewhere … in the entire remaining narrative of mankind this probably won’t happen again
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I know I am late to the party but TBPN is really good
This is why you advertise on TBPN
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Commodification derives its meaning from how Marx used the word commodity, which is not how it's commonly used in English
TIL that commoditization and commodification not only have different meanings but are spelled differently Commoditization is when a product becomes standardized Commodification is when a non-market good becomes a market good
Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) retweeted
Replying to @NoFunToronto
NIMBYs
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Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) retweeted
incredible how pretty much the entire github homepage is useless
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sometimes I forget that Python is a scripting language with dynamic imports. then I remember, and remember that you can use subprocess from WITHIN Python to install a package and then LOAD that package in the same interpreter absolutely cursed
Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) retweeted
Some pictures are worth a thousand words, this one is worth $1.2 billion
Best Poster of the World Series so far..
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Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) retweeted
so much of political and environmental messaging makes absolutely no sense until you realize these people are still haunted by the ghosts of ww2 and the atomic bomb and simply do not trust that technical progress will ever lead to anything good
The hidden curriculum behind "AI uses too much water" lesson isn't about conservation (or factually very correct...) Instead, they're teaching kids that human progress is inherently destructive and that they should feel guilty for using resources.
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Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) retweeted
of all the twitter takes and subtle intellectual threads this might be the one that made me question my life the most
autistic people will see a "honk if you like pizza" bumper sticker and think it means "if i like pizza, i should honk"
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Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) retweeted
Occurred to me last night that these two aphorisms get interpreted as interpersonal points about exploitation and generosity, but they're really two ways of phrasing the same wisdom about what constitutes scalable and persistent value in the context of cultural evolution
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Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) retweeted
Its so stupid how bad merchant names are on your credit card. It's all gobblegedook. Impossible to figure out who you are paying for what.
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Til Meta has a chabot
Something huge is coming from Meta AI. Currently, their chatbot only has Create and Canvas options, is about to get a ton more! - Reasoning - Connections - Think hard - Research - Search - Storybook New model coming? I would be very surprised that they'll name is "Llama". 🤔
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