SRE. Makes DNS better. Maker. Survivor of cancer. 日本語のがくせいです。 See @hazelsmithphoto for my photography work. Opinions my own. Pronouns: she/her. 39. 🪿
Joined March 2009
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Hazelesque, but ✨festive✨ retweeted
🚨NEW: The Online Safety Act has been a failure, according to a new report from Ofcom.
Ofcom have found "no significant change" in children encountering harmful content since the law came into effect last July. This is despite the signifigant threats to free speech and privacy.
Hazelesque, but ✨festive✨ retweeted
I cannot let a steam engine analogy go by without bringing up John Wilkinson, perhaps the most underappreciated engineer of the Industrial Revolution.
Watt had figured out how to dramatically improve the steam engine, but he spent years struggling to actually manufacture one. The problem was embarrassingly simple: nobody could make a sufficiently round cylinder.
The casting and machining tolerances were atrocious. Watt complained that one 18-inch cylinder was out of round by as much as THREE-EIGHTHS OF AN INCH. Steam leaked past the piston. He tried packing the gaps with cork, oiled rags, paper, and apparently even old hats. Nothing worked particularly well.
Enter John Wilkinson, a British ironmaster whose immediate concern was manufacturing better cannons.
At the time, iron cannons were commonly cast around a core, introducing defects and misalignment that could make the barrels inaccurate or dangerously weak. Wilkinson developed a process for boring cannons from solid castings, and in 1774 patented a vastly improved boring machine.
The key innovation was almost comically mechanical: a massive, rigid boring bar, supported at both ends, that could cut a genuinely straight, circular hole instead of following the irregularities of the casting.
He adapted this technology to Watt's cylinders. By 1776, Matthew Boulton was boasting that Wilkinson had bored a FIFTY-INCH cylinder accurate to within the thickness of an old shilling.
Suddenly, the steam engine was a commercially viable machine.
And the story gets better. Wilkinson became one of Watt's first customers, buying an engine to drive the blast machinery at his own ironworks. The steam engine was now helping manufacture the iron that made more steam engines possible.
I find this whole episode absolutely extraordinary. The Industrial Revolution was, for a critical period, bottlenecked on the ability to make a sufficiently round hole.
We remember Watt, and rightly so. We remember the invention of the steam engine and the subsequent development of thermodynamics. But the man who made the machinery that made the whole thing possible is practically a footnote.
I think we consistently underestimate how much of scientific progress is actually downstream of advances in tooling, measurement, and manufacturing precision. It's not just that technology precedes theory. Sometimes the decisive breakthrough is that someone finally figures out how to build the thing the theorists have been talking about for twenty years.
Anyway, I think John Wilkinson deserves considerably more credit for modern civilization than he gets.
a few thoughts:
1. pretraining science is kind of like how people built quite good steam engines before they understood thermodynamics. “Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.”-(L.J. Henderson). if nick is right, which i am pretty sure he is, progress points in the direction of more interpretability, and pretraining was "slouching towards monosemanticity". my guess would be that major breakthroughs in interp also advance capabilities
2. nick is a good friend of mine, safe to say my origin story at openai wouldn't have happened if i hadn't met him, and it's fascinating watching him operate and seeing the early drafts evolve into this. he's the most profoundly happy guy I know- not driven by guilt, activism, or religious terror, but by fascination. he of course understands the stakes of understanding neural networks, but it doesn't seem like the core reason he does it: he just loves the neural nets. afaict he's posting this from some beautiful hideaway in tokyo. there's a lesson in there for all the +EV maxers. i feel very grateful to have met him
3. i do think it's crazy how few people across the world were staring at neural nets growing: most have moved to a different level of behaviorist analysis, thinking about reward functions and test scores and whatnot. it does not bode that well for the major model companies, oai included, that fundamental breakthroughs like this are coming from outside. we've become too much of a pressure cooker focusing on local incentives, studying narrow tracks under old paradigms, mostly doing engineering, rather than fundamental research, and implicitly hoping the next model will figure it out
Hazelesque, but ✨festive✨ retweeted
I had a similar reaction. Everyone should applaud performance improvements, but gauge against the “speed of light”, not just a sloppy competitor. If you are measuring in seconds, you may have already anchored yourself incorrectly.
Structure the UI so you can put locally cached media up just a few vblanks after the process launches.
Structure the server so it can return everything necessary for the dynamic UI in one single query that was kicked off in parallel with the Gfx API initialization, branching to a modern transport protocol for large media files.
You should be able to double click on the launcher and have it responsive before your muscle memory can slam the pointer to a location to click on.
This is hilarious and awesome.
Awesome because this has annoyed millions of peoples for years.
Hilarious because WHY DOES IT TAKE 5 SECONDS TO SHOW A MENU OF GAMES?!
Steam takes 10 SECONDS?!
Do you realize how much time that is for a CPU with a modern internet connection? Am I crazy!? What am I missing?
Hazelesque, but ✨festive✨ retweeted
These are all just super cool.
I am afraid, no one knows this design language anymore (sculptural late post-modernism: Graves, Memphis group, frog design, Sun).
It was very distinct from IBM/Braun (corporate modernism, rationalist: Mies, Noyce, Sapper, Rams).
I gravitate towards the latter and find personal pleasure in it, but I have deep appreciation for the former.
It was not Post-modernist with a P, that had a chip on its shoulder to counter modernism. This is the warm, sculptural, restrained but expressive, humanist post-modernism in design that made beautiful objects. I love Michael Graves and Sun Microsystems design language for this reason. And apparently, HP as well.
Hazelesque, but ✨festive✨ retweeted
Today, no one would be able to imagine the defrag UI. It would be some stupid progress bar that would appear to be stuck and occasionally say "Hang on! just a little longer".
Hazelesque, but ✨festive✨ retweeted
The government is quietly engineering a lethal trap for disabled people, and they are disguising it as "welfare reform."
Abolishing the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) to make PIP the single, exclusive gateway for health-related Universal Credit by 2028/29 is not a policy tweak. It is a calculated, malicious act of state cruelty designed to eradicate the safety net entirely.
Look at the sheer scale of the cliff-edge being manufactured:
There are currently over 1.1 million people receiving LCW, LCWRA, or ESA who do not have the Daily Living component of PIP. Crucially, nearly half a million (469,920) of those exact claimants have already been dragged through a humiliating PIP assessment and failed it.
PIP and the WCA measure two entirely different realities. PIP assesses if you need financial help to wash, dress, or navigate your home etc. The WCA assesses if your health legally prevents you from holding down a job.
By aggressively insisting PIP serves as the solitary threshold for both benefits, the DWP is maliciously deciding that over a million profoundly sick, neurodivergent, and disabled citizens are suddenly "fit for work" by default.
Let us be absolutely clear about what this actually means:
1. Total Financial Blackout: People enduring severe, fluctuating chronic illnesses, neurodivergence, or disabling mental health crises who fail the notoriously rigged, adversarial PIP process will have their health-related uplifts instantly severed.
2. Punitive Harassment: Stripped of their protected status, hundreds of thousands of sick people will be violently shoved into standard Universal Credit conditionality. Imagine being in a rolling, debilitating physical crash, and being legally mandated to spend 35 hours a week job hunting and attending arbitrary Jobcentre interrogations.
3. Weaponised Starvation: When our bodies inevitably give out, and we fail to meet their impossible, ableist demands, the DWP will sanction us. They will freeze our basic subsistence allowance and starve us out.
4. State-Sanctioned Deaths: Let’s stop sugarcoating the reality of these policies. We already know the devastating, blood-stained correlation between aggressive DWP conditionality, financial starvation, and suicides. Forcing deeply vulnerable people through this punitive meat grinder will directly cause severe psychological collapse and a catastrophic, preventable loss of life.
Advocacy groups are already warning that over 900,000 people will be hit by this exact "double whammy" of losing both benefits simultaneously.
And this is those who are currently in power.
This is not about "getting Britain working." This is about wiping disabled people off the ledger by starving us into submission or into the grave.
We are not your scapegoats, and we are not expendable.
#ChangingTheNarrative #PunchDownMedia #TakingThePip
I know the Work Capability Assessment is horrendous
But what Labour plan to do is *much worse*
Their plan is to "decouple financial support from capability to work"
Their plan will mean 100,000s who would qualify now as too ill or disabled to work will be deemed "fit for work"
ALT https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/pathways-to-work-reforming-benefits-and-support-to-get-britain-working-green-paper/pathways-to-work-reforming-benefits-and-support-to-get-britain-working-green-paper GOV.UK Department for Work & Pensions Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working Green Paper Updated 30 October 2025 The removal of the WCA is part of the fundamental reform to decouple financial support from capability to work ...the PIP assessment would become the single assessment to receive both financial support in PIP and any extra financial support through UC Under this new system, financial support from PIP (non-means tested) and the health element of UC (means-tested) will both be non-work related ...they will not be linked to capacity to work.
![https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/jsf/dataCatalogueExplorer.xhtml
DWP StatXplore Database interrogation:
ESA November 2025
UC March 2026
Total UC LCW, LCWRA & ESA: 3,151,831 With Daily Living PIP: 2,045,122
Without DL PIP: 1,106,709
DWP FOI2026/84560 (9 Sept 2026) revealed:
ESA data: Nov 2025
UC data: March 2026
UC LCW/LCWRA & ESA tried & failed to qualify for DL PIP: 469,920
This means:
42.5% failure amongst those without DL PIP 18.7% failure amongst all those who attempted to qualify for DL PIP
[Total attempted to qualify for DL PIP: 2,515,042]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HTORiSTXIAAMbGZ.jpg?name=orig)
ALT https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/jsf/dataCatalogueExplorer.xhtml DWP StatXplore Database interrogation: ESA November 2025 UC March 2026 Total UC LCW, LCWRA & ESA: 3,151,831 With Daily Living PIP: 2,045,122 Without DL PIP: 1,106,709 DWP FOI2026/84560 (9 Sept 2026) revealed: ESA data: Nov 2025 UC data: March 2026 UC LCW/LCWRA & ESA tried & failed to qualify for DL PIP: 469,920 This means: 42.5% failure amongst those without DL PIP 18.7% failure amongst all those who attempted to qualify for DL PIP [Total attempted to qualify for DL PIP: 2,515,042]
Hazelesque, but ✨festive✨ retweeted
Being left out of a group activates the same brain region as breaking a bone. A 2003 study in Science used brain scans to show that social exclusion from a ball-tossing game lit up the anterior cingulate cortex, the exact region that processes the distress of physical pain, in the exact same way.
Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA designed a virtual ball game called Cyberball. The participant played with two other people, who were actually controlled by a computer. Partway through, the other two stopped throwing the ball to the participant. The exclusion was trivial. The players were strangers. The game did not matter. The brain reacted as though it did.
The anterior cingulate fired. The same circuit that makes you clutch a burned hand made the excluded player feel the sting of being left out of a game that meant nothing, by people who did not exist. The brain could not tell the difference between a social wound and a physical one.
A follow-up study found that Tylenol, which reduces physical pain, also reduced the neural response to social rejection. The painkiller worked on loneliness. The hardware is shared, and the pharmacy does not distinguish between the two kinds of hurt.
The next time someone says "get over it, it's not like they broke your arm," the brain scan says it is exactly like they broke your arm. The pain is processed in the same place, by the same cells, and the body does not have a separate system for hurt feelings. It has one system for all of it, and rejection lights it up. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1455…
Hazelesque, but ✨festive✨ retweeted
Today is a very special day: it’s my human’s mom’s birthday!
Chef Lasagna has made the apple pie you love so much, perfect for celebrating you!
Hurry up, humans, or we’ll eat the apple pie ourselves!
Happy birthday!
#IKEAのサメ #ikeashark #happybirthday #chef #brioches #italy
Hazelesque, but ✨festive✨ retweeted
3. The shame about the wasted years is the most expensive thing you own. Let it go.
Every year spent in regret about previous years
is another year not being used.
The diagnosis at 35 is not a verdict on what you've lost.
It's the first accurate map you've ever had.
You can grieve the years without living inside that grief indefinitely.