Nerd: Spends his work-hours hip-deep in stats and math models, and his free-hours buried in books and computer games.
Nürnberg, DE
Joined March 2009
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Andrew Flicker ⏸️ retweeted
Grigori Perelman was both the first and the last human to solve a Millennium prize problem.
Andrew Flicker ⏸️ retweeted
This YC company has triggered a lot of debate on what constitutes an ICBM.
If you would please refer to the chart:
Introducing Rook by @Hop_Aero (YC S26): an autonomous hypersonic cargo rocket that delivers 550 lbs up to 450 miles in ~15 minutes.
It launches from a standard 40-foot shipping container and lands on unprepared surfaces—no runways or fixed infrastructure required.
I enjoy that Claude Code is sometimes like, hey, so I found a possible decision point. Would you like to go with:
A) Reasonable answer (recommended)
B) Weird shit that you'd only do if you misunderstood everything
C) Bonus option I hallucinated just so you'd have three options and not two
Andrew Flicker ⏸️ retweeted
One thing about AI regulation being haphazardly imposed on just-released, highly performant models is that in a very real sense, the government just made my world *dumber.* In some impressionistic sense I almost always think this is true of government, but here it is literal.
Andrew Flicker ⏸️ retweeted
A @pokerorg prediction for the 2026 Main Event I can definitely get behind.
poker.org/latest-news/winner…
I was pretty skeptical of paying for X Premium, but the ability to summon Grok to reply to people's claims is worth it all by itself, ha. Might cancel after the discounted rate, not sure, but it's been enjoyable as a lark.
Glad they caught the guy! I was expecting it to be a bureaucrat or political appointee, rather than a soldier, but yeah. If you increase the financial incentive for this sort of thing, it's a natural outcome. Still worth it for the markets to exist, but challenging.
bbc.com/news/articles/c20832…
Andrew Flicker ⏸️ retweeted
Let me say this clearly: airplanes cannot fly.
Flying is an evolutionary mechanism that first insects and then dinosaurs used to avoid danger etc.
Let me say this clearly: LLMs cannot feel emotions.
Emotions are evolutionary mechanisms.
They push us to avoid danger or approach what is beneficial.
We experience emotions because we are alive, and we want to stay alive.
LLMs are not alive.
Yes, emotional language may be encoded somewhere in the LLM.
Yes, it may even be associated with some LLM output.
But that is just a superficial property.
There is nothing deeper behind it.
For a very simple reason: LLMs do not have an intrinsic and inescapable drive to stay alive.
This is what we call “motivation fault line” in our paper describing seven fault lines between human and artificial intelligence.
*
Paper in the first reply
Accurate. I'm a remote, online knowledge worker. If I need to wire breaker boxes or learn how to service wind turbines to pay the rent, well, guess I'm buying new work gloves.
Andrew Flicker ⏸️ retweeted
There's never been an investment like the investment in railroads. (This graph has a log scale!)
Andrew Flicker ⏸️ retweeted
Does it also require them to drive a horse-and-buggy to work wtf
This quoted post is unavailable.
So I found a reference in an article I was reading (quillette.com/2026/03/10/the…) to the 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine, with the translated lines
"To that pigpen of Freedom, inhabited by boors living in equality"
I wanted to see what it was in the original German.
So I've been trying to google it, to find the poem its from. I could not- I'd found large copies of his poetry, both in and out of translation, but not including those lines. I've found multiple other articles, books, and essays referencing these four lines:
Sometimes it comes to my mind / To sail to America / To that pigpen of Freedom / Inhabited by boors living in equality
(To make a point about anti-Americanism, usually)
I am starting to suspect that it's either totally made-up or a wild mistranslation that has become a folk quote.
Multiple people quote it, in major news magazines and publications- but noone ever says the poem, or even the year, nor include the German.
frontpagemag.com/what-create…
dokumen.pub/decline-amp-fall…
classicalmusicguide.com/view…
washingtonexaminer.com/weekl…
go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%…
Finally, I tracked down the poem, sometimes called "Where to Now?"
timothyades.com/heinrich-hei…
Timothy Ades, the respected translator of poetry, translates this as: Often I’ve a mind to sail / To the country of the Yanks, / Home of freedom’s cattle–stall / For egalitarian punks.
More literal: Sometimes I think of sailing to America, to the great stable of freedom, inhabited by equality scoundrels.
Pretty different feel, huh?
OpenAI Subscription Protest chatgpt.com/share/69a2ee81-f…
Yeah, The Master's Tools and all that- but still, even their own AI thinks this is a bright line crossed.
