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it's good for you to be relied upon. it's good for you to talk a friend through something at 3am. it's good for you to offer advice and be accountable for it. it's good for you to recommend an outfit. it's good for you to be supportive. it's good for you to be tired from it
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Inspired by Nick Cammarata’s interpretability essay “Neural Networks Are Already Clean”, I turned a couple of its ideas into speedups for pretraining without backpropagation. Still in the works. 2.3x speedup, cool xitter.cf/industriaalist/status/…
Replacing backprop with zeroth-order optimization is inevitable.
Introducing Noise: a speedrun for pretraining without backprop.
Last week we presented Dust, the first method to approach backprop with SGD for pretraining transformers. We think another 1,000x improvement on top of it is possible, and it will require *co-designing* credit assignment, optimizers, architectures, and eventually, hardware.
We built Noise to iterate on this faster.
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Peter Thiel: the only moat left is being a little bit sexist, racist, or just really funny. Everybody else will get replaced.
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What do you mean elite overproduction? No one who is time poor, dons field wear, has pockets, and types on business machines is an elite. Our elite can't taste the difference between a lemon and a lime and they mix light bulb temperature in their chipotle kitchen.
Twitter is the elite, which is why the billionaires all have their noses pressed against the exterior of our dining room window pane. They are stealing our words with these business machines, but it's ok to turn a blind eye to their poverty. You don't forbid the ox from eating as it's treading out the grain. And we set apart, we modern Levites, have functionally unlimited words. We are that which names. We are Claude's animating spirit.
I must leave you now. We are preparing to accept the bedraggled mathematical asylum seekers into the humanities, yea these tired and hungry.
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Yup, there I was, back in 2011, already moving the goalposts in response to LLMs proving theorems.
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Still haven't plumbed the bottom of the word meek. It's like the Greek word polytropos, the definition of which is the Odyssey entire.
Out: Nephilim
In: Anāwīm¹
¹ Impossible to translate: Those punished with cognition. The princess and the pea. Those who sacrifice the now and are therefore alien to it. Those who appear inexplicably passive but are valuating the future over the present. He who sacrifices himself by means of awareness. An intergenerational man who alone steers the next seven generations. Numbers 12:3. Why Christ died. What meekness means, why it inherets the earth. The remnant. The elect. The good shepherd.
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I suggest that the right attitude to take toward the OpenAI math release is to imagine we have discovered a notebook full of results from a deceased mathematician. Our job it to make sense of the notebook.
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The thing I learned this year is that when engineers say they like working on “hard problems”, they actually don't. What they like is puzzle solving, and having a repertoire of patterns that they can pattern match onto traditionally hard problems, usually involving databases or something with scale, etc. And they know that the industry used to pay you a lot for how deep and broad this repertoire was. Unfortunately, in 2026, well, you have a cheat code machine that has infinite breadth and depth for pattern matching. So the question is, do you actually like hard problems? Because there are now hard problems that are a complection of engineering, product, society, culture, politics, and they are fairly intractable, probably unsolvable! Because if you do want to work on those actually hard problems, there is so much money that people will pay you for it. But you’ll have to face that truth about yourself first.
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it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it.
now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it
"If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply."
"we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us."
to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly
gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study
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A weird thing about watching The Terminator (1984) in 2026 is that the effects hold up quite well but the strikingly tender portrayal of heterosexual relationships feels like something from another world
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The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.
I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection.
The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn't have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.
This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all.
1/2
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Recently learned that Schmidhuber’s Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity, covering compression progress and intrinsic motivation and their relationship to beauty, curiosity, art, science, music, and jokes, was published in a Japanese scientific journal in 2009.
jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sic…
It is wild that this framework: compression progress as the basis for beauty, curiosity, art, science, and even jokes, was laid out in full formal detail in a Japanese journal 15 years ago.
ALT Simple Algorithmic Theory of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes Jürgen SCHMIDHUBER Abstract In this summary of previous work, I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively more “beautiful.” Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, “truly novel,” regular data that allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known. This drive maximizes “interestingness,” the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and recent artificial systems.
Jürgen Schmidhuber proposed a Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity in the 1990s.🤔 people.idsia.ch/~juergen/cre…
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Man some people get to do such cool jobs. Like Babythief Redteaming
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Me: “they can’t add fractions bc they refuse to memorize a three-step process”
Colleague: “some of them aren’t capable of memorizing 3 steps”
Me: “they show up every day in shirts, pants, and shoes, so obviously they are?”
(I am a treasure to work with)
People have heard about the phonics vs triple-queuing fiasco but there is a similar issue in math where ed school ideologues have stigmatized the normal and necessary work of drilling novice students in the fundamentals.
slowboring.com/p/math-needs-…
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I’m honestly shocked with Opus 5.5 on how easy it is to just copy people’s work and output anything, feels distopian for some things.
From this tweet, I just cloned the repository and asked this: “can you create a new project with the title Evangelion that uses the same premise, but uses a song [Name of Song] from my desktop? Please all the interface needs to match this Google Search with Evangelion UI for the reactivity: [Google Search]. Add 10-15 different visualizations”.
No technical instructions at all and just asking based on a Google Search, not even copying the images properly or “directing the AI” based on the previous tweet. The output after 15 minutes is great. That just makes me skeptical that engineers won’t be just replaced by creatives in many fields of web development.
evangelion-neon-overdrive.ve…
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Knowledge, bah! Who needs more knowledge? It is well known for having <gasp> Side-Effects. Whereas ignorance never hurt anyone!
