Waterloo Computer Science Ph.D. (Censorship Tolerant Networking), adventurer, and scrappy technology entrepreneur. Director of Technology @tersa_critical
Vancouver, BC
Joined April 2008
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I’m excited to share that I’ve joined @tersa_critical as Director of Technology.
The world urgently needs critical minerals to power the energy transition, strengthen supply chains, and support the technologies shaping our future. At the same time, an estimated $3.4 trillion worth of resources remains trapped in the world’s tailings ponds - an enormous opportunity to unlock value from materials already above ground.
#CriticalMinerals
These horrible people will do anything to create regulatory capture and handicap the open weight competition.
They’re already claiming, without evidence of any kind, that AI is going to kill hundreds of millions of people. Now the threshold is 50?
Anthropic’s proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1 billion in damages are on the line tomshardware.com/tech-indust…
"Threads — and Bluesky — have effectively quarantined some of the worst people on the internet."
Love it @nikitabier
Last year I thought Threads was an existential risk to X.
When Meta puts its full weight behind something -- by injecting the app into Instagram, it’s DEFCON 5:
You have to squeeze out every last drop of growth from all available surfaces to save the app.
However, I started to realize that the opposite was happening:
It was strengthening X.
If you look at any announcement by Zuck, you will see the most rude & toxic comments on the internet.
But when he makes those same announcements on X, people are thrilled about how he’s pushing humanity forward. X is a place where people are excited about the future, so it’s no surprise he and his top lieutenants are using it more than their own app.
Threads — and Bluesky — have effectively quarantined some of the worst people on the internet.
And so I had an epiphany: those apps are X’s anti-abuse systems.
🙏
Working on it
lifespan.com/blogs/magazine/…
😅
At least they're not starting a new AI religion like the lunatics at other companies.
BREAKING: Palantir, $PLTR, CTO has said that some AI researchers are taking up smoking because they expect AI to cure cancer
Dr. Earl Oliver retweeted
$10/day daycare for the Premier, waitlists for regular British Columbians.
David Eby promised $10 daycare for every family in BC.
Instead, his own family landed a spot, while only 10% of childcare spaces in the province are part of the program and working parents are stuck on waitlists.
BC families face the most expensive childcare in the country. They deserve a Premier who fixes the problem, not one who works the system for his own family.
Watch my full remarks 👉
Dr. Earl Oliver retweeted
More great stuff - the "rationalists" view of AI. From an expert.
Michael Jordan (the machine learning one): "Superintelligence is Science Fiction" 🔥🔥🔥
di.ens.fr/~fbach/MJordan_ITW…
Dr. Earl Oliver retweeted
This is what real software security thinking looks like. Not moral platitudes or meeting with religious leaders.
I love that the rockets are always filthy with soot from previous launches.
Three Falcon rockets vertical at three of our launch pads in Florida and California → spacex.com/launches
Dr. Earl Oliver retweeted
I’ll defend a friend from the non-stop shit talk. Wildly accomplished for her age. Well-liked in resource world, in the NP, and by federal Conservatives in Ottawa. Overcame incredible hardship and found her conservatism as many do—through lived experience.
This purity test is the pits.
Also, read: withoutdiminishment.com/p/th…
Dr. Earl Oliver retweeted
Yann LeCun: we are not going to get human-level intelligence or AGI by just scaling LLMs.
“There’s absolutely no way in hell.”
“The idea that we’re gonna have a country of geniuses in a data center, that’s complete BS.”
“It may feel like you have a PhD sitting next to you.”
“But it’s not a PhD.”
“It’s a system with gigantic memory and retrieval ability, not one that can invent solutions to new problems.”
More of this please...
So tired of the anthropomorphization of software tools, or at least, the current state of tools.
Jensen Huang: don’t mistake engineering vocabulary for evidence of a machine mind. AI is still software, not a human mind inside a machine.
"We can't make jokes about all this stuff, we're scaring the American public."
Words like “spawn,” “parent,” “child,” and “kill” have existed in computing for decades; Giving those same mechanisms human characteristics today because of AI is unnecessary and misleading.
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From "The Ezra Klein Show + New York Times Opinion + New York Times Podcasts" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)
Dr. Earl Oliver retweeted
The BC Conservatives almost won in 2024 by refusing social agnosticism. The economy alone isn't enough to mobilize voters. That failed approach put us in opposition for a decade. We win if we promise to fix street disorder, preserve parental choice, and protect private property.
The best part about Kerry Lynne Findlay’s abrupt resignation is that it exposes the flaws of a distorted theory of politics.
It’s often observed that there’s a big gap between the online world and the real world. Findlay’s leadership represented an attempt to bridge that gap by importing online politics into the real world. And it failed spectacularly.
The BC Conservatives had considerable political advantages on the economy, quality of life and basic public services. Yet they squandered those advantages on an experiment in weirdo politics.
Memes, shit-posting and other inside-baseball obsessions may galvanize small and unrepresentative online audiences. At best, they fail to resonate with normies. At worst, they actively turn them off. If there’s a clearer case for the politics of normalcy, I haven’t seen it.
The lesson for Conservatives (and conservatives) is straightforward: the basic task of conservative statecraft is to make conservative ideas and principles relevant to the median voter—not to try to make the median voter more like your online followers.
