Wannabe love child of Shane McConkey, Haruki Murakami and Jonny Greenwood. Used to work at the tweet factory.
London
Joined June 2007
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Oliver Snoddy retweeted
extremely impressed by grok @bot. random musings on it and some of the competition:
- native apps far superior to the imessage (e.g. instinct) form factor. imessage is easier to bootstrap for normies and simpler onboarding, but for any reasonable power usage, a dedicated native app is just better.
- multi-bot model (e.g. grokbot) is superior to single bot model (e.g. dots). its a tad more daunting, but creating specialist bots with their own identities/rules/routines is more fun, makes me feel incentivized to invest more in each, and is generally less overwhelming than having a dumpster ground of unrelated topics in one thread. the downside of this model is that i often forget which bot i was talking to about something and revert to my main bot as a router.
- other than multibot, some key things that make Grok Bot great: multi-device (ios, mac, tesla), super performant (so fast and responsive), exhaustive ecosystem integrations and mcp support. it just works every time.
- claude duet is def on to something with the 'tasks' tab. recognizing todos, structuring them, showing status in a familiar mental model like a todolist, and allowing one-click actions feels very natural and magical. excited to play with it. don't have access yet.
- openai shipping dots as a section within the main chatgpt app was a mistake imo. it's out of sight and fighting the existing user behavior / muscle memory of how people use chatgpt (which is already conflicted and confused between codex/chatgpt work & chatgpt). dots should have been a separate app and should subsume the o.g. chatgpt use case. what can chatgpt do that dots can't? there should just be Dots and Codex as two separate apps (this is not a statement on what they should each be named). i can imagine the OAI team faced an extremely complicated set of trade-offs when weighing this, and i empathize, but imo there's a much better end state to be had.
caveat that i haven't in earnest tried using muse yet, and I haven't been motivated to invest in porting other than occasionally feeling inspired by @alexandr_wang's shitposting.
- tax prep: organizing tax docs, communicating with accountants and handling responses to their questions, doing my own research/analysis on prepared forms before finalizing returns. lifesaver.
- angel/fund mgr: overhauling how i organize my angel/fund investments, track the portfolio, consolidating agreements. grok bot instantly became an effective fund mgr/cfo.
- shopping assistant: it's an addictive slipperly slope, but grok helps me find things i want (clothes, gadgets, various household maintenance and improvement things). the shopping flow is still a dice flow (even with Link setup)-- i occasionally have rejected/failed checkout flows and need to take over the vm.
- property mgmr. i'm increasingly tagging it into dealing with home repair related things, coordinated with vendors, researching/validating proposals, shopping better quotes.
- work assistant: help manage the deluge of slack, email traffic, weed out the junk from my inboxes.
what i want:
- a better conduit to doing local execution/computer-use on a machine. being able to run grok bot on a mac mini on a home network would unlock a home of home automation use cases that i'm still relying on a local codex instance for (even with tailscale setup on my gb, this is more limited i've found). lmk if i'm missing a solution that exists here.
- a multiplayer experience w/ shared threads. would be useful for sharing some bots with a spouse.
overall grok bot is extremely impressive and magical. kudos to the team.
Oliver Snoddy retweeted
Churchill could have shortened WW2 by years if he had just “done a deal” with Hitler. George Washington could have done a deal to end the American Revolution. Zelenskyy is in good company.
Oliver Snoddy retweeted
Incredible scoop by my @WSJ colleagues: Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration. wsj.com/world/ukraine-starli…
Oliver Snoddy retweeted
Latest: Zelenskyy tells reporters over WhatsApp that restrictions on Ukraine's Starlink systems remain. Interceptor drones can't function, logistics and operations hobbled. The maximum speed is 161 kph; "exceeding this limit causes the Starlink connection to cut out completely, resulting in the loss of the drone."
He says Ukraine has done tests to determine whether SpaceX is truly facing technical issues, as has been told Kyiv by the US side, or if this is a "deliberate operation... to restrict us, cut us off, and prevent us from defending ourselves and protecting our people, both at the front and among the civilian population."
He says Ukraine "sent a couple of vehicles equipped with Starlink terminals into European Union territory."
"They moved at speeds exceeding 180kph, and the Starlink systems worked perfectly. We have the relevant logs and evidence to prove this."
He adds: "The conclusion is clear: the restrictions are in effect within Ukraine but do not apply within the European Union. In other words, this is a planned operation."
Would somewhat overshadow a remote-controlled, stunt ‘flying’ car
EXCLUSIVE: Elon Musk approached Donald Trump with the idea of slowing down Starlink in Ukraine, The Telegraph can reveal.
The billionaire tech entrepreneur approached the US president with the proposal to introduce speed limits on the system, which hampered Ukraine’s drone defences, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.
🔗 telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2…
Oliver Snoddy retweeted
there is an argument (which I've made privately until now) that one of the principal innovations of the large language model labs is a *legal* innovation, not a technical one
by building a system that hoovers up mind-bogglingly large volumes of human information and feeds it into a recombinatorial association machine, the companies have bulldozed the existing IP regime and made the contents of ~all human IP (including the most mundane) searchable, reconfigurable, and usable while also obscuring any trace of origin and eliminating a need to provide credit or attribution. much of the perceived benefit is therefore access and exposure to IP people would not otherwise have had access to, presented behind a system that abstracts the IP from its context and history and presents it as net-new information.
I imagine we would have seen ~similar productivity outcomes had Google actually been allowed to make productive use of the Google Books database over a decade ago.
I’m starting to get increasingly uncomfortable with the economics of AI as it is currently happening
It seems fundamentally wrong that a small number of people with access to a huge amounts of VC money can vacuum up all the contributions of humanity, often paying nothing for it, then turn around and get enormously rich while the many people who put all the work into creating the training data get nothing
I am generally pro-AI, but the way it is happening is seeming increasingly parasitic to me
Oliver Snoddy retweeted
well, having the best european model for 3 days was fun :)
congrats to the team on this HUGE release!
more teams, more competition, better models. that’s how europe gets stronger 🇪🇺
Meet Mistral Large 4, aka Le Chonk.
• 1T parameters, natively multimodal. 49B active.
It is the best open weights model from US or Europe on aggregated benchmarks.
• State-of-the-art on critical workloads, including cyber defense, manufacturing and finance and it surpasses closed frontier models on visual grounding.
• Forged in Europe end-to-end and is deployable from Europe via our own Mistral Cloud infrastructure.
• Available to all via API today. Working with cybersecurity partners privately.
Open weights release end of October.
Very cool
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Not even a watch guy, but one day! From Ikepod to Ressence, long wanted a Marc Newson design. ressencewatches.com/products…
