& this is the wonder that keeps the stars apart. #plurality @CivicTechTO https://xitter.cf/t.co/MspBWDNxaH ORI @g0vtw @UsePolis contrbtr. past: biochmst @enviroDGI @HyphaCoop

Toronto
Joined September 2008
I'm starting to feel that I'm less afraid of any particular ideology, but rather, I most fear the distance *between* ideologies. It feels more "towards life" to rage against the larger social neglect which breeds that distance.
2
4
1
56
⿻ patcon (is in Toronto) 🦋 @patcon.bsky.social retweeted
🚨 BREAKING 🚨 It looks like Ford is planning a major sell-off of schools. Through the TDSB, Toronto taxpayers own 612 properties worth $20 billion. Ford changed the rules so his Minister of Education could sell any school to anyone he wants. Ford's TDSB supervisor met twice as often with the TDSB's property management arm as with parents. #OntEd #onpoli
69
653
41
1,383
57,926
⿻ patcon (is in Toronto) 🦋 @patcon.bsky.social retweeted
Ford must stop interfering with our city Make no mistake: Toronto will stand up for itself.
726
803
77
4,576
85,438
I don't like it, but I think it's true. I think it's gonna be a bit bumpy in the next year, while we repair our way out of the very digitally insecure world we've crafted for ourselves. Seems prudent to have just-in-case ways to be generous with friends and neighbors 🤷🏻 – at Toronto, Ontario
I think it's plausible that within a year we'll see AI-based cyberattacks on the power grid, financial system, internet infra, or water. Things like the French supermarket cyberattack but worse. As basic prep I would recommend: Cash: Get a few weeks of spending in cash Internet: Get a Starlink Mini so that you have Internet if local fiber or cell is down (~$150 plus $10/month in standby mode) Power, minimal: Enough to run Starlink Mini and phones (~$1,250) Daily need: about 1 kWh (Starlink Mini 0.7, phones and laptops 0.2; can limit runtime) Battery: 1 kWh LiFePO4, e.g. EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus Solar: 1x400W folding panel, which refills about 1 kWh on a sunny day Power, better: Enough to run a fridge, Starlink Mini and phones (~$5,000) Daily need: about 2.5 kWh (fridge 1.5, Starlink Mini 0.7, phones and laptops 0.2) Battery: 4 kWh LiFePO4, e.g. EcoFlow DELTA Pro 3 Solar: 3x400W folding panels, which refill about 3 kWh/day in sun Generator: ~2,500W dual-fuel inverter generator; refills battery in a few hours even if weather is bad; get a few 20 lb propane tanks Water: 14+ gal of water per person for two weeks Food: 2+ weeks of shelf-stable food Comms: Hand-crank NOAA emergency radio
1
142
⿻ patcon (is in Toronto) 🦋 @patcon.bsky.social retweeted
Last week I took a $11,000/yr contract and built an alternative for $3.64 in under 15 minutes. And this wasn't the first time this has happened. Build vs buy might be one of the biggest company conversations over the next year, if not already.
51
20
7
852
54,904
This repo seemingly isn't aiming to be well-documented yet, but pairs really nicely with the actor model video I shared earlier: github.com/avenceslau/durabi… Thanks @avenceslau 🙏🏻 – at Toronto, Ontario
in an uber to SFO and my agents are cooking with @avenceslau durability library, kitesurf browser and typescript MCP sdk. what a world
1
2
279
For anyone who's tracking news about #celld (and @cloudflare's awesome durable object model that it builds on): I've heard it said that it brings the "actor model" of programming to the infra level. Perf for #decentralization Here's a good primer on it :) youtu.be/CBUWcUuG6Ss – at Toronto, Ontario
2
215
Was at a Thanksgiving party last night where two attendees put their phones beside one another and asked their voice agents to work together and build us a party game that we could join via QR code... – at Toronto, Ontario
2
1
5
790
Over the next few hours, we tried some truly bad games, each time yelling encouragement or admonitions at the AIs, sending them into the next round of improvements. – at Toronto, Ontario
1
98
It ended up being a pretty fun time, and we learned about which sort of games we each enjoy (competitive vs co-op), and how to negotiate our use of time together in ways that felt fulfilling – at Toronto, Ontario
4
87
⿻ patcon (is in Toronto) 🦋 @patcon.bsky.social retweeted
1/ My heart is heavy. I made a number of mistakes in my life, and not asking earlier for an immediate slowdown is one of them. If OpenAI starts making similar breakthroughs in biology, we risk something very ugly... I explain below how 1B could die because of advances in AI x Biology, and answer various questions. Slow down! That's what is being asked by YouTubers and creators with 300M+ subscribers combined. teamhuman.org/ A year ago, I co-led the Global Call for AI Red Lines, because I thought we still had some time. There is no more time. If they can do this in math, they will absolutely try to do this in ML research. RSI has arguably started: Claude already leads 26% of Anthropic's R&D, up from effectively nothing at the start of the year. RSI was once a red line. The red line has become the plan. Yoshua Bengio said, “RSI should be illegal”. I agree. We are mostly on track for AI 2027, and it's a coin flip between misalignment and extreme concentration of power in the hands of one company or one government. Prove you can keep control, or stop scaling! If OpenAI and Anthropic want to keep scaling, they should publish a safety case. Everyone seems to be forgetting that we already got an embedded evaluation, with the risk report from METR. We already know that mitigations are not ready. At the end of the last investigation, Beth Barnes from METR said: "We are not on top of it!". Even basic safeguards like DNA synthesis screening aren't enforced. Even if the technical safeguards were in place, society at large isn't ready, and we cannot allow this reckless experiment to continue. I support the acceleration of the diffusion of AI for beneficial applications, but even without further scaling, this technology is already as transformative as the internet and would take decades to percolate before we run out of low-hanging fruits. Seriously, AI is already nuts. Models now crack problems mathematicians couldn't solve for decades, while most hospitals still run on fax machines. Time to touch grass before we are forced to.
We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model. We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations to inform how we release these results. github.com/openai/math
48
105
23
533
28,089
⿻ patcon (is in Toronto) 🦋 @patcon.bsky.social retweeted
I, along with the rest of the Deno company, am joining Cloudflare! I'm motivated by abstractions that give leverage at scale. The Cloudflare workers programming model is a hermetic computing abstraction that truly embodies the old Sun Microsystems tagline "The Network Is the Computer". The programming abstractions that Kenton designed really force scalability. If you squint your eyes you might even conceive of it as a distributed high-level operating system. The only major problem with this distributed operating system is that practically people only use it inside of Cloudflare. Cloudflare is an amazing service for nearly all applications - but there are many situations when you might need it to run elsewhere. I want to solve this problem and make the Workers programming model the default way you write server-side application code. The time is ripe for new abstractions too - what software we run and how we run it are changing quickly with AI. The number of agents is exploding and I don't think they all need a Linux VM. A much more lightweight Durable Object would suffice for many applications. I'm super keen to talk to people who want to self-host agents at scale on DOs - msg me!
163
212
42
2,455
96,734
⿻ patcon (is in Toronto) 🦋 @patcon.bsky.social retweeted
my shower thought today
9
7
3
178
16,656
This seems particularly cowardly of @GAC_Corporate in light of recent news that we KNOW the USA is interfering blatantly in our own separatist movements... I need my gov public service to show up for civil society in places it's needed, including such confs where ppl speak freely – at Toronto, Ontario
1
98
⿻ patcon (is in Toronto) 🦋 @patcon.bsky.social retweeted
This is the doom I predicted a few days ago, coming for Photoshop. A clean-room open-source reimplementation. No prizes for guessing that they decompiled Photoshop to source code, processed that to some kind of non-code specification language, then fed the spec to an LLM with an instruction to generate Rust. Adobe just got nuked. And closed source is dead, dead, dead. github.com/storytold/photocr…
637
1,458
584
16,789
3,945,383
Replying to @rough__sea
@rough__sea working on a recursive sorta #celld presentation, trying to sell my coworkers on the architecture. The idea is that the running app is an interactive slideshow, building up the core concepts, illustrating the system thru its own loopback API :) github.com/patcon/celld-pres…
1
2
108
hoping to build up to showing more durable objects interacting over RPC, state replicating into S3 and other nodes, and failover And then for the end gimmick, everyone hits a button on the audience remote at the same time, and it initiates /shutdown :)
15
⿻ patcon (is in Toronto) 🦋 @patcon.bsky.social retweeted
water is transparent only within a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, so living organisms evolved sensitivity to that band, and that's what we now call "visible light".
202
2,263
222
24,090
859,725
The tip here related to ASD-STE100 (like ELI5 for aerospace engineers) is so simple but seems to be pure gold. I've added the simple phrasing ("using 80% of the way to ASD-STE100") to some tough questions, and it make the responses so clear and legible 😮 – at Toronto, Ontario
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks: Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better: Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better: Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better: Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work! In summary: - As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding. - Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
1
3
155
Current status: thinking about artificial intelligence as "value heterotrophs" to human embodied experience. Kinda like how animals are heterotrophs for the energy fixed by plants in photosynthesis. So metaphorically, #deliberation is like the electron transport chain process :) – at Toronto, Ontario
1
1
93