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My Venn diagram: Technology, Telecom, and Regulations. Ex-Google & Uber. Former FCC Lawyer & US Attorney SDCA
Austin, Texas
Joined February 2009
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Sunil Daluvoy retweeted
Good Will Hunting GPU Edition
Ep. 2: My Boy's Wicked Smaht
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.
“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.
“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’
“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
Impressive. This set of talks, along with the new America dot gov website, has the unmistakable feel of an Apple launch event. They're rebooting the federal government as a tech startup. Several observations.
(1) First, with this new AI interface to the entire federal government, if it works as promised, there won't be a single American who can't say their life wasn't helped at least in part by AI, or that the benefits accrued solely to zillionaires. This in itself cannily mitigates anti-datacenter sentiment.
(2) Second, Joe Gebbia and Marco Rubio's talks on simplifying name changes and passport filings introduce a completely new era where the US government is actually launching tangible features that benefit users.
(3) Third, this launch event in and of itself may visibly drive reform. It could become much more important than the State of the Union. Unlike laws, code is user-visible, and can be instantly audited by the public, as Obama found out with the failed obamacare website launch. So: the annual America dot gov event may be substance, whereas SOTU is traditionally optics. I wouldn't be surprised to see the President present at the next one.
(4) Fourth, this kind of event is a perfect example of where tech and red cooperate best. They both hate bureaucracy. Automating paperwork with code reduces the power of statists over both capitalists and nationalists. It's also hard to undo by other admins: once you digitize a process, hard to turn it back to paper.
(5) Fifth, it's an obvious point perhaps, but think about how much influence YCombinator has had in 20 years. From Gebbia's Airbnb joining their 2009 batch to a complete overhaul of the user interface of the US bureaucracy, and thus the US government.
(6) Sixth, this is another take on the network state. The functional part of the US (the network, meaning tech) is merging with and partially reforming the dysfunctional part (the state, meaning bureaucracy) by automating 20th century paper forms.
As a tech startup, there will no doubt be bugs and user issues and so on, but unlike with paper laws those issues will be visible and the code fixes will be verifiable. A new era of AI America. Rooting for them.
Today on @CollegeGameDay :
- college kid w bare feet made a field goal to win/ raise $1.5 M
- Texan cowboy married a Tennessee cheerleader at the tailgate
- an immigrant kid from Africa left tragedy to achieve triumph thanks to the love & grace of Tennessee couple.
This show is not about college or the game. It’s about American and what makes it truly great.
That being said, go Horns! 🏈
Peyton Manning secured the second $1.5M kick attempt and this kid NAILED IT 🚀
@PatMcAfeeShow
"I don't know about you people, but I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do." - Gavin Belson
Anthropic Boasts They Will Kill Off Humanity Way Before OpenAI buff.ly/9koxnqI
Sunil Daluvoy retweeted
🇺🇸 During the U.S. Open men’s final, the broadcast clock hit 0:07 and the camera cut straight to Pierce Brosnan...
Promote that cameraman immediately 😂
Writer: Sol
That’s not his weight. Ben Shelton registered the fastest ever serve in the history of tennis. Ever! Roscoe would be approve.
Sunil Daluvoy retweeted
Enter Sandman is a 25 year old Virginia Tech tradition and the reason Metallica added the school to their last tour.
Virginia Tech’s Geosciences department measured the equivalent of a magnitude 1 to 2 earthquake when the band played the song at that concert.
Sunil Daluvoy retweeted
@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing.
Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything.
“they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out.
“A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.)
“On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive.
Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer.
Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way.
For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_….
For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize noemamag.com/the-mythology-o….
And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article cambridge.org/core/journals/…. (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.)
Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.
This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.
All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.
Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
Sunil Daluvoy retweeted
5/5 The contest is not simply over speed. China has too much power in Xi and cohort; America has too much in Trump & Silicon Valley allies. The edge will go to the country that resists ideology and corruption—and gives people agency in their future. Read: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…
What a badass!
I saw @RLanceMartin give a 15min presentation at a recent conf. Afterward, he stayed for over an hour answering everyone's questions. @AnthropicAI, you are lucky to have him.
Anthropic engineer:
“70% of our engineers are using self‑improving loops. Now everyone is building agentic Graphs"
in 3-6 months, we’ll all be building graphs to orchestrate self‑improving agents. No more prompting.”
in 30-minute lecture, Anthropic engineer shows how to build a self-improving agentic workflow from scratch.
Worth more than a $500 agentic course.
Watch this video, then read the article below on how to become a graph architect.
Sunil Daluvoy retweeted
I’m sick of reading AI slop, so today I’m open-sourcing my /no-ai-slop skill that removes 20+ slop patterns from any piece of writing.
📌 Get the free skill here: github.com/petergyang/no-ai-…
If you find it useful, please consider starring the repo so more people can find it.
Why I built the skill:
I use AI to edit my writing because it helps me fix spelling, grammar, and clarity.
But even the best models keep producing the same slop that this skill removes:
→ Binary contrasts: “It’s not X. It’s Y.”
→ Throat-clearing openers: “Here’s what nobody tells you.”
→ Fake-profound endings: “The future isn’t coming. It’s already here.”
Use this skill responsibly.
I always write a first draft manually before iterating with AI on edits and I make sure to do another manual pass at the end as well.
That’s in contrast to using AI to automate pumping out slop end-to-end.
📌 Read my full post for more on how I try to use AI responsibly to edit without giving into the dark side: creatoreconomy.so/p/use-my-n…
Sunil Daluvoy retweeted
walking into work and realizing there are no World Cup games today and you actually have to do work
Sunil Daluvoy retweeted
🇳🇴 ESTA HISTORIA EMPEZÓ ANTES DE QUE ÉL NACIERA.
En 1997, un mediocampista noruego llamado Alf-Inge Haaland se paró frente al Brasil de Ronaldo, Romário y Roberto Carlos, y ayudó a vencerlo. Poco después, una rodilla rota le apagó la carrera antes de tiempo. Se volvió a casa, a Bryne, un pueblo de tractores y lluvia, cargando un fútbol inconcluso.
Tres años después nació su hijo. Le pusieron Erling.
El niño creció en ese pueblo donde no pasaba nada, pateando contra el viento del Mar del Norte, escuchando historias de un país que alguna vez había mirado de frente a los gigantes. Noruega no jugaba un Mundial desde 1998: Erling esperó el suyo, literalmente, toda la vida.
Se fabricó a sí mismo con una disciplina de monje: comía, dormía y entrenaba como un profesional desde antes de serlo. Lo llamaron robot, androide, máquina. Se equivocaron de palabra: las máquinas no heredan deudas.
Anoche, en Nueva Jersey, la saldó. Un cabezazo y un zurdazo letal para tumbar a Brasil, meter a Noruega entre los ocho mejores del mundo y firmar siete goles en el torneo. Ya integra un club de leyenda: es apenas el sexto hombre en la historia —el primero en 53 años— en llegar a 50 goles con su selección en menos de 50 partidos. Los otros cinco incluyen a Puskás, a Gerd Müller y a Pelé.
Contra Brasil, como el padre. Por el padre. El fútbol le debía un final a los Haaland y tardó veintinueve años en pagarlo.
Los vikingos ya pueden remar tranquilos: el cuento quedó completo. 🇳🇴⚡
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Erling Haaland nació en Leeds Inglaterra en 2000 mientras su padre Alf-Inge jugaba para Leeds United. La familia se mudó a Bryne cuando tenía 3 años. Alf-Inge continuó su carrera hasta retirarse en 2003 por lesión de rodilla. mancity.com/players/erling… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alf-Inge_… theguardian.com/football/2003/…
Sunil Daluvoy retweeted
Karl Popper’s, ‘Open Society and Its Enemies’ remains one of the most compelling defences of open discourse as a civilisational mechanism of error correction.
For Popper, Truth is never possessed in its entirety. It can only be understood through a logical process of criticism, disagreement, and the continual testing of ideas. A society that is capable of correcting its mistakes entirely depends upon the freedom to question prevailing assumptions and to expose falsehood through reasoned debate.
It is therefore entirely regrettable that one of the more insidious realities of our age is that certain individuals and institutions invoke the language of the open society while inverting its essential principles. Under the banner of tolerance, safety, equity or consensus, group-think, they have deliberately narrowed the range of permissible inquiry and badly damaged the very processes through which truth is discovered.
Popper understood that certainty is the enemy of progress. Indeed, a civilisation that loses its capacity for honest discourse loses its principal means of self-correction.
Once criticism is treated as heresy and dissent as a threat rather than a necessity, the foundations of the open society begin to crumble from within.
beg you to read Popper. To read @DavidDeutschOxf. To listen to and absorb the work of @ToKTeacher @naval @ConjectureInst and the many other great critical rationalists.
We ought to understand the great peril we face.
