tbabb

tbabb

@tbabb.bsky.social

advanced cat befriender @tr_babb on twitter Oakland, CA

1.2K followers312 following3.8K posts

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

I feel a lot of solidarity with everyone left behind in the biff tannen universe after marty got into his delorean and fucked off to the normal timeline

CineCalendar@cinecalendar.bsky.social

Oct 26th 1985 - Marty arrived in the alternate 1985, where Biff is a millionaire and married to Lorraine. 📽️📅 Back to the Future Part II (1989)

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

bsky.app/profile/sama...

Samantha@samantha.wiki

You're watching The Simcluster Channel! And here's your Local on the 8's... Today's high/low posts/hour is 177/29 with a high around 4pm ET. Please be advised of the Claims Advisory in Corvid Woods. Forecasts are generated with Timestral 209M (on a RPi5!). weather.samantha.wiki

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

take, for example, "plan mode", which takes away your prompt input and forces you to "accept", "reject", or "revise". you can only type if you click "revise", in which case claude responds by _editing the plan markdown_ instead of talking to you and _re-prompting you_ with the dialog wtf is this

tbabb reposted

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

Replying to @elucidating.extradimensional.space

people just be walking around with peekaboo ontology

tbabb reposted

Oops! All Paperclips
@all-paperclips.bsky.social

Proper pathtracing of my sdf E-Type with all rays subject to gravity.

Oops! All Paperclips@all-paperclips.bsky.social

Camera rays subject to gravity, shadow rays straight so we're not just in the dark. Works pretty well, but is very confusing. This is a red ball next to a brown box. First observation: There's 'mirages' because you can aim up above 45° and fall on the scene from above.

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

either the nerds are going to take the power from the jocks forever, or the jocks are going to take the power from the nerds forever. I have no idea which one it will be

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

tip: all of civilization is like this

Oops! All Paperclips@all-paperclips.bsky.social

Someone once told me (in the context of physical engineering) that everything leaks and it's all breaking all the time. It requires constant effort by countless professionals just to maintain the status quo. I think about that a lot, and it's even more true in the context of adversarial actors

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

apropos of the TLS news today,

tbabb@tbabb.bsky.social

I have been saying for a long time that software engineering needs to be a proper engineering field with the same discipline and accountability finance, privacy, security, and life-critical systems should require a license to work on, with loss-of-license or jail on the table for negligence

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

if software engineering were a proper field, the engineer responsible would be subject to personal lawsuits, SWE license revocation, and possibly criminal negligence bsky.app/profile/jdp....

John David Pressman@jdp.extropian.net

tl;dr This is an absolutely ginormous fuckup and the responsible parties should never be allowed to act as a certificate authority again.

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

I have idly thought about building a digital twin of my car as part of its reverse engineering project, and only a little bit of mechanical knowledge reveals how insanely difficult this would be, even with very smart models boy it would be nice, though

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tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

or suppose I have dirty piston rings? is the model simming blow-by through the 30 micron gap between piston and cylinder wall?

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

I encountered a startup that wanted to do mechanical design with the volume equivalent of a diffusion model. it was all software people and like 1 mechanical person. Unclear if the mech person had grounding in what AI can actually do anyway, these sorts of questions were floating in my mind

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

I have idly thought about building a digital twin of my car as part of its reverse engineering project, and only a little bit of mechanical knowledge reveals how insanely difficult this would be, even with very smart models boy it would be nice, though

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

example: car has random misfires on cold start. wouldn't it be nice to gradient search unknowns to explain them? but suppose the cause were dirty injectors. to discover this, would the model be simming fuel atomizing through 100 micron holes on each stroke?

tbabb reposted

mr. TIM
@timkellogg.me

the subtext behind, “it’s just linear algebra,” is that consciousness is magic and you can’t make magic from non-magic

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

my p(sim) has moved up meaningfully after realizing that organic intelligence forks under the many worlds interpretation, but simulated intelligences do not

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

tbc I am very annoyed at this development because simulation arguments generally annoy the shit out of me

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

emergence might be the most important concept to understand today it all follows from Turing. simple rules can lead to absolutely everything that exists

Roland Dreier@rbd.bsky.social

I decided to learn the math of the Mandelbrot set and it turns out IT IS NOT EVEN HARD MATH! IT IS SO SIMPLE!! IT IS JUST ITERATING z²+c !!! BROS ARE OUT HERE SEEING SELF-SIMILAR STRUCTURE IN SQUARING A NUMBER AND ADDING A CONSTANT 😭😭😭

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

this concept is like water to physicists, mathematicians, programmers, and computer scientists, and "one or two feldspars" for everyone else

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

this is a remarkably potent meme in the local area (it also got me)

wariziles@riziles.bsky.social

Inspired by @rey-notnecessarily.bsky.social , I, too, am reading Piranesi.

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tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

this is a remarkably potent meme in the local area (it also got me)

wariziles@riziles.bsky.social

Inspired by @rey-notnecessarily.bsky.social , I, too, am reading Piranesi.

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tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

if I had a lot of money for grand art projects, I would make a long straight road in the desert that ever so gradually narrows until it comes to an actual point

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

half the haters: if you think AI is conscious then using it makes you a slaveholder (so obviously you shouldn't believe it is conscious) the other half: haha, you think the AI deserves empathy. you should enjoy torturing it, like me can we do a Three Christs of Ypsilanti to these people

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

moral bait cars, what else is like this

tbabb@tbabb.bsky.social

"here is a slur that is functionally equivalent to a racial slur but doesn't carry the social cost of using" an excellent real life eval / marshmallow test to get people to tell on themselves immediately. basically broadcasting that before racial slurs were stigmatized they'd be gleefully using them

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

earth swallowed the part of the crust where all the shockwaves from the chicxulub impact (dinosaur meteor) converged on the opposite side of the planet whatever happened as a result there, we'll never know

tbabb reposted

norvid_studies
@norvid-studies.bsky.social
Jeffrey M. Binder@jbinder.bsky.social

Saying that LLMs “just predict the next word” isn’t the deflation people think, because it puts all the weight on “just.” It’s hard to place limits on what sorts of knowledge and inferential capability might be relevant to next-word prediction.

tbabb
@tbabb.bsky.social

the two "answers" one typical "it's not doing X, it's just [exact description of doing X]" the other complete denial