antitrust autist by day; ADHD clown autist by night, corrupting the youth of Athens one rubber-chicken-ecce-homo’d-at-a-featherless-biped at a time. æsthete.
Joined September 2020
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In this house we believe:
-you can just do things
-competition is good
-it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission
-everything in moderation, including moderation
-there are no solutions, only tradeoffs
-clichés are clichés for a reason
-so too with the most replicable results in social science
Bottomless Pit Supervisor, Esq. retweeted
My wife has been reading about Greco-Roman mystery cults. We pulled into a Buccee’s and she suggested we have a “Buccee-nale”. I said a Bucceenale implies the existence of a deity called Buccus that sends people into frenzied states of euphoria. She said, “look around”
Bottomless Pit Supervisor, Esq. retweeted
Probably under-discussed, but this is one of the largest contributors for service workers everywhere becoming worse.
Bottomless Pit Supervisor, Esq. retweeted
Around 1500, Hieronymus Bosch painted sheet music on a sinner's bare butt in hell. 500 years later, someone transcribed and performed it. Now you can hear the original butt song from hell.
ngl got a little choked up
If someone asks you how much a single family's life is worth to the United States Navy, tell them the exact price: ten million dollars of steel.
On April 29, 1975, as Saigon fell, a tiny two-seat wooden-and-fabric Cessna plane with almost no fuel left circled desperately above the American aircraft carrier USS Midway.
Inside that tiny cockpit, a father named Major Buang-Ly had crammed his wife and five small children, including a baby. He scribbled a note on a map, wrapped it around his pistol so it would not blow into the ocean, and dropped it onto the carrier deck.
A young American sailor picked up the crumpled paper and ran it up to Captain Lawrence Chambers.
The note read: "Can you move these helicopter to the other side, I can land on your runway, I can fly 1 hour more. Please rescue me. Major Buang, Wife and 5 child."
The flight deck of the USS Midway was completely jammed from bow to stern with military helicopters. A Cessna has no tailhook to catch carrier wires, and its pilot had never landed on a ship in his life.
By every military regulation, Captain Chambers had been in command for only five weeks. Throwing millions of dollars of U.S. government aircraft into the sea without permission from Washington could end his career in a court-martial.
Chambers looked up at the tiny plane circling in the wind with five children inside. He did not call an accountant in Washington.
"Clear the deck," the captain ordered.
Hundreds of young American sailors in yellow and green jerseys ran to the edge of the ship, put their shoulders against massive Huey helicopters, and shoved ten million dollars worth of machinery straight off the cliff into the South China Sea.
Captain Chambers turned the giant carrier into the wind at twenty-five knots. The tiny Cessna came down, bounced once on the steel runway, and rolled to a safe stop with feet to spare.
When the cockpit door opened and five small children stepped out onto the deck, three thousand American sailors roared so loud it drowned out the engines, and immediately passed around a hat to collect cash for the family's new life in America.
When the math says a child's life is too expensive, an American throws the math into the ocean.
Whatever training we do would mostly go out the window in a couple months most likely. The tale of near-peer conflict these days is one of rapid adaptation and hyper accelerated technological development. Look at Ukraine if you have any doubts.
In that scenario, I take the US over anyone because it’s full of Americans. The real training exists at a deeper level.
I am not seeing much bearishness. Except maybe in the sense that the cybersecurity community is really wishing it could hibernate overwinter in a cave right about now.
I can’t remember the last time we were this bearish on AI as a theme since 2024, when ChatGPT was making Will Smith videos that you could easily tell was not real
The fact that you can upload a picture of any question in any subject domain in the world, no matter how sophisticated, and get a pretty good answer from AI is enough to let me know that we are never going back on this technology
People don’t fully appreciate how reliant every student and corporate office worker across America is on AI today
If you unplugged Claude or ChatGPT from every school or company tomorrow, there would literally be hysteria and people would stop working until it came back online
Not to mention, I have many friends who literally use AI every single day in their personal life to design their workout, meal prep plan, vacations and so forth
Talk to any girl under the age of 28 getting into a relationship today and they are asking AI how to communicate their feelings, and using it to draft text messages to their Hinge dates
People are literally using these tools as their personal trainer, therapist, doctor, tax accountant, and everything in between
I know multiple people across finance who have turned down job offers because their new firm doesn’t pay for Claude in Excel or have access to ChatGPT.
Younger analysts are literally unable to do their job without these tools already, and it will soon infect seniors as well
This technology is not a fad. Demand is going exponential, whether you like it or not.
The bears used these tools 6 months ago, got a disappointing or subpar response, and decided that these tools are not useful
Reality could not be further from this false narrative
Bottomless Pit Supervisor, Esq. retweeted
Happy to announce I built a Greek/English reader site with all the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, & Aristophanes.
Multiple translations for each play; click to parse & define for any Greek word; full Greek & English search.
greekdrama.johnhboyer.com
Bottomless Pit Supervisor, Esq. retweeted
I really like that coding agents are now good enough that you can just make your own ultra specialized tool for the one thing you're curious about, which in the past nobody would have taken the time for. Nice example:
Bottomless Pit Supervisor, Esq. retweeted
This is the correct take and I wish I could filter my feed to only get takes from people who have (1) used a frontier model in the last six months and (2) have ever done a biological experiment
There’s a really pronounced divide between people who are on the AI side of things and people who are on the biology side of things. Even among people working in AI, the divide persists based on where they’re focused.
The AI side, adherents of scaling laws and the bitter lesson, believe that AI getting better means AI being more capable of novel discoveries in medicine (that go beyond discovering new drugs in well understood targets or speeding up dry lab work etc).
The biology people think the idea of a bitter lesson in biology is kind of ridiculous and that regardless of AI’s capabilities it’s going to be at least 5-10 years until you could hope to reliably simulate human toxicology in silico (right now AI/ML can’t even reliably simulate in vivo studies like binding affinities or functional assays).
Even the most AI pilled of them, who will list all the areas that AI can reduce the time spent on various areas, don’t think the concept of AI discovering novel targets or generating new understanding of causal biology is realistic in the near term. Most, in fact, will readily characterize the assumption that even an “ASI” level model could find cures hidden in our current understanding (without expanding that understanding with significantly more biological data) as patently false.
This was a big part of why we wanted to experience it ourselves by using AI for a (very) small portion of what it can do in biology. It was both mind blowing and revealed some poignant insights into how different the problem of making AI better at something like coding is to the problems of biology.
Even if it unlocked the ability to generate new molecules at a stunning pace, its simulation (in silico) of binding only had 49% accuracy. And if we wanted to improve that, we’d need to feed it back the data from the lab - data that took about 30x as long to get as it took to generate the molecules. And these were tests in a test tube (turn of phrase), imagine how long it would take if we wanted to improve the model with data that required recruiting humans and monitoring their reactions.
Human biology is very complex, and adding a drug - especially a novel drug and doubly so for a novel drug acting on a novel mechanism - means mapping interactions that have nth-order-effects that we don’t have the data to predict. Virtual cells have made advancements enabled by AI, but the perturbations equate to a small fraction of the possible.
This is before you even get into curing disease, especially uniquely human diseases. Brain function involves cellular identities that are unique to humans, meaning animal studies are of little use.
How long does it take to understand what the side effects of chronic administration of a drug in humans are? AI can speed up analyzing the data, or designing the trial or even getting it approved…but it can’t make a 6 month trial complete in 3 months.
I think its important to point out that significant advancements can be made in AI that contribute to biology, while also being realistic about how much it speeds up something as complex as curing a specific cancer or diseases of the brain.
Bottomless Pit Supervisor, Esq. retweeted
ヤバい、読んでいる方が震えるレベルの話だった…
凄いリアルで吐きそうになる
직원 40명 정도 되는 물류 회사에서 전산 담당을 맡고 있음 회사에 전산 인력이라곤 나 혼자뿐이었음
그날 밤 집에서 넷플릭스를 보며 쉬고 있는데, 스마트폰으로 서버 용량 이상 경고 알림이 연달아 띠링띠링 터졌음 미심쩍어서 노트북을 열고 원격으로 접속해 봤음
공유폴더를 열자마자 화면 속 파일들이 실시간으로 하나씩 이름이 이상하게 바뀌고 있었음 당장 월요일에 나가야 할 거래명세서 엑셀 파일 뒤에 낯선 확장자가 붙더니, 클릭해서 열어보면 깨진 외계어 글자만 가득 나왔음
말만 들었던 랜섬웨어 공격이었음 깊게 생각하고 자시고 할 시간이 없었음
바로 차 열쇠를 챙겨 들고 회사로 미친 듯이 달렸음 차로 이동하는 동안 스마트폰 원격 제어로 공유폴더 서버 전원부터 강제로 꺼버렸음 하지만 이미 감염되어 돌아가고 있는 사무실 PC들이 문제였음
회사에 도착한 게 밤 12시 20분이었음 사무실 문을 열고 들어가서 컴컴한 불 꺼진 책상들을 돌며 PC 마흔 대의 랜선을 하나씩 손으로 다 뽑아버렸음 손이 덜덜 떨려서 랜선 잭이 잘 안 빠질 정도였음
바탕화면에 생성된 메모장 파일 내용은 전부 영어였음 파일들을 풀고 싶으면 72시간 안에 비트코인으로 얼마를 입금하라는 내용이었음 해커가 요구한 금액을 대충 계산해 보니 우리 회사 한 달 순이익이랑 거의 맞먹는 거액이었음
새벽 1시가 넘은 시각에 긴급하게 사장님한테 전화를 걸었음
전화를 받은 사장님이 제일 먼저 물어본 건 "돈 보내주면 파일 확실하게 풀리냐"는 거였음 월요일 아침 일찍 대형 거래처로 나갈 물량 출고 리스트와 운송장 데이터가 하필 그 공유폴더에 들어있었기 때문임 사장님은 급하니까 일단 돈 보내서 해결할 수 있으면 보내자고 하셨음
나는 강력하게 반대했음 돈을 보낸다고 해커가 복구 키를 준다는 보장도 전혀 없고, 한 번 돈을 입금한 회사는 '돈 되는 호구'로 찍혀서 나중에 또 노린다는 사례를 수없이 봤기 때문임 대신 나한테 백업 데이터가 있다고 사장님을 안심시켰음
하지만 진짜 문제는 그다지 멀지 않은 곳에 있었음
상황을 수습하려고 백업 서버를 열어보니까
Multiply this by every device and every other stupid account or thing and you have quite the map of a person’s cybershadow. Even the unprotected stuff is going to be hugely insight laden once haystacked. (Needlestacked?)
The new paradigm is going to be (in part) minimizing attack surface area.
“Armchair Do-Gooders.” Jesus wept. How about de Tocqueville instead?
In an aristocratic society, the ambitious man claims the right to rule because he is superior to others. In a democratic society, the ambitious man claims the right to rule because he is more devoted to equality than anyone else. They “must show themselves the friends of equality; and the only worthy means of showing themselves as such, is to be so.”
“Woke”; “suicidal empathy”; “PMC elitism”; “limousine liberals”—all of this is just how aristocratic ambition manifests in democratic societies that disavow aristocracy. (This is part of why movement leadership is so often nakedly corrupt.)
David Friedberg says this isn’t Suicidal Empathy, these are Armchair Do-Gooders.
He is referring to the French woman, who yelled “Do you know who I am? I am an activist who advocated for you all” as rioters destroyed her store.
FRIEDBERG: “The look on her face, which was like, ‘What the hell happened,’ is meant to be this moment that sort of captures the zeitgeist of what some people call Suicidal Empathy, but I think it’s much more about being an Armchair Do-Gooder.
An armchair do-gooder is someone who kind of sits at home in a nice home in the suburbs or wherever they live, and they say, ‘Let all the people in, take care of all the people.’ But as soon as the people show up to their front step and says, ‘Can I come and stay in your house?’ the answer is no, of course not.”
“Someone else has to deal with it. Someone else has to house you. Someone else has to feed you. Someone else has to give you a job.”
We’ve all seen this play out in the man-on-the-street interviews where people say they support policies that let immigrants in, but when it’s time to house them, suddenly they have no room.
JASON CALACANIS: “We called this Limousine Liberals.”
There have been many names for this. Rob Henderson calls them luxury beliefs… Open borders is one of his own examples.
Everyone always seems surprised to find out their actions have consequences.
What’s going on here is just another manifestation of the bottom quintile tweet. That’s why the US labs are being silly on this.
Bottomless Pit Supervisor, Esq. retweeted
> I think within DS, the engineering bros absolutely have a say when it comes to model training
Not only that!
«At DeepSeek, infra is the big brother»
– an insider
Maybe the only lab in the business whose infra side has the authority to make critical decisions and VETO research.
Bottomless Pit Supervisor, Esq. retweeted
I'm Japanese.
I started talking to Americans on X about a year ago.
I didn't expect it to change me.
But it did.
I say "no worries" at work now.
I say it to my boss.
I smile at strangers on the train.
Some of them smile back.
It's very confusing.
I ask the convenience store clerk how her day is going.
She always says "Good! Thank you!"
Last week she asked me back.
And when something good happens to a friend,
I don't say "That's nice."
I say "That's awesome!"
And I mean it.
I used to think Japan and America were very far apart.
Now I think we're just a long flight away. 🇯
This doesn’t surprise me at all.
