Brian Wilfley retweeted
this is my personal singularity moment
this post may sound like a paid ad. I only wish. I'm concerned, more so than happy. the world is changing, and, among the scenarios where AI goes terribly wrong, inequality is the most realistic, yet, the one Anthropic seems to be the least concerned about. I'm glad OpenAI is taking the opposite stance: *personal AGI for everyone*. I think this is a commendable position in the times we live. but who am I in the queue of the bread?
anyway, Fable is here, so I'll just report my first-hour experience
first of all, all my pet prompts are solved.
→ λ-calculus puzzles
→ bug questions
→ one-shot apps
all are trivial to it.
I don't have anything harder other than my
ongoing work
so, in the last several days, I've been toying with HVM5, a new interaction net evaluator with a faster loop.
after writing the first version, I left 32 GPT-5 agents working for ~20 hours each. this resulted in up to 2x speedups, but the file size increased by 2-fold and quality decreased significantly.
I then simplified the whole thing into an even simpler core, and left Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 optimizing it for 8 hours. Opus got a legit 6% - 34% speedup in most benches. GPT got better results, but, sadly, an unusable file.
I then asked Fable to optimize it.
2 hours later, it landed a 1770% speedup in one case, 100%+ in other 4, and 22% in average. yes, in 2 hours it outperformed me, opus 4.8 and a swarm of gpt 5.5 agents, by one order of magnitude.
that could not possibly be legit. "it must be hardcoding the benchmarks" (GPT trauma). so I read its explanation and what it did was, indeed, the most high impact optimization one could try first. seems like HVM5 was wasting a lot of time garbage-collecting unused branches of pattern-match nodes. I had optimized that for static mats, but not for dynamic mats. skill issue. Fable figured how to do it for these, resulting in a massive speedup in some benches
but wait, is that *correct*? I'm not sure yet, it is credible, but this is the kind of thing that is very easy to get wrong on interaction nets. the problem is, when I was ready to start auditing Fable's solution so I could tell whether it was buggy or legit, it interrupted me to tell me it had found a massive bug on the code *I* had written.
... wait, what?
so... for garbage collection purposes, I stored a bit on lambda term pointers that meant "the variable bound by this lambda has been freed, so, its lambda must free whatever argument it is applied to". that's fine. yet, on duplicator nodes, I also used the same bit to mean "one of the duplicated variables was freed, so, treat this dup as a passthrough no-op". so, if a lambda entered a duplicator, it would mistake the lambda's collection bit for its own, resulting in corrupted interaction!
that's a mouthful, why I'm writing this?
just so you can appreciate the sheer absurdity of what just happened. I didn't ask it to find bugs. I asked it for an optimization. and even if I did ask it to find bugs, this bug is so astonishingly subtle and specific, identifying it takes mastering the domain to an extent that it beyond even me. I'd easily need hours or days to fix it, *if* I ever came across it. chances are it would just go unnoticed. and Fable found it and fixed it like it was nothing, while it was busy adding a 17x speedup to a file that neither I, nor Opus 4.8, nor a fleet of GPT 5.5 managed to barely make 2x faster.
oh and there is also another tab where it is also ripping through Bend's codebase and finishing everything I had to do
I don't know what to say anymore
this isn't about Anthropic or OpenAI, this is about our collective future as a species. the world is changing, and we need to be aware of it, and discuss how to handle this change.
receipt below . . .
Brian Wilfley retweeted
John McCain and I didn’t always agree, but he understood that some values transcended parties. He knew that if we got in the habit of bending the truth to suit political expediency or party orthodoxy, our democracy will not work.
John McCain had character. That’s what I think about so much these days because it’s so different from what we see out of the Republican nominee.
Brian Wilfley retweeted
BREAKING: In a stunning clip, Kamala Harris’ campaign has put together a montage of all the Republicans who have fact checked Donald Trump on his lies surrounding FEMA funding. Retweet to make sure all Americans see Republicans holding Trump accountable.
Brian Wilfley retweeted
I'm going to post this video every day until the election
xitter.cf/daveryder/status/17654…
Brian Wilfley retweeted
Opinion by George W. Bush: The reauthorization is stalled because of questions about whether PEPFAR’s implementation under the current administration is pro-life. But there is no program more pro-life than one which has saved more than 25 million lives. wapo.st/3sTg4e8
Brian Wilfley retweeted
Shortly after Steve Jobs returned as the CEO of Apple in 1997, he met with Jony Ive, Apple’s Senior VP of industrial design.
Apple had 40 products on the market.
“Jony, how many things have you said no to?” Jobs asked.
Ive was confused.
“You have to understand,” Jobs said,
“There are measures of focus, and one of them is how often you say no.”
“What focus means,” Jobs taught Ive, “is saying no to something that you—with every bone in your body—think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you're focusing on something else.”
Jobs walked up to a whiteboard and drew a 2 x 2 grid. On top, he wrote “Consumer” and “Professional.” Down the side, “Portable” and “Desktop.”
Four products—meet Apple’s new radically focused product line, Jobs said.
After that meeting, over the next two decades, Jobs and Ive—focused on making a few high-quality products while saying no to everything else—transformed a dying, near-bankrupt company into one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth over $2.9 trillion.
Takeaway 1:
The philosopher Marcus Aurelius pointed out that the focus of doing less “brings a double satisfaction.”
You get the satisfaction of having fewer things to do. And…you get the satisfaction of doing those fewer things at a higher level.
You get “to do less, better.”
During Steve Jobs’ first visit to Jony Ive’s design studio, he looked around, and then he said, “Fuck, you’ve not been very effective, have you?”
It was clear to Jobs that Ive was full of ideas and potential he wasn’t able to execute or fulfill under Apple’s previous leadership.
In the Jobs era of “doing less, better,” Ive was very effective.
Some products he designed include: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods.
Takeaway 2:
Even though he slashed the product line down to four products, Jobs loved to have and hear ideas.
“Steve used to say to me,” Ive said, “and he used to say this a lot, ‘Hey, Jony, here’s a dopey idea.’ And sometimes they were: really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful.
But sometimes they took the air from the room, and they left us both completely silent.”
It made me think of what Jerry Seinfeld identifies as the ultimate skill of the artist: “taste and discernment.”
“It’s one thing to create,” Seinfeld says. It’s one thing to have ideas.
“The other is you have to choose. ‘What are we going to do, and what are we not going to do?’” What are we going to add to the product line, and what are we not going to add?
“This is a gigantic aspect of [artistic] survival,” Seinfeld continues.
“It’s kind of unseen—what’s picked and what is discarded—but mastering that is how you stay alive.”
- - -
“Everything just got simpler. That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity.” — Steve Jobs
Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!
Brian Wilfley retweeted
Here are links provided by Dr. Gandhi @MonicaGandhi9
Again, thanks for the excellent talk.
medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
livescience.com/antihistamin…
Brian Wilfley retweeted
Thank you, @MonicaGandhi9 for a fantastic talk on living with an endemic COVID-19!
Brian Wilfley retweeted
Today's update on SF/@UCSF numbers. Bottom line –huge increase in cases & test positivity. Hospitalizations still pretty benign (though early signs of an uptick). Most remarkable stat is our asymptomatic test positivity rate (ATPR) @UCSFHospitals – now ~7%, or ~1-in-14.(1/16)
Brian Wilfley retweeted
This thing has rapidly become the world’s exasperating good news/bad news story. If your head isn’t spinning, you’re not paying attention.
A 🧵on my take on both the good news & the bad, with an emphasis on the things that have changed in the past few days... or minutes.(1/25)
Brian Wilfley retweeted
Three police officers went to an *elementary* school in Tennessee & arrested four Black girls.
One girl fell to her knees. Another threw up. Police handcuffed the youngest, an 8 yo with pigtails.
Their supposed crime? Watching some boys fight — and not stopping them. (THREAD)
Brian Wilfley retweeted
My vaccine is so powerful it’s able to make this non magnetic candy stick!
It’s almost like it’s some kind of non magnetic force is involved.
Brian Wilfley retweeted
Bernie Sanders is all of us... in southern California when it hits 55 degrees.
Brian Wilfley retweeted
I will vote to respect the American people’s decision and defend our system of government. My full remarks:
Brian Wilfley retweeted
Recap of Starship SN8 high-altitude flight test → youtu.be/_qwLHlVjRyw
Brian Wilfley retweeted
The instrument platform of the 305m telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico fell overnight. No injuries were reported. NSF is working with stakeholders to assess the situation. Our top priority is maintaining safety. NSF will release more details when they are confirmed.
