lyrical historical essays | sci-fi novels The Nested Stars: Box of Stars, Harvest, Release Hist +Myth +Tech Also at the 'Stack

Joined January 2009
I accept my fate
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
In 1989, a young researcher at Bell Labs, Yann LeCun (yes him), taught a computer to read the messy handwritten zip codes on real US mail by letting it learn tiny pattern detectors on its own instead of being told what a '7' looks like. A few years later the same idea was reading handwritten cheques for banks, and by the end of the 1990s it was reading over 10% of all cheques in the United States. The cheques were cashed by people, but they were read by one of the first Convolutional Neural Networks, the ancestor of the AI that now recognises your face.
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
My cousin had his bank account completely emptied yesterday and the nature of the fraud is breaking my brain. Somehow they are calling using the bank's actual phone number? How is this possible?
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
The perfect storm is frontier models finding obscure security vulnerabilities at breakneck pace while voice models become indecipherable from human speech. When a model hits a roadblock, it will just spoof Caller ID as your bank and call you, pretending to be your banker.
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
Physicists in Okinawa have floated a diamond about a centimetre wide and pushed it up and down using nothing but the spins of electrons inside it, pumped by pulses of green laser light. That object is roughly a hundred million times heavier than anything moved by spin force before. So, a quantum force now shows up directly on something heavy enough for gravity to matter.
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
Steinbeck, the single story of the world
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
Replying to @DylanoA4
Candide's reply to Pangloss in the last line of Voltaire's "Candide:" "Cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin." ("All that is very well, but we must cultivate our garden.")
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
Montaigne once said that he hoped death found him planting his cabbages, and there's immense wisdom in that: the only way to live without regret is to do things so intrinsically meaningful that even if rudely interrupted by death you would not think you had wasted your time
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
Two thoughts from Dashiell Hammett "My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery." "The outcome of successful planning always looks like luck to saps."
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
Cluny Films is here. We'd love to see you in New York next month if you're a filmmaker, or someone interested in being involved with a groundbreaking project of storytelling. cluny.org/events/the-visible…
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
Mask Off Moment This is an anonymous account I use to post a bunch of deep tech content on X covering heavy industry, light industry, technology trends, industrial bottlenecks, weird explainers and esoteric insights. iykyk. A lot of very talented people (many of whom run amazing companies) DM me saying please keep posting “this is the best content on X”. I get DMs from VCs asking about companies, and DMs from LPs asking about industrial and economic theories. This is all very flattering, and whilst I sometimes post a bit sporadically I do try and make the effort to tap out a new post most days. The quality of people who follow @object_zero_ is frankly phenomenal, it’s a real privilege to have this channel in my pocket. 40k followers including world leaders, centi-billionaires, serial inventors and entrepreneurs, world renowned scientists, and engineers. I would say it’s a mix, but the reality is that it’s not a mix at all, it’s an extremely high mean and median. I have posted about shipbuilding, nuclear power, the Kroll process, silicon carbide, laser interferometry, heavy steel forging, machine learning, design engineering, CFD, manufacturing methods, power transmission and HVDC. I post about energy and commodities and industry and global macroeconomics. I post about mines and prospecting, minerals on the sea bed and drilling and producing hydrocarbon basins. Don’t worry… I’m not leaving. I’m not ill and I’m not asking for anything. A quick apology… I would post here more often, except I don’t have the time. I am able to post with a bit more breadth and depth because I am genuinely engaged in these things. I don’t want to be presumptive, but I think the people who have reached out to talk to me about their work would attest to this. I simplify a lot of the posts so I don’t collapse the audience, but if you reach out in the comments or DM you can get much sharper commentary. So what is this post? Well, it’s time that I start talking about what I am actually doing irl, who I am, what I am engaged in. Some people on X already know some loose details, some people have met me as Object Zero. But irl, I work about 5,000 hours a year and have done so for 20 years, I believe hard work puts you in a privileged place. It changes you. Over the years I’ve invented and developed new industrial technologies, I’ve built big things, I’ve executed major capital projects. I feel I understand what the world needs in the 2030s and where we are falling short. If you believe you are capable of such things, then you have an obligation to society to go and do them. I am confident I know what it’s possible to do, and what it takes to get it done. I intend to solve our energy infrastructure, generation and transmission and the big BTM loads that are emerging. I’ve already hired the best people in the world for this, people who have architected $6bn assets, people who have commanded $40bn fleets. I’ve hired the best research faculty from the best university. This isn’t a game. We’ve already built and tested the first prototypes, we are already completing the permission processes, the licences and the permits. All the elements already exist, it just needs 21st Century system integration. Because technology has changed, the past is already obsolete, the genie is out of the bottle, the 21st century is getting built on a Western tech stack and/or an Eastern tech stack. There is no in between, there is no middle ground. Both sides have strengths and weaknesses, but if we want freedom we’re going to have to earn it again. We are going to build the biggest products (by mass) that have ever been manufactured, we are going to build a lot of them. They’re going to change the world, and we’re going to get more of this…
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” ~Attributed to Richard Feynman
A process you're allowed to question is a vote of confidence in the people who run it. Steve Jobs called that "optimistic humanism".
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
Two thoughts from Raymond Chandler "If you believe in an ideal, you don't own it, it owns you." “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
"My generic career advice for young people is that if at all possible, you should aim to work on something that no one has a word for. Spend your energies where we don’t have a name for what you are doing, where it takes a while to explain to your mother what it is you do. When you are ahead of language, that means you are in a spot where it is more likely you are working on things that only you can do. It also means you won’t have much competition.” @kevin2kelly
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
In order to win, you have to build something that nobody actually understands until it's too late.
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
I just spoke with @BenWilsonTweets and he said the response to the episode has been “life-affirming”. Since it was released he’s received introductions to other people who have beaten advanced cancer and so far you have helped raise over $800,000 for Ben and his family. Ben’s doctor originally gave him a year to live. With the new medication Ben is on (that’s working!) the goal is to push that out to 2 to 3 years and then with new therapies push 2 to 3 to 10, and then 10 to 25, and 25 to 50 and Ben gets to see his 4 small children grow up. Even today someone offered to make an introduction to Ben for a promising new therapy. I’d like to ask you to keep helping spread the word about Ben. Someone out there that doesn’t know about Ben (yet) could have information that could save his life. And if you’d like to donate you can do that here. Every little bit matters: gofundme.com/f/help-ben-figh…
Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5. I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38. He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters. His work has benefited millions of people all across the world. Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations. 0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders. 55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
Two thoughts from Alfred Korzybski “Who rules our symbols, rules us.” "The map is not the territory."
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
"The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world." ~John Steinbeck
The line comes from John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel East of Eden. It’s a deceptively simple sentence, and one I admittedly glossed over when I first read the book. Only later did I really understand what Steinbeck was getting at. The pursuit of perfection can be paralyzing because perfection is impossible. Once that burden is removed, though, we are free to simply try to be good. That idea fits closely with one of East of Eden’s central themes: “timshel,” the belief that human beings have the ability to choose what kind of person they become. Steinbeck makes goodness feel ordinary and attainable. You do not have to be flawless or heroic. Kindness, generosity, compassion, and making the better choice when you can are enough. In simpler terms: perfection is the enemy of good.
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
"There are two kinds of people in this world: Jancsi von Neumann and the rest of us...So there was an alien among us, a true wunderkind, and nobody at school could stop talking about him. They said that he had learned to read by age two. That he was fluent in Latin, Ancient Greek, German, English, and French, that he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head by the time he was six, and that, during one summer, bored out of his mind after being locked in his father’s library because he had set his fencing teacher’s hair on fire, he had taught himself calculus and then committed to memory all forty-five volumes of Wilhelm Oncken’s General History." ~Benjamin Labatut
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
"If you had a really reliable way of checking every scientific paper, I think you would find an absolutely massive number of errors." Psychology researcher Spencer Greenberg (@SpencrGreenberg) is the founder of Clearer Thinking and co-author of The 12 Levers, which distills 106 self-help books and 23 therapies into 12 broad strategies. Spencer joins us to discuss the replication crisis, p-hacking, and the problem his team named importance hacking. which self-help techniques hold up to evidence, why memory works like autocomplete and more. Out now on Infinite Loops, with @jposhaughnessy. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:51 The Eyes-Closed Experiment 3:08 We Forget Almost Everything 3:45 The Inner Why Technique 4:49 When Jim's Journal Contradicted His Memory 6:05 The Challenger Memory Study 6:54 Memory Works Like Autocomplete 9:26 How to Remember What Matters 11:11 Do Learning Styles Exist? 12:59 The Power of Full Attention 15:16 Jim on Meeting Bill Clinton 18:49 How to Disagree Productively 23:27 Parties That Never Repeat a Format 25:12 Blindfolded, Then Silent 29:17 How Spencer Beat Social Anxiety 31:17 Exposure Therapy and Behavioral Activation 33:06 Exercise: The Closest Thing to a Miracle Drug 34:50 Self-Help Ideas That Make Life Worse 39:37 Irrationality Is Social: Vet Your Authorities 42:47 Why Knowing Your Biases Isn't Enough 43:57 Jim's Bear Stearns Interview Test 47:00 What Actually Predicts Job Performance 49:50 Taking Bias Out of Hiring 52:33 Grade Candidates Side by Side 53:48 A Horse Race of 20 Self-Help Techniques 55:00 The Famous Goals Study That May Not Exist 56:12 Goals and Guiding Foundations 57:14 A Decision Exercise From Jim's Grandfather 58:59 The Pre-Mortem 1:01:04 The Replication Crisis and Importance Hacking 1:04:02 Could AI Audit Every Scientific Paper? 1:06:25 Science vs. Scientism 1:11:33 Why Studying Humans Is So Hard 1:13:20 Inside The 12 Levers 1:15:36 The Biggest Lesson From 100+ Studies 1:18:18 Why Testimonials Mislead 1:18:57 Why Change Is Hard 1:20:01 John Sarno and Pain in the Mind 1:27:17 Conditions the Mind Can Help Solve 1:28:40 Jim's Frozen Neck and the Sarno Book 1:31:35 Phantom Limbs and the Mirror Box 1:34:08 Can AI Be a Good Therapist? 1:36:28 Brutally Honest AI Feedback 1:39:57 The Lever That Surprised Spencer Most 1:43:36 Two Ideas for the World
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edwardrooster (∞) ✒️ retweeted
We are all fragile. We are all here for a limited time only. The best we can do is take good care of ourselves & our people & be kind to each other the best we can.
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