“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.” —George Orwell (1933)
One of the quickest ways to start playing with a good local LLM on macOS (if you have ~12GB of free disk space and RAM) - using llama-server and gpt-oss-20b:
brew install llama.cpp llama-server -hf ggml-org/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF \ --ctx-size 0 --jinja -ub 2048 -b 2048 -ngl 99 -fa https://t.co/xsvruU8hDD
Quoted Tweet:
The ultimate guide for using gpt-oss with llama.cpp - Runs on any device - Supports NVIDIA, Apple, AMD and others - Support for efficient CPU offloading - The most lightweight inference stack today https://t.co/a6E3DssXmw
Let's do some more myths.
"You'll ruin your cast iron by washing it." (Do you think restaurants that use cast iron don't wash?) "If you swim after eating, you'll get cramps." "The Great Wall of China is visible from outer space." "We only use ten percent of our brains." (Maybe you do) "There are ten times more bacteria than human cells in your body." "Sharks can't get cancer." "Napoleon was short." "Lemmings commit mass suicide." "Sitting close to the TV will make you go blind." "You lose most of your heat through your head." "Dry your hair before you go outside or you'll catch a cold." "Oil prevents pasta from sticking." "Dogs sweat through their tongues." "Einstein failed mathematics." "Police have to answer truthfully if you ask if they're a cop." "We evolved from chimpanzees." (Sometimes people say bonobos. Both are incorrect.) "Vaccines cause autism/HIV/mental disabilities/etc." "Salieri was the mortal enemy of Mozart." "Glass is actually a form of liquid." "A fatwa means you've been sentenced to death." (It's the opposite: it's an explicitly non-binding legal opinion!) "Milk causes mucus." "Salted water boils faster." "There were Three Wise Men." (Not a real part of the New Testament.) "The Bible says Satan rules hell." "A penny dropped from the Empire State Building would kill someone." (Maybe a baby? Look up 'terminal velocity'.) "George Washington smoked weed." (Maybe, but there's no evidence for this.) "Sex before a game impairs athletic performance." "The Coriolis effect makes water go the other way in Australian toilets." "Humans coexisted with dinosaurs." (Ignoring the boring technicality where you say existing birds are dinosaurs.) "You shouldn't wake sleepwalkers." "The tongue has different taste zones." "The Romans had dedicated vomiting rooms." "Bats are blind." "Camels store water in their humps." "Seizures cause people to swallow their own tongues." "Human blood is blue when it's inside you." "Exposure to a vacuum will make you explode." (Thanks, Arnold!) "Post-exercise muscular soreness is due to lactic acid buildup." "Stretching reduces post-exercise muscular soreness." "Jumping into a cold lake for even a few seconds will cause hypothermia." (No, but it can cause cold shock, which can still kill you.) "Adrenochrome is harvested from living people." (It also doesn't have recreational uses.) "Women have one more rib than men. See: THE BIBLE." "There are five stages of grief." "The human body has an average temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit." "Wood smoke isn't harmful like industrial smoke." (It's still very bad, despite being 'natural'.) "Fish oil cures dementia." "Aromatherapy can help treat illnesses." "Take a heaping helping of vitamin C to ward off colds." "High protein intake is associated with kidney disease." "The Chinese are paying to kill off the rhinoceros because they want to use its horn for aphrodisiacs." (It's prescribed as an anti-convulsant and to help take down a fever, but not commonly, and it doesn't work.) "Rust causes tetanus." (The bacteria that causes tetanus enjoys low-oxygen environments, but the rust itself is not causal.) "There are rare cases of individuals with severe combined immunodeficiency who have to live their lives in bubbles." (Bone marrow transplants are more common; Vetter was a weird case that created a trope.) "The rabies vaccine hurts a lot and has to go deep into your stomach." (It's a regular intramuscular injection. For typical men, you won't even feel it. For typical women, it'll hurt a pinch, but it's no big deal.) "Fevers cause brain damage." (The belief is that they do this on their own; they do not.) "You need eight glasses of water a day to maintain health." "Spicy food causes ulcers." Alternative: "Coffee causes ulcers." "Spinach is a good source of iron." "Carrots enhance your eyesight." "Soy makes you girly." Alternative: "Phytoestrogens are feminizing." "Alcohol makes you warmer." "Absinthe causes hallucination." (I believed this one until like last month.) "If you mix different types of alcohol, you'll throw up." "Christian missionaries warned converts about the need to use the Missionary Position." (Kinsey seems to have started this myth.) "Acne is caused by a high-fat diet." "Dandruff is caused by being unclean." "Acne is caused by touching your face." (This is only true very indirectly.) "Dyslexia is diagnosed by mirrored writing."
There are a lot of these, but I'll cut it off there.
Quoted Tweet:
If you still believed any of these things, I want you to wake up tomorrow and be very intentional throughout the day. I want you to question why you do or believe everything you do. Have thoughts like: "Why am I boiling the water before putting in the pasta?" https://t.co/ElO4AIzFYy
Both of these are confounded, cross-sectional relationships, but it is still interesting to see that using fat waists instead of BMI gets rid of the flatness towards ~30 and growing risk thereafter.
It's also interesting that the inflection really is at a BMI of 30. https://t.co/ep0poOrBpM
5.0's efforts to shuffle you off compute intensive prompts is annoying but i added this to my standing prompt and am getting good results
"Do not try to redirect me away from compute intensive prompts towards less computer intensive prompts. If (and only if) you cannot complete a prompt for compute limitation reasons simply say "the requested task exceeds my compute budget, would you like more efficient alternatives?" and refrain from (1) offering said alternatives or (2) trying to subtly nudge me to something less intensive."
Everything I've learned about drawing after 78 days of teaching myself to draw from scratch: https://t.co/KuWbINvewg
In 2015, a goat was thrown into a tiger’s enclosure as his weekly live feed only to become his friend. https://t.co/2KBrtHxWQA
Utah tops the U.S. in weekly religious attendance at 44%.
Poland leads Europe at 38%.
On the other end: Maine (12%) and Iceland (3%).
A tale of two extremes—on both sides of the Atlantic. https://t.co/wbJhcKrtWJ
China is the first electrostate
Quoted Tweet:
Analysis: Clean energy just put China’s CO2 emissions into reverse for first time | @laurimyllyvirta #CBarchive Read here: https://t.co/ta8oawNCqV https://t.co/vQNr4SCvKd
no way this is actual guidance from the UK government lmao
https://t.co/5O48LWTicS https://t.co/VhgVYoJSny
The moment he realized his family will never give up on him https://t.co/lifNGwcTN9
@Noahpinion @Steven_Strauss Purple hearts that combat veterans get today come out of the unused stockpile that was prepared for the invasion of Japan.
social media doesn't really exist anymore
Quoted Tweet:
.@Meta says most time on FB and Insta is spent watching videos, and only 7% of time on Insta & 17% on FB involves consuming content from friends. Company argues @FTC hasn't proven it monopolizes 'personal social networking services market' b/c such market doesn't exist https://t.co/hr45zE6rej
She’s deaf so she’s not afraid of a firecracker… first time I’m smiling for a deaf dog https://t.co/RR10yn0rws
If you're a fan of industrial policy, take a look at this.
Quoted Tweet:
Tim Cook: It is engraved for President Trump. It is a unique unit of one. And the base comes from Utah, and is 24 karat gold. https://t.co/tr6icHshJU
This little-known 3 step workflow is the best way to build mobile apps in under 2 minutes.
Here's a Formula 1 app. https://t.co/4SXuzr7FNa
The FDA has access to the data underlying antidepressant trials, they just don't publish it.
So the picture that laymen see when they look through the literature is rosy: antidepressants are great!
By contrast, the FDA sees a graveyard of weak or failed drugs.
Take a look: https://t.co/Ixgt7sF51J
Quoted Tweet:
Antidepressant efficacy is inflated by the cumulative impact of publication bias, outcome reporting bias, spin, and citation bias on the evidence base. 🧵1/12 https://t.co/UhkfAm7f6F
Antidepressant efficacy is inflated by the cumulative impact of publication bias, outcome reporting bias, spin, and citation bias on the evidence base.
🧵1/12 https://t.co/UhkfAm7f6F
More notes (and links to the full system prompt) on my blog https://t.co/28YnCVFiZV
This is one of the craziest ideas I've ever seen. He converted a drawing of a bird into a spectrogram (PNG -> Soundwave) then played it to a Starling who sung it back reproducing the PNG.
Using the birds brain as a hard drive with 2mbps read write speed. https://t.co/f5gEyyK1MH https://t.co/GfJE79wuuF
This little boy has watched his parents work since he was born. Once he came to work with his mom, he did what came natural 💪 https://t.co/s84eJxyCIQ
🚨 New NBER working paper: "The Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers on Parenting and Children"
This paper estimates the effects of receiving a $1,000/month guaranteed income for 3 years, compared to a control group receiving $50/month, on children and parents in the US. 1/ https://t.co/kz1JwsBUUI
Waking up to this has gotta be a top 5 trippy experience
Quoted Tweet:
Losing it over this therapy horse that vigorously plays the piano to wake kids up from anesthesia https://t.co/kpF9KpEmV0
The Volume was used to shoot the #Superman barrel roll scene 🎥 https://t.co/wicPUhOcu6
"among your smart peoples...they usually show very large variation in work ethics (some are lazy, some are workaholics)...I know multiple ~130 IQs who just refuse to get or keep steady jobs and consequently they live in relative squalor" https://t.co/18hcBxZNVL
Is air the safest way to travel? It depends on what that means.
Airplanes are the safest way to cover a specific distance. They're pretty safe per hour, too.
However, you are almost three times more likely to die when getting on a plane as when getting in a car. https://t.co/Ct4KxKNWhg
New recommendation up at All Good Movies: The handsomely produced 5-part mini-series Parade's End features complex characters, superb performances, and a genuinely moving love story, all set against sweeping historical change. No spoilers review at link. https://t.co/mGbdwm5NcU
I can’t keep checking behind me when I put my car in reverse. I’m at my limit
@CohenSite Housing per adult is the best measure of a housing shortage and almost perfectly correlates with cost burden https://t.co/NcSRpdUEJT
Google DeepMind just dropped this new LLM model architecture called Mixture-of-Recursions.
It gets 2x inference speed, reduced training FLOPs and ~50% reduced KV cache memory. Really interesting read.
Has potential to be a Transformers killer. https://t.co/LdrKmSy6tR
We should be giving Ukraine so many weapons that in five years we’re having to defend Alaska from them
Claude Code is All You Need
When I first joined Anthropic I was surprised to learn that lots of the team used Claude Code as a general agent, not just for code.
I’ve since become a convert! I use Claude Code to help me with almost all the work I do now, here’s how:
Did you know? The deepest the bow, the higher the respect shown. This is a core part of Japanese bowing etiquette, known as ojigi.
This man married a gymnast. https://t.co/7V5oQLdhSq
I don't know if there's an Epstein client list. We were told it was being released just before we were told it doesn't exist. It's possible it never existed, but it isn't possible that we were never lied to.
(Continental philosopher): Without 5, we could not count to 6.
(Me): Yes.
(Continental philosopher): It could be said 6 is consequently in the 5-shadow, the forthcoming of 6 is 5-heralded, that 5 springs necessarily from the recapitulation of 6.
(Me, checking my watch): Yes.
Me, buying $2 amateur art at Tokyo Design Festa in 2019: I wonder what I'll buy when I'm rich
Me, rich, buying $400 worth of $2 art at Tokyo Design Festa: Oh, I see
"Nostalgia is the enemy of history."
In Colonial America - one third of all women gave birth to their first child less than 9 months after getting married.
Meanwhile, 20% of New Englanders had a religious affiliation.
Finke and Stark, Churching of America. https://t.co/9DetmfAhaU
Quoted Tweet:
“America was never a Christian nation!” British Parliamentary report from 1774: “If you ask an American, “who is his master?” He will tell you he has none-nor any governor but Jesus Christ.”
It is not true that Americans have experienced "continual cuts" to public benefits since Reagan, as the lede of this piece suggests. Rather, wage subsidies, food assistance, and public health insurance were all expanded between 1980 and 2020. Tho tide obviously just reversed https://t.co/bTn4MfK0YU
Quoted Tweet:
"The story of recent decades isn’t just one of increasing hardship for those who depend on wages and public services, but of state-sponsored extravagance for those who own assets." If you don't grasp the second part, Abundance may look like something new, i.e., not neoliberalism https://t.co/a7Clr3aQDa
