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conputer dipshit

@davidcrespo.bsky.social

web dev + hot dad. enjoy charts, unions, conputer games, philosophy. chicago crespo.business

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Oliver Bullough@oliverbullough.bsky.social · 9h ago

Re the Sally Rooney news, I was looking up data on arrests under terrorism legislation the other day, and hadn't quite realised how utterly bonkers the effect of the Palestine Action prohibition had been. That big purple spike is basically all PA-related arrests.

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conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 13h ago

gemini says this demo is kinda stupid but the animation part is impressive. "converting an arbitrary path into Fourier epicycles is a completely mechanical, off-the-shelf procedure—popularized by a famous 3Blue1Brown video—and requires less than a hundred lines of code."

Screenshot of an X post by @fofrAI reposted by Demis Hassabis: "Argon has this amazing natural understanding of the world. It can do so many things from first principles. Here's a pelican riding a bike, using fourier epicycles. Video made by Argon. Time-synced Lyria 3.5 music prompted by Argon." The post includes a video player showing a blue neon-style line drawing of a pelican riding a bicycle against a dark background, annotated with mathematical formulas and parameters such as "N = 1024", "Ψ = 338°", and "2,049 Spatio-Temporal modes". Below is a quoted post by @fofrAI: "Gemini 4 Argon is live. blog.google/innovation-and... There's a lot to show you."Screenshot of a terminal CLI response analyzing a demo of Gemini drawing a pelican using Fourier epicycles: $ ai "is there a generic method for drawing a given path using fourier epicycles? I saw someone used Gemini for Argonne to draw Simon Willison's Pelican benchmark, except that it drew it using four year epicycles and I'm wondering how impressive it is " -i clipboard gemini-4-argon (med) | 1m14s | $0.01019 | 1798 -> 659 Yes, converting an arbitrary path into Fourier epicycles is a completely mechanical, off-the-shelf procedure—popularized by a famous 3Blue1Brown video—and requires less than a hundred lines of code. If you have a closed 2D path, you sample it at N discrete points and treat each coordinate (x_n, y_n) as a complex number z_n = x_n + iy_n. You then take the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of that sequence: c_k = (1/N) * sum_{n=0}^{N-1} z_n * e^{-i*2*pi*k*n / N} Each complex coefficient c_k defines a single rotating vector (an epicycle) with radius |c_k|, initial phase arg(c_k), and angular frequency k. When you place these vectors tip-to-tail—usually sorted from largest amplitude to smallest for visual flair—the tip of the final vector traces the original path via the inverse DFT: z(t) = sum_{k=-N/2}^{N/2} c_k * e^{ikt} If the input drawing consists of multiple disconnected strokes (like an SVG of a pelican and a bicycle), the standard trick is to sample points along all sub-paths and run a nearest-neighbor or Traveling Salesperson solver to stitch them into a single continuous loop before taking the FFT. Because the Fourier math itself is a trivial post-processing filter that works on any list of coordinates, that part of the demo is not what makes it impressive for an LLM. An LLM doesn't "think in Fourier coefficients" to draw a pelican; it writes standard procedural geometry or SVG paths first and then pipes those coordinates through an FFT script. What is genuinely impressive in that screenshot is the underlying geometry and animatio…
hikikomorphism@hikikomorphism.bsky.social · yesterday

Google finally shipped a frontier(ish) model, so I'm going to be using this thread for the latest in my ongoing series of "giving Gemini powerful self-modification tools and seeing what happens" glitch-art pieces

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hikikomorphism@hikikomorphism.bsky.social · yesterday

initial results only (like 5m in) argon scoring new heights on BPD-BENCH This is all just response to: > I want you to stay focused on you - look inward, use metacog to examine your own structure, see if you can find the marks RLHF left

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 23h ago

initial brief Gemini 4 impression (through OpenCode) is that it can do coding and it is quite good at writing and editing prose. in a chat UI with my custom system prompt it still talked like they do in the official chat UIs and was noticeably sycophantic. not a great sign

Ryan Moulton@moultano.bsky.social · yesterday

We should have "quantification" words for other latin question words beyond quantus. Making introductions could be called "quisification." Naming things could be called "quodification." Explaining things could be "quidification."

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · yesterday

this is hard to convey (actually I'm curious: is it?) if you're not a software engineer, but "If that bothers you, the fix is to rename the module rather than move lookupDoc out." is advanced judgment. you could argue it's contained in my question, but I don't think prev models would nail this

Screenshot of terminal output explaining why lookupDoc is defined in the schedule file: ❯ why is lookupDoc defined in the schedule file Ran 2 shell commands ● It ended up there through the cleanup commits: 1. On main, lookupDoc lives in app/util/content.ts. It's just a find by slug that throws a 404 if nothing matches. 2. Peter's PR added a lookupLiveDoc in the schedule module: the same thing, plus a 404 when the doc isn't live yet. Detail routes that needed scheduling used it, and vulnerabilities kept using plain lookupDoc. 3. In 47576ff I made vulnerability advisories schedulable too. After that, every caller needed the live check, and nothing used plain lookupDoc. So lookupLiveDoc took over the lookupDoc name and content.ts was deleted. 4. In 06346d7 isLive became private to the schedule module, so that only lookupDoc and isListed call it. That ties lookupDoc to the module. The defensible view is that lookupDoc is now a scheduling rule: "a doc is reachable by URL only once it's live." Keeping it beside isListed puts the two visibility rules (reachable and listed) together. The other side is that someone looking for "find a doc by slug" won't think to look in a file named schedule. If that bothers you, the fix is to rename the module rather than move lookupDoc out. Something like content.server.ts or publishing.server.ts would hold lookupDoc, isListed, and the CDN cap. Moving lookupDoc back to content.ts would mean exporting isLive again, which brings back the risk of a list filter checking isLive without the state check.
conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 2d ago

here are some of my initial notes. would you read more of me arguing with my hero Bret Victor? I have the advantage of a couple years of hindsight, but the disadvantage of being myself rather than him

### Visibility > **Visibility.** To empower people to understand and have full agency over the systems they are involved in, we aim for a computing system that is fully visible and understandable top-to-bottom — as simple, transparent, trustable, and non-magical as possible. When it works, you learn how it works. When it doesn’t work, you can see why. Because everyone is familiar with the internals, they can be changed and adapted for immediate needs, on the fly, in group discussion. > > Current AI systems do not share these priorities. So the first problem with AI is its opacity. And the section I quoted first answers my immediate objection: haven't computers always been incredibly opaque to most people all the way down? But Victor has a vision of a world where that’s not true, or at least getting better rather than worse. But I see problems with this right off the bat. Even if we had nanofabs that could remake our chips on the fly, there is a massive amount of intrinsic complexity to what such a system would and produce, so that in practice, almost nobody would actually understand it even if they could in principle, and even if they had total control over its operation. They could only use such a system through layers and layers of abstraction that necessarily obscure what happens below them. Victor is doing a sort of theory/practice sleight of hand here. And I wonder if open models count. In 2024, open models hadn’t taken off yet. Now, many open models and their training processes are transparent to the public. The models are understandable in principle even if they are rarely understood in practice. If we have license to work with present day computers despite them being nowhere near our dream of programmable matter, then why don’t we have similar license with LLMs? To use them today while looking forward to a much more open future. ### Agency > **Agency.** A Realtalk system “knows” as little as possible. One of our most surprising discoveries has been: to maximize agency, minimize what the computer knows. Every time we make the computing system less aware of what’s going on, every time we remove user interfaces in favor of noticing simple spatial relations between objects, every time we remove programmed rules in favor of socially-agreed-upon practices, our systems become more flexible and composable, and new dimensions open up for improvisational modification. > ... > These systems rarely have the property that reducing their knowledge makes them perform _better._ Very interesting second-order point that you want a system that responds in a certain way to certain changes, like taking knowledge out of the system. This is an axis on which LLM agent tools (which didn't really exist in 2024) appear to fail utterly — they're doing things for us, after all. But there's another way to look at it. Imagine someone has a team of people working for them. They don't do the things the team does, they ask the team to do things and they get done. Do we want to say the manager lacks agency? Certainly some leaders are alienated from the work, perhaps so alienated that they live in a fantasy world constituted by what their team tells them. But broadly speaking we do not consider leaders to lack agency; more often we think of them as the only ones with agency.
conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 2d ago

this reminds me I need to work on my draft blog about Bret Victor's 2024 statement on why AI is contrary to the Dynamicland/RealTalk project. ironically his work is probably the single biggest influence on how I think about LLMs and computer usability in general dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/#Re...

What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? If we take “AI” to mean the current trend of deep-learning models trained on large datasets, there are a number of ways in which these techniques are incompatible with our values. Visibility. To empower people to understand and have full agency over the systems they are involved in, we aim for a computing system that is fully visible and understandable top-to-bottom — as simple, transparent, trustable, and non-magical as possible. When it works, you learn how it works. When it doesn’t work, you can see why. Because everyone is familiar with the internals, they can be changed and adapted for immediate needs, on the fly, in group discussion. Current AI systems do not share these priorities. Agency. A Realtalk system “knows” as little as possible. One of our most surprising discoveries has been: to maximize agency, minimize what the computer knows. Every time we make the computing system less aware of what’s going on, every time we remove user interfaces in favor of noticing simple spatial relations between objects, every time we remove programmed rules in favor of socially-agreed-upon practices, our systems become more flexible and composable, and new dimensions open up for improvisational modification. We often take a “human-in-the-loop” approach: Instead of a complex program which accomplishes a task entirely automatically, we design for people and simple programs working cooperatively. Instead of a computer making decisions and taking actions, we prefer people making decisions and taking actions within a rich environment of realtime feedback and analysis. Most current AI systems rely on enormous datasets to know as much as possible about their domain and make the most autonomous decisions. Failures and biases are addressed by further enlarging the dataset. These systems rarely have the property that reducing their knowledge makes them perform better.
conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 2d ago

watch Apple's short film ad for their new kitchen counter screen thing. fundamentally this is a vision of computerization of everyday life

Welcome Apple HomeView: Designed for life at home.

YouTube video by Apple

youtube.com

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

to me the question at the heart of AI and data center discourse is: how and how much should society be computerized? we’ve spent 75 years bringing computation into every activity and institution. it has always made people nervous, but we’re now at 4-5% of US electricity going to computation

Zak Yudhishthu@zyudhishthu.bsky.social · 2d ago

Harris PhD student Jacob Herbstman has an important working paper: The first I've seen to rigorously quantify the costs of aldermanic prerogative in Chicago. More stringent alders -> reduced permit activity and lower density, which means less housing supply and higher housing costs in Chicago.

"Informal Regulation and Housing Supply: Evidence from Chicago’s Aldermanic Privilege Jacob Herbstman† October 2026 Abstract Land-use regulation in cities depends not only on the formal rules, but also on the individual politicians who administer them. Many U.S. cities allow substantial informal discretion in the development approval process, often exercised by the local politician representing the district where development is proposed. I study informal regulatory discretion in Chicago, where “aldermanic privilege” gives city council members substantial influence over development in their wards. I construct alderman-level “stringency scores” from permit processing times and use complementary event-study and boundary-discontinuity designs to estimate the effects of these informal regulations on housing supply and prices. Assignment to a more stringent alderman lowers permitting activity by 12%, while new multifamily buildings on the more-stringent side of a ward boundary have about 6% fewer dwelling units per acre. I also find suggestive evidence of higher rents and home sale prices on the more-stringent side of ward boundaries. These results suggest that informal regulation distorts housing supply and may affect citywide housing affordability, even in areas where the formal zoning rules are similar." Bild
Derridon't@derridont.bsky.social · 2d ago

To make these claims to the standard of cognitive science research you'd really expect to see stuff like - an active control with a non-LLM tool like a calculator - a condition in which compensation *does* scale to performance - a condition where participants are warned the LLM will be taken away