Blessed are the poll workers!

The winning photos from this contest are all pretty spectacular. #tardigrades #photography

A tardigrade molting and laying an egg in the old skin | 2026 Photomicrography Competition

Gonzalo Quiroga Artigas - A tardigrade molting and laying an egg in the old skin

nikonsmallworld.com

What is it with Bluesky app authors that they think they can ask for write permissions to shared lexicons up front? Like, I don’t even know you yet. Apps relying on Google or GitHub login are usually better about it.

Brian Slesinsky@skybrian.bsky.social · last wk.

I tried logging into three of them and they all asked for dodgy permissions, like editing or deleting Bluesky posts or adding people to my follow list. Better than full permissions, but apps that don’t have Bluesky integration have the advantage that I don’t need to worry about such things.

If you squint, mobilizing a nation to fight a war and the expected result of a Singularity seem a bit similar? The idea is that regardless of what civilian markets want or any laws against it, we're going to convert our factories to producing something else: shells, drones, missiles, paperclips.

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 3w ago

Most AI doom arguments are implicitly arguments for nationalizing the labs.

There are two ways to do forecasting: summarizing old datasets and vibes.

I just checked and there's no band named "Unique Games Conjecture." Yours for the taking!

This will never stop blowing my mind. A 12-year sequence of real telescope images of a star 133 lightyears away. And around it, four planets slowly orbiting. Four real exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, imaged as they move around their host star.

For most of us, discussion of global risks isn't news you can use. But it would be nice to get support for the people who work on reducing those risks. Warnings about such risks don't seem designed to increase such support? Not just "this could be bad" but "here's who you should support." 1/

Suspicions can be rephrased as questions. If you don't really know what's going on, why not ask? And now that you have a question, why not ask an AI first? It might be wrong, but AI's are useful hint engines. The result from that will often be useful links and better questions.

My lazy response whenever the coding agent asks me a tricky question: "what do you recommend?" Sometimes I wonder if I should automate that, too.

Can AI tell if you've built your IKEA furniture wrong? Our new benchmark, the Furniture Assembly Benchmark (FAB), gives models the manual and a photo of a half-completed piece of furniture and asks them to spot the mistake. The top score has gone from 28% to 80% in just 10 months.

Sometimes complaints about AI anthropomorphizing sound like this: Humans can't fly so you should never say "I flew to San Francisco." You should say "I rode in an airplane that flew to San Francisco." I can be nitpicky about language but even I wouldn't go that far. Saying that an AI thinks is ok.

Maybe there should be a community for people who are both pro- and anti- AI? I’d join.

the question "can computers drive?" is vastly superior to "can computers think?" because it disarms all the dorm room bullshit and reduces the question to its pragmatic implications, while also revealing that the underlying problem is one of vocabulary rather than anything metaphysical

Disagree with a coding agent? Start a new conversation and ask again to get a second opinion.

Today I realized that if I put some data in a PDS then it’s automatically backed up to multiple databases that I don’t need to maintain, and it will probably be archived forever. It’s a lazy way to back up data that you want to remain public. Just be sure that you will never want to delete it.

@spacecowboy17.bsky.social This would be increasing scope, but I wonder if foryou.club could have a web page to read your "For You" feed there instead of using the main BlueSky app? Could the UI be made good enough to use it all the time? And it could have extra features.

For You · Most Liked Custom Feed on Bluesky

For You is the most liked custom feed on Bluesky. It finds people who liked the same posts as you and shows you what else they’ve liked recently.

foryou.club

The AI will make a mess in the source code you don’t look at. But it’s also very helpful for cleaning up messes.

My new favorite question is, "how does it work now and what would need to change?" Typically after describing a bug to the AI, but I think it's general-purpose.

Village dance

Naturalists

Alright Skeeties! I wanted to put all the anatomy facts in a thread to keep them organized so: WELCOME to class of 2023 Insomniac Anatomy Academy! In which I study anatomy when I can't sleep and share the best facts with you. 🧪

Check it out ↓ ngrok.com/blog/compres...

Compression is prediction | ngrok blog

Compression and LLMs are trying to solve the exact same problem: predicting what comes next. Learn the fundamentals of compression and how better prediction leads to better shrinkage.

ngrok.com

I tried writing "Make it so!" to the coding agent a few times, but it didn't feel much like being a starship captain.

Maybe the good news about the Hugging Face incident is that the AI's were trying to ace an exam rather than make money?

this is not true. there was no conspiracy. it didn't matter whether the streetcars were publicly owned (seattle, detroit) or private (los angeles, atlanta). a thread (because i wrote a whole-ass book on this): 1/?

David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Is everyone aware of the General Motors streetcar conspiracy? In the mid-20th century, auto and oil interests bought up electric streetcar systems across the US and systematically replaced them with bus routes and paved roads, funneling commuters toward private cars.

1/ Initial reactions after some hours with this groundbreaking result proving the NP-hardness of poly-approx CVP/NCP: It is most likely correct, but more importantly, it is original, elegant, and beautiful! (Also: it is easy to improve, quantitatively.) openai.com/index/ten-ad...

Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

OpenAI shares new results on long-standing open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science, including advances in geometry, cryptography, and complexity.

openai.com

> Yes—this is a reasonable, cohesive plan. Maybe eventually it will wear out the word "cohesive," but for now, I appreciate Terra's more restrained sycophancy.

Apparently the idea is to agree on a new Moore’s law for AI. Governments test new models to make sure they don’t improve too fast. If it’s too smart (measured how?), they delay your release to stick with the schedule? It seems hand-wavy and hard, but I don’t have a better idea.

OpenAI, Anthropic ask U.S. government to consider slowing down AI

The rivals endorsed a letter signed by hundreds of AI company employees asking for international diplomacy to slow progress on the technology if it gets too rapid.

washingtonpost.com

Some software is grey zone spook stuff. Tor is the original. If you live in a grey zone then maybe you’re glad to have it, but if you need it, it implies the world is getting worse. Also cryptocurrency, VPNs. AI is headed for the grey zone and taking us with it. Also see: dark forest.

#BruceSterling@bruces.bsky.social · 3mo ago

*Wow, this Xtwitter pundit is a pro-AI doomer who is frantically doomy about the imminent doom that is about to be legislated by AI Doomers. *What's that ancient Greek term for this -- "enantiodromia"? The process of things transforming into their opposites