my favorite LSD story is from this old microsoft engineer who took a ridiculous amount of acid and found a way to open a windows xp control panel of his brain and turned off his fear of heights
taxi driver: you don’t speak albanian?
me (in albanian): i do! I’ve just forgotten a lot of words
driver: ah come on man learn the language. show that you’re proud of your country
me: i am! I’m actually thinking of moving here
driver: now why would you do that. that’s stupid
me: we should go to a museum!
grandpa: don’t go to a museum, just ask us. i‘m so old they built the museum using what i know
me: haha nice one grandpa
>visit museum
>grandpas name on contributors plaque
no matter how shitty your morning is at your office job today at least you didn’t underwrite the insurance policy for a cargo ship that took out an $800 million bridge
I actually don’t care that politicians can trade stocks. What I’m mad about is that it takes 45 days for their trades to become public. Amend the STOCK act so I can copy Nancy Pelosi’s homework on a millisecond basis and I promise you, Congress, we will let you trade forever
The best argument against rejecting nature completely is that we keep inventing advanced algorithms and running them on hyperscale supercomputers to find the most optimized solution for a problem and the end result is just like. A bird. You could've just drawn a bird instead
there's some dude on youtube who just started a new series where he builds a phased array radar from scratch capable of detecting and locking on to drones
the raspberry pi subreddit is currently speedrunning the "infrared cameras are so low res" -> "oh they're illegal" -> "wait a minute China isn't an ITAR signatory" -> "we ordered 30 FLIR cams from alibaba" -> "our office was raided by the FBI" high school robotics pipeline
“Thank god I didn’t go into computer science” says the junior analyst in New York, staring at a spreadsheet and correcting mislabeled columns and unformatted rows by hand
“Thank god I didn’t go into finance” says the ML scientist in San Francisco, staring at a spreadsheet and co
I was in college when AirPods came out and first adopters were ridiculed for how goofy they looked. I was in high school when the Apple Watch came out and first adopters were ridiculed for paying $800 to tell the time. I was in middle school when the iPad came out and reviewers…
So I actually read the article. The two people deriding MrBeast are (1) a Kenyan politician, for whom this is embarrassing, and (2) a woman who founded a 501c3 based in Cambridge Massachusetts that raised $131k in 2020 and spent $83,000 on themselves
While American YouTuber MrBeast’s goal was to provide clean drinking water for 500,000 people, activists say his actions shamed the Kenyan government and helped perpetuate the stereotype that Africa is "dependent on handouts."
WhatsApp had 55 employees when it was acquired for $19 billion (~$350,000,000 per person).
How the hell does Twitter have 8,000+ employees?? What do they do???
DoorDash discourse is a stark reminder that we stopped institutionalizing people who needed it. Legitimately, no sarcasm, I am sorry that we force you to take care of yourself and work 40hrs+ a week when you are not mentally capable
every time someone pulls out that story about NASA engineering a pen while the Soviets just used a pencil I like to ask them which country landed on the moon first
The use of Augmented reality combat systems in China and US exemplifies the different approach of the 2 militaries.
Left, China's simple good enough system that has been in mass deployment for years.
Right, US system that's bulky, over engineered and stuck in development
1/4🧵
in the middle of the trip we enter the city i’m going to and he tells me he doesn’t know where my address is, so he pulls over and gets out next to a cafe where a bunch of old guys are drinking coffee. he asks them where we should go and then we keep driving. lindy
In a way you have to admire the Houthi spokespeople posting that they sunk an aircraft carrier while the captain of the aircraft carrier uploads pictures of people sitting in his chair eating a cookie. This is truly posting through it at a scale none of us can imagine
Unsuspecting Petty Officer sent to the bridge and told to sit in the Captain’s chair. Cookie placed in his hand, confusion blankets his face. Told that his mom is so damn proud of him and misses him. He says, “Love you Mom and I’m following in your footsteps.” Mom is a Navy vet!
one of the funniest outcomes in an alien encounter is we find out there’s an alternate 3000BC tech tree that unlocks antigravity and FTL travel but not nuclear weapons. so they send their entire army here and just get whacked by a nuclear submarine assembled in Groton Connecticut
the difference between you and a world leader: you called your teacher mommy in elementary school and did nothing but get embarrassed. Macron called his high school teacher mommy, dated her until she left her husband, married her, and is now threatening Russia with nuclear war
hilarious edge case:
my friend and her ex blocked each other’s profiles when they broke up
but
now they’re on speaking terms, want to unblock
but
Spotify has no blocklist, you can only unblock from their profile
but
since they blocked each other neither of them can do that
in 1999 Richard Branson was woken up by a staffer at 5 in the morning and told that construction crews were struggling to lift the repaired London Eye (repairs funded by title sponsor, British Airways). he told the staffer to send this blimp on behalf of Virgin Airlines
two times I almost got kicked out of college. first time was irrelevant. second was when I invited a state senator, who was a close friend, to campus. the comms dept had this whole protocol for throwing a banquet, appointing tour guides, etc. We got grits at a dining hall
I once set up one of those self driving simulations where it learns to avoid crashes using a genetic algorithm. I let it train for 10hrs and found it hadn’t move an inch. Turns out it learned it can avoid all accidents by never moving at all. Anyways that’s why you have anxiety
this hotel just cancelled my reservation because they said, and I quote, “even though a valid reservation was made, that does not mean a room was reserved, and there aren’t any rooms left”
even though
a valid reservation
was made
that does not mean
a room
was reserved
the problem with work life balance discussion at companies with large age spreads is that everyone >30 just wants a fake high paying job so they can spend time with their families and everyone <30 wants to do Important Work to attach their identity to in the absence of love
>LLM offers “JSON mode”
>look inside
>it’s a flag that appends “you are a person who only speaks in JSON, please return the answer as a JSON object, do not return anything other than the JSON object, I will tip you $200” to the prompt
my mom just showed me a LinkedIn screenshot of Mira Murati (CTO of OpenAI) and said "she's Albanian, you should talk to her about your AI startup, maybe she can help you out"
when I worked in power we were able to save one of our large clients something like $6000/mo by advising them to leave their lights on overnight because the kW surge required to turn all of them on at once overrode any savings they could get by turning them off
bro holy shit I knew my mom got a masters in physics when I was in high school but I just offhandedly asked her what her topic was and she said “quantum theory of superconductors”
I’m showing her the arxiv paper tonight
@BenRatkaj
like yeah it sounds like bullshit but...who's gonna tell me i can't model my brain as the windows registry? who's gonna stop me from conquering my anxiety by finding its memory address in cheat engine and zeroing it out? if i can fly in lucid dreams i can do this too!
the guy who shouts “break right” to save the pilot in this clip was then shot down and became an Iraqi POW who underwent a unique form of torture whereby a captor would punch him to dislocate his jaw and then use an electrical face contraption to taze his jaw back into place
interesting post from an OpenAI employee claiming that all large language models reach the same endpoint regardless of training strategy or clever tricks
this is of course what the bitter lesson teaches us but useful to get an up to date confirmation that it still holds true
the thing about the unironic “men used to go to war” crowd is like. men still go to war. you know men still go to war right. like there are actually a lot of wars you are eligible for right now. have you tried talking to a recruiter recently
my mom just showed me a LinkedIn screenshot of Mira Murati (CTO of OpenAI) and said "she's Albanian, you should talk to her about your AI startup, maybe she can help you out"
to this day New York City Title 29 § 506.3 bans possession of a "citywide standard key" and goes on to define it as "a key of special or controlled design, also known as a '2642' key"
why is it called a 2642 key?
because its bitting is 2-6-4-2-0
2014: The Washington Post published an article which included a photo of TSA master keys. A short time later functional keys were 3-d printed using the key patterns in the photo. Oops.
(This is a modified version of the photo.)
one of the funniest parts of freakonomics is when they interview the crack dealing kingpin to figure out how he led his gang and he turned out to be some guy who got an MBA from a rando community college and modeled his enterprise after the mcdonalds org chart example in class
supposedly during Afghanistan the Taliban would point empty Stinger tubes at the sky in random directions and if they heard the star spangled banner start playing they knew a fighter jet or helicopter was nearby so they'd make a run for it
When I was researching biowarfare in college one of the most compelling arguments I found was ironically American diversity: scientists can engineer a virus that targets Han Chinese people, but they can’t make an American equivalent because we don’t have a shared genetic lineage
Mom brought out her old research materials. Trying to show what I can without doxxing. Her thoughts after skimming the paper:
- At the start of superconductivity research there were a few contemporary theories attempting to prove that a RTSC was impossible according to known…
bro holy shit I knew my mom got a masters in physics when I was in high school but I just offhandedly asked her what her topic was and she said “quantum theory of superconductors”
I’m showing her the arxiv paper tonight
she tells me she’s from the comms department and how dare I not inform the university of this trip and in the future I always have to tell them blah blah blah. she floats probation over my head. I tell her lol if you thought this trip was bad wait till I tell him about this
It’s difficult to overstate how unbelievably free-for-all 1990s Russia was; three dudes from Miami attempted to buy a diesel electric Soviet submarine from corrupt Navy officials and the response they got from the other end was “with missiles or without?”
I’m gonna be honest, I’m firmly in the nerd camp and have always been, but I’ve never encountered the mean jock trope irl. Every guy I’ve met super into sports has always been overall chill, always willing to share their sport with me, and much less annoying than the average nerd
one of the crazy things about Stinger missiles is they have active liquid cooling to allow the infrared sensor to work at longer ranges, but the battery only works for like 30 seconds. you get 30 seconds to aim and fire or else you and everyone around you dies. no pressure!
[Boeing Representative] It’s a great pleasure, thank you.
[Interviewer] This aircraft that was involved in the incident over Oregon this week…
[Boeing Representative] Yeah, the one where the door fell off?
[Interviewer] Yeah.
[Boeing Representative] That’s not very typical,…
you know at one point my coworker and I did ask our boss if we could expense a forklift training course to the company card and he was like. we sell software. why would we cover that
another crazy folk tale I heard is that Stingers after 1990 shipped with IFF (identify friend or foe, preventing launch if locked on to a friendly unit) which would sound a piezoelectric buzzer, but the first few batches were programmed to play MIDI star spangled banner instead
Oh bipedal locomotion is hard? That sucks. If only nature had an example of an animal that is helpful and friendly to humans, that also happens to be able to run and go up and down stairs really fast. Guess we'll have to spend $81,000 on GPU compute about this
I took him there, showed him my room, and went to a meeting for one of the clubs I was in. we had fun and he mentioned us on the state senate floor as one of the points for the education bill he was trying to pass. the next day this random lady shows up at my dorm room
Met a guy who switched out of CS into corporate law. He said “you guys are lucky, you can just run your code to make sure it works. Nobody finds compile time exceptions in my contracts until they make it into a courtroom, and even then the judge is often older than gcc”
my understanding of American economics for the last 30 years is every decade everyone notices the obviously nonsensical bubble, the economy explodes, then a bunch of nerds accidentally invent another trillion dollar money printer and everything is fine for another 10 years
if you thought zirp was once in a lifetime, you might get another chance. a chance to start a money incinerating startup and get rich off secondaries. a chance to make 1000x on an altcoin someone in your groupchat started. a chance to raise $100M off a .ai domain. don’t waste it
18yr old Italian cousin telling us about the summer he spent 72 hours awake without any substances:
“What did you do?”
“I finished One Piece”
“Wow! You’re a serious fan?”
“Oh no, the story is full of plot holes and there’s no character development. It was a total waste of time”
Following Pearl Harbor, the Senate voted 82-0 and the House voted 388-1 to declare war on Japan. The 1 no vote, Jeannette Rankin, never held political office again. 3 days later, the NYT reported that every recruiting record of every branch of military had been broken
this is one of the greatest recruitment strategies I’ve ever seen. just call up college seniors who have no idea what they want to do after graduation and give them a place to do the thing they went into their major for
A teen hacked Nvidia, got arrested, was released on bail under police supervision. Police confiscated his laptop and put him in a motel room. He then used the Amazon fire stick connected to his motel room TV to hack Rockstar and steal GTA 6 clips
@Agoodname467
I once went to a museum with a mutual I had constantly teased for being a fed (jokingly) and we got to an anti-ship missile on display and she was like “oh me and my dad worked on that!”
broke mindset: my representatives are insider trading. we need to end this
woke mindset: my representatives are insider trading. I need to financially exploit this for personal gain
Discord hired the best people who built the best product for their market. But now those people are still on payroll and need to _keep changing things_ to justify getting paid. Their recent moves are indicative of managers flailing around because there is no real work left
The M2 runs 6 Pro Display XDRs on its own. Each one is 6016 x 3384 pixels. They STILL needed a separate dedicated chip for Vision Pro. How is Meta supposed to compete with off the shelf processors? Nobody else even has the compute for this. It's completely bonkers
embarrassed myself in the computer history museum by telling my friend “I’m gonna be honest with you, I got a bachelor’s degree in computer science and I have no idea what a differential equation is” and a group of girls behind us laughed
but of course you’d never spring for that because that would mean you would have to actually rise to the occasion instead of perpetually believing you’re the type of man who would rise to the occasion, you know, when the time is right, while the occasions cruise by you
academics will look at this and think “haha what an idiot” and then give me a blank stare when I tell them I emailed the guy who wrote the paper in the paywalled journal and asked him to email me the pdf
@spacecowboyai
he owned a small business on the side and knew my high school principal who recommended me and a group of friends for interning there during our junior year. friends moved on, I worked on and off for abt 4 years after. still friends but I don’t work there anymore
Elon gets so much clout for being CEO of 4 companies at the same time just because he filed them independently instead of as subsidiaries of SpaceX (which, if we’re being honest, that’s what they are). Sundar oversees like 50+ companies in the Alphabet portfolio but nobody cares
Paul Buchheit originally invented Gmail because Google management was mandating a switch to Outlook and he wanted to keep using Linux on his work desktop
Group of high schoolers in front of me at the Chipotle line. One of them just texted some girl on Snapchat and they’re staring at the empty screen waiting.
We get through two more orders before she finally responds. Full screen paragraph. Whole group groans. Been there buddy 🤣
you guys ready for a random lore drop?
the guy in this meme from 2004 graduated Princeton to become an associate professor of computer science
specifically, my computer science professor
he taught my data science & algorithms course
he was cracked :)
dear mrs. murati, my name is andi. i am 24 years old. i live in new york city. my friend is training llama 70b models and he has not given me ssh access to his compute cluster. my data yearns to be trained on. please send NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU
Dude on the subway with his phone in landscape mode typing random numbers into the calculator app next to the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. Real
the biggest reason i think America Is Good is that in the time period between Hiroshima and RDS-1 (first Soviet nuclear test) the richest country ever had the opportunity to take over the world with nukes and instead chose to set up various forms of international banking
because engineering classes are about “nothing matters unless you get the right answer” and liberal arts classes are about “are you socially capable of understanding which obvious conclusions to not draw attention to?” and this hypocrisy kills the autistic mind
I rarely if ever see liberal arts students cry about having to take math classes but virtually every engineering student who is going to enter into a six figure career cries because they have to take demanding courses like “How to Read” and “Some Stuff That Happened In The Past”