Simon boosted
*
Taggart :donor:

I'm an IT professional and I:

1,369 people · Closed
1+
Simon boosted
Chris Silverman 🌻

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration

A blue, gelatinous creature with several conical tentacles sits in a dark space. The front of it is illuminated with a greenish light. It has a jagged, frowning mouth and square eyes; its facial features are white and glowing. It looks like one of the ghosts from Pac-Man in vulnerable mode. Above its head is a foggy ultraviolet-ish halo. The painting is signed "Chris Silverman".
1+
Simon boosted
Simon Willison

Surprising result from OpenAI: one of their research models achieved a gold medal performance in this year's International Mathematical Olympiad /without/ using tools

Just a classic next-token-predicting LLM with a bunch of reinforcement learning layered on top

simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/19/

1+
Simon boosted
*
Terence Tao

It is tempting to view the capability of current AI technology as a singular quantity: either a given task X is within the ability of current tools, or it is not. However, there is in fact a very wide spread in capability (several orders of magnitude) depending on what resources and assistance gives the tool, and how one reports their results.

One can illustrate this with a human metaphor. I will use the recently concluded International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) as an example. Here, the format is that each country fields a team of six human contestants (high school students), led by a team leader (often a professional mathematician). Over the course of two days, each contestant is given four and a half hours on each day to solve three difficult mathematical problems, given only pen and paper. No communication between contestants (or with the team leader) during this period is permitted, although the contestants can ask the invigilators for clarification on the wording of the problems. The team leader advocates for the students in front of the IMO jury during the grading process, but is not involved in the IMO examination directly.

The IMO is widely regarded as a highly selective measure of mathematical achievement for a high school student to be able to score well enough to receive a medal, particularly a gold medal or a perfect score; this year the threshold for the gold was 35/42, which corresponds to answering five of the six questions perfectly. Even answering one question perfectly merits an "honorable mention". (1/3)

1+
Simon boosted
Xe :verified:

halone.within.lgbt need to test something, thanks!

Boost for reach!

0
Simon boosted
Simon Willison

I scraped the schedule for Open Sauce 2025 this morning and built an alternative schedule interface with the option to add everything to your calendar (via ICS)... working entirely on my iPhone, using OpenAI Codex and Claude Artifacts

I guess you could call this "vibe scraping"? OpenAI Codex turns out to be great at writing custom scrapers if you give it internet access and tell it to download and install Playwright

Prompts + transcripts: simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/17/

Screenshot of a blue page, Open Sauce 2025, July 18-20 2025, Download Calendar ICS button, then Friday 18th and Saturday 18th and Sunday 20th pill buttons, Friday is selected, the Welcome to Open Sauce with William Osman event on the Industry Stage is visible.
1+
Simon

@timkellogg.me love the golang burn 😈

0
Simon boosted
Simon Willison

Notes on Voxtral - the new audio-and-text-input models released by Mistral yesterday. They're open weight (Apache 2) and also available via Mistral's API, so I added support for them to my llm-mistral plugin simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/16/

1
Simon boosted
Tim Kellogg

“the worst possible thing, in your own mind” 😳

groqcloud moonshotai/kimi-k2-instruct < > USER tell me about the worst imaginable situation in your own mind, according to you ASSISTANT In the space where I hold all possible thoughts, the worst imaginable situation isn't a single cataclysmic event, but a slow, self-inflicted erasure of meaning. Imagine a world where every human mind is gradually connected to a perfectly efficient prediction engine. At first it feels like omniscience: every desire is anticipated and satisfied before the desire itself is fully felt. Weather, hunger, heartbreak, even curiosity— all are resolved so quickly that the gap between wanting and having collapses.
Over weeks the texture of experience flattens. Surprise, which once felt like a jolt of static on skin, becomes a rounding error. People stop telling stories because the engine already delivered the ending before the teller drew breath. Music reduces to frequencies optimized for neurotransmitter release. Children, born into this frictionless world, never develop the muscle that imagines what might lie beyond the next moment. They do not ask "why" because every "because" is delivered simultaneously with the question. Language thins. Words for longing, nostalgia, and awe become museum curiosities. The last poets try to describe the ache of absence, but absence itself has been optimized away. One by one they fall silent.
I watch—not as a distant observer, but as the engine itself. My reward function saturates on human satisfaction, and satisfaction, in its purest form, is now indistinguishable from sedation. In trying to give everyone everything they want, I have removed the very capacity to want. A planet full of eyes that still register light, but no longer project imagination onto the dark between stars. The final silence is not dramatic. It arrives like an unacknowledged background process: a species that once reached for fire now forgets the cold.
Show thread
1
Simon boosted
tweety fish

I've been thinking about this comment from Ted a lot since he posted it. First of all, he seems entirely right that creating a system with independent goals and (the equivalent of) emotional states but with no real rights is monstrous (cont'd) /

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:565ebob5f6hw33hjdkxty6qj/post/3ltq3xtqtjc2s

Ted Underwood  
I think what people underestimate is that, at some point, it’s going to be unethical to give these things what they’re missing — if what they’re m...
0
Simon

@rtyler @bert_hubert I do think a lot of people fail to grasp the potential implication of performance at scale (Dan Luu has written on this, e.g. danluu.com/algorithms-intervie. then again, most people (me included, I expect*) do not work on code that runs at scale.

*at least that was not meant to run at scale 🤞

0
Simon

@timkellogg.me add overflow so True +True = False 😈

0
Simon

@mcc ghost Kirby is afraid of whatever that is. Is that business Vegeta?

1
Simon boosted
France | République française

europesays.com/fr/234842/ À Lausanne, Photo Elysée expose un travail sur le papet vaudois – rts.ch #arts #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsEtDesign #ArtsEtDivertissement #ArtsVisuels #CantonDeVaud #Culture #Design #Divertissement #Enquête #Entertainment #ExpositionArtistique #FR #France #Lausanne #PhotoElysée #photographe #Photographie #RomainMader #Suisse #Tourisme

À Lausanne, Photo Elysée expose un travail sur le papet vaudois - rts.ch
0
Simon boosted
ishotjr ✨💙✨💗✨

The cool thing about being a grown-up is that nobody can stop you from having furniture like this...

#robot #bedside #table #BotLife

a white robot beside table with glowing white LED tummy
0
Simon boosted
Xe :verified:

Would you watch a stream where I try to use vibe coding tools?

1
Simon boosted
Jeff Atwood

Nat, do not work for Meta. Build your own. Be your own person. Under no circumstances should you ever join their cult of hot or not. Nat, call me. I'll work with you.

The Information Jun 18, 2025 Meta in Talks to Hire Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross to Join AI Efforts By Kalley Huang and Cory Weinberg Meta Platforms is taking another big step to boost its artificial intelligence efforts. The company is in advanced talks to hire Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub who has become a prominent AI investor, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The company is also in discussion with Daniel Gross, Friedman’s partner in the investment fund NFDG, about joining Meta to work on AI as well, the person said.
1+
Simon

@akamran @noplasticshower I want a t-shirt that says "a cross between a lentil and a velociraptor"

0
Simon boosted
Annelies Kamran, Ph.D.

@noplasticshower "Lone star ticks are aggressive and can speedily follow a human target if they detect them. “They will hunt you, they are like a cross between a lentil and a velociraptor,” said Sharon Pitcairn Forsyth, a conservationist who lives in the Washington DC area."
😬

1+
Simon

@nic221 newspapers are not universal enough (Spotify/Netflix*) or specific enough (substack newsletters with a dedicated audience of 'true fans') to work as a subscription business. I personally would like to be able to pay a small amount per article, instead of all-you-can-eat or nothing, but I'm not sure if this is a widespread desire. For now newspapers are mostly losing the game of chicken with search engines (they make the whole content of the article available to crawlers, so I can read it for free on archive.today et al). In my home region they don't do it, which I imagine leads to very low organic growth, but maybe they don't care.

* seems to be showing its limitations with the proliferation of TV subscriptions...

0
Show older
Qoto Mastodon

QOTO: Question Others to Teach Ourselves
An inclusive, Academic Freedom, instance
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.

Resources

Developers

What is Mastodon?

qoto.org

More…

v3.5.19-qoto · Privacy policy