Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

NVIDIA sent me preview hardware of their new DGX Spark 128GB ARM64 4TB "AI supercomputer" - it's a very neat little device, here are my notes so far
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/14/nvidia-dgx-spark/

You know what’s really underrated?

Social opprobrium.

🧵

nanochat by Andrej Karpathy is neat - 8,000 lines of code (mostly Python, a tiny bit of Rust) that can train an LLM on $100 of rented cloud compute which can then be served with a web chat UI on a much smaller machine https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/13/nanochat/

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration #inktober day 12: shredded

I like to dress up, sit in the park, and do bookbinding. I do this probably 2-3 times a week when it's nice out. Very good

Ok folks, let's do a barter because I really want to do this free session but I am also an exhausted human and I need my efforts to go toward my own work too.

If my newsletter gets 20 new signups in the next week, I'll do an open "design a study with Cat" mini workshop 💕

Spread the word! Also yes I absolutely know it would be trivial to game this and I'm trusting you not to. Why? Because I trust you. 🤗

https://www.fightforthehuman.com/

my work sometimes feels like trying to very slowly and exhaustingly transition over like 10 years from brutalist radical DIY laptop kit for the post-apocalypse to a not-too-weird-looking, hardware and software bug-free, always reliable, well-supported, performant, silent, secure and still repairable and open source laptop that people with a shopping list of specific requirements would find acceptable enough, while not selling out and still surviving somehow

Went for a bike ride yesterday. Weather was ok, I guess.

🚨 OxF EUROPE-FRIENDLY TIME ALERT 🚨

AI is affecting many areas of life, but arguably none more so than higher education, where it is challenging the mechanics, the economics and even the purpose of post-secondary education. On Monday, @ahl and I will be joined by Michael Littman, professor of computer science at Brown University -- and AI Provost for the university. Join us at 9a Pacific for what promises to be a lively and wide-ranging discussion!

https://discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=1426652393822752939

in its first year, pastagang has created 5 collaborative creative tools, written 22 blog posts, released 3 podcast episodes, published 1 academic paper and given 1 talk. it has performed in 23 gigs in London, Sheffield, Karlsruhe, Ljubljana, Berlin, Barcelona, Linz, Landau, Boston and New York. through these, pastagang has accidentally earned over £200. it has also released 3 albums, 1 single and 119 recordings of jam sessions

This LLM security research from Anthropic also has important copyright implications:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

I experimented with using a more powerful AI (ChatGPT5 Pro) to attempt an open problem https://mathoverflow.net/questions/425509/sphere-with-bounded-curvature which is not quite in my area of expertise (specifically, differential geometry): https://chatgpt.com/share/68e85cba-7228-800e-8804-a0f41aa64e14 . The outcome was surprisingly nuanced, and illustrates a point I made in an earlier post https://mathstodon.xyz/deck/@tao/114501120421010793 that one has to measure the usefulness of a tool at multiple scales. In summary: AI assistance was very useful at small scales, somewhat unhelpful at medium scales, but somewhat helpful again at large scales; the problem remains unsolved, but I understand it much better now.

The problem asks, if a smooth immersed sphere in R^3 has both principal curvatures bounded in magnitude by 1, must it enclose at least a large a volume as the round unit sphere? This looked to me like a variational problem in which the round sphere would be the minimizer, so the problem naturally splits into a "perturbative" regime in which the immersed sphere is close to round, and the "non-perturbative" regime in which the immersed sphere is far from round. Lacking much geometric intuition on this problem, and knowing that most of my analysis-based toolkit was geared towards pertburative cases, I guessed that the perturbative regime would be the more important case, and chose to focus efforts there. (1/8)

"The Trump administration on Thursday proposed banning Chinese airlines from flying over Russia on routes to and from the United States, saying the reduced flight time this practice enables puts American carriers at a disadvantage." https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-proposes-barring-chinese-airlines-flying-over-russia-us-flights-2025-10-09/