dad. staff applied ai engineer @forge_global, formerly @awscloud. also @makeemoji. tech, housing, and future enjoyer. radical centrist
🌁 Bay Area, California, USA
- Tweets 26,765
- Following 4,845
- Followers 7,106
- Likes 220,451
Matt Popovich retweeted
working with Astra to make a font where each token has equal width (early prototype)
maybe this will make it easier to understand why models have the quirks they do
Made with AI
17
32
1,168
32,411
Matt Popovich retweeted
Robert Eggers is set to direct a new adaptation of Gilmore Girls.
The characters will speak Akkadian.
20
117
1,867
32,116
Matt Popovich retweeted
I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron.
Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence.
Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons.
Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist.
After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence.
New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today?
worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…
288
1,073
7,918
590,024
Matt Popovich retweeted
remember this old post of mine? Tried it with Jev---it seems to have a grasp of the globe on par with some of the best models a year ago
due to the architecture & low cost, it was also feasible to extract a labeled map of continents and countries. lots of interesting details
20
37
791
164,580
Matt Popovich retweeted
Boring ass high Lama twitter: blah blah yak milk blah blah samsara blah
Boring ass Cistercian Abbott twitter: blah blah calligraphy blah blah unruly initiates blah
Franciscan hermit twitter: 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 NEW GRUEL????
3
29
1,606
Matt Popovich retweeted
Wall Street *hated* Bezos starting Amazon Web Services, which is the backbone of the modern internet
2
5
122
4,784
Matt Popovich retweeted
About two weeks ago a Florida pelican walked a quarter mile to a NOAA lab wrapped in fishing line and carrying a barbed hook in its wing, politely tapped on the door until it was discovered by scientists, patiently stood still while they operated on it, and then flew away.
70
1,465
20,079
299,799
Matt Popovich retweeted
yes, image creation also goes in the llm hole
for the past few months i've been asking our models to paint. opus 5.5 is very skilled at emulating different styles
every image here is a python program generated pixel by pixel. there is no image model, and no off-the-shelf art software. instead, it's about 7,500 lines of code using standard libraries to emulate different brush styles. the agents don't use any pictures as reference, instead working only from what they know about each painter
7
23
1,292
51,717
Matt Popovich retweeted
I built Vybez
A small TypeScript sugar that weaves Jev decisions ergonomically into your existing code.
Most workflows mix semantic decisions and deterministic rules; Vybez makes that strongly typed and seamless in TypeScript.
github.com/clavia-labs/vybez
Try: bun add vybez
5
4
12
560
Matt Popovich retweeted
Every unbuilt unit on “open space” in Marin or elsewhere in the bay is bulldozing land in the rest of the state.
NIMBYs in Marin and Berkeley have done more environmental damage than Chernobyl 100 times over.
A new PPIC report finds housing concern is dropping in the Bay Area - even as it stays the state's worst-hit region - because people priced out already left.
Concern is rising fastest in the Central Valley, where Bay Area transplants have pushed up prices.
7
2
27
2,302
Matt Popovich retweeted
The literacy crisis is real. A friend sent me this: this is an essay that successfully got someone admitted to Harvard.
728
540
20,605
1,913,058
Matt Popovich retweeted
In further crackdowns on effective altruist influence in the government president Trump has BANNED the use of Sankey Diagrams in government documents across all departments and strongly encouraged the use of Treemap charts
6
9
171
8,191
Fundamentally this is a pro-CCP-victory stance from @mkratsios47 and the Trump admin. If we take American labs at face value, they have to slow even if they’d otherwise prefer not to because of political backlash risk. Chinese open source is under no such restriction
Interesting comments from OSTP Director Michael Kratsios on the pacing discussions. Echoing some of the prior comments from VP Vance ("if you are building Frankenstein, stop")
"Our position is if you do believe that you are developing a technology that is unsafe, that you don’t want out in the world, you can just stop it.
You don’t need someone to force you to do that and I think thats what’s been a bit confusing about this whole narrative.
So there’s leaders of these companies that are going out and saying we are gonna do all these measures, the government has to do all these things, when in reality they just need to slow down if they feel like they need to do so.”
Companies who are warning that their activities present an immense risk but they plan on continuing anyway should work on a better answer to this question, or should consider whether they in fact can take a greater degree of unilateral action in favor of safety and security than they have thus far.
1
3
401