U of Auckland Professor. Founder TransAxon.bio @TranzAxon, nz.com, curiouscat.cc, @AI4Good; BCI, AI, NLP, ML; ex: IBM, CMU. AI that reasons & Improved brains

Auckland, NZ
Why are we using the word "recursive" to describe tail recursion, or, in other words, a loop? Related, what would "real" recursive self improvement loop like? It would have to involve subsidiary improvement processes that serve to enhance the ones above them.
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Having GPT 5.6 presenting as Copilot in Outlook almost makes answering University administrative email a pleasure. Thank you @OpenAI and @sama
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The entire argument, in the limit, for investment in vast data centres by AI companies is that the scale will enable them to deliver AI at lower cost than sovereign or on-prem models. There is a strong case for both, but that case is not cost saving.
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If Andy Burnham wanted to signal, clearly, Labour's competence and lack of capture, he'd find a way to abolish the UK's absurd 5 second imposition on every website visitor to satisfy the absurd idea that every person needs to be repetitively interrogated on their preference about cookies. A mild repudiation, and retirement from public influence of the people who thought that they should impose this on the rest of us might also be widely appreciated. Of course, I'm not British, so my opinion on this should hold no particular weight.
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AI coding agents can turn a diagnosis into code, tests and permanent architecture in minutes. The “reliability ratchet” makes systems locally defensible but globally less adaptable: additions accumulate, while almost nothing gets removed. In the worst case leads to systems that can never have their intended function. michaelwitbrock.com/2026/08/…
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Typical operating configuration for an @Apple MacBook power supply. Design and engineering genius!
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It's deleted 92000 lines and added 36000. I hope it knows what it's doing.
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Is the Apple Macintosh charging brick the least-well-designed device ever? It blocks adjacent sockets completely. That is, until it falls out of the wall.
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New Rules: processes that are compulsory ought to work. @WeWork Merchant Square London
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Michael Witbrock retweeted
I'm proud we are releasing LAION-fMRI, a densely sampled 7T fMRI dataset of natural images, with very broad stimulus sampling for testing countless hypotheses & deeply exploring brain representations. It is now available at laion-fmri.hebartlab.com/ What does LAION-fMRI offer? 🧵
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Do Impossible Things. AI can help.
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I (and a reasoning model) did a calculation. A 2 earth G (fairly mild) passenger transport mass driver on the moon only needs to be 144km long to reach escape velocity in about 2 minutes. To make it follow the curvature (otherwise you need quite a tower at the end) you need a max anti-levitation force of about one lunar gravity, the levitation force that you need to keep it off the rails at the beginning anyway. With care, this could be used for landing too. @elonmusk @PeterDiamandis
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Michael Witbrock retweeted
Announcing The Future Vision XPRIZE. A global competition with $3.5M+ in prize funding challenging creators anywhere on Earth to imagine hopeful, technology-forward futures worth building toward. Not warnings. Blueprints. Futures that inspire us to go boldly. Someone in your timeline is sitting on a vision that could change the world and doesn't know this exists yet. Share this. Be the reason they find it.
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