Feels like the AI world is balancing on a knife’s edge. On one side, the worst of big tech’s social media addiction machine and an even greater concentration of power. On the other side, the democratization of intelligence and an abundance that lifts all of society. Either outcome seems possible.

OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which I had never heard of because I’m not a mathematician, but which is apparently a very big deal:

The question of whether smooth three-dimensional fluid motion can break down has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.

There is some controversy over whether two human researchers (one at Anthropic) working on similar problems might’ve accidentally influenced the OpenAI model. It doesn’t sound like that’s true, but it does feel a little unfair regardless, where credit likely means so much to people.

Did a little Redis housekeeping, cleaning out orphaned records that were sitting around wasting memory. Down to 23 GB of RAM on a 48 GB machine. Still probably too much.

I had a nap yesterday and a late Dr. Pepper, so my sleep was all off. Caffeine really affects me late in the day. Woke up at 2am worried about all sorts of business and social things I can’t control.

Let it go. 🎶

Might be about time to get a Switch 2… Ocarina of Time remake looks good. 🕹️

Ben Thompson in today’s Stratechery blog post:

AGI is AI that learns continuously. That’s not the case with current large language models.

I agree with Ben’s definition of AGI, but LLM memory is so good now, it’s almost indistinguishable from learning. My ~/.codex/memories folder is 7 MB, which doesn’t sound like much, but it’s only small Markdown files. It’s incredible how much it knows. That doesn’t even count ChatGPT’s dreaming memory system and computer history.

How am I just now hearing this interview with Jensen Huang? “You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser.” 🤣

This could be really good. Trailer for a new documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Elizabeth Holmes: You Can See Everything. Amazing cut to the wider shot at the end.

Today I updated the Micro.blog web interface with better links and icons in the timeline, and a new context menu for editing your own posts or muting a conversation. There are a lot of related design fixes too. Just a better design and more room for us to build new things on.

Reflecting on the Astra launch… It was a killer business instinct for Greg Brockman to say, “yeah, this is basically AGI.” Dario Amodei is much more cautious. He’s not going to say that about Fable. But it works because it actually feels true. Marketing not based on truth is just bullshit spin.

I wanted to quote a couple things from this OpenAI blog post on alignment by Jakub Pachocki: The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization. As machines become smarter, they find themselves working on higher-level concepts, and placed in environments increasing...

With the 40th anniversary re-release of the original Transformers movie coming up, I finally watched the 2007 Transformers. I had skipped it because it looked all wrong. The design doesn’t look like Transformers to me. Also watched Bumblebee, which it much better, just a better feel, better sound.

Nitter and XCancel are back online after being shut down for a couple weeks following a cease and desist letter from X. I’m a little surprised. From the GitHub project page:

Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.

Working on some web timeline design tweaks that will go live in the morning. I’ve been stubbornly insisting on text labels for Reply, Bookmark, etc. where every other network uses icons only. Going to mostly keep that, but the new version looks way better.

Worrisome reporting from Mark Gurman:

Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.

John Gruber adds:

I sure hope that’s not true, because that would be awful — making a bad situation worse — and pretty much the exact opposite of what Apple ought to do.

I think I would really like the foldable iPhone. But at over $2k, I can’t justify blowing that much money on a phone. It would be a crazy business expense when I could put that money back into Micro.blog hosting or paying people. Other folks may have different priorities, and that’s fine! 💰

Pretty thorough article at The Economist about whether AI is creating or destroying jobs:

Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them.

You could argue that construction-related jobs are temporary, but I don’t think so. There’s going to be demand for years.

I got some great feature and bug fix suggestions on Friday. Over the weekend I’ve implemented several of them (some shipped already, some need client app updates).

Against my better judgement, considering writing a very streamlined Git app for Mac. No apps are quite right for me anymore. The most important thing now is a big, readable diff view for reviewing AI changes. Commit and push in one step.

Android folks, check out the beta of @gregmorris’s Micro Social app for Micro.blog. Google is picky about requiring testers before releasing an app, so even a quick download and poking around helps.

Seems clear from people’s fancy demos and my own testing that computer use and spacial reasoning in Astra are big steps forward. It can control Acorn and use selection tools to crop out complex areas, for example, very quickly. Mind-boggling.

Had a dream last night that I went to Best Buy to buy an extra Jaz disk. They didn’t have any, but I was able to get one from Amazon that arrived to the store within minutes. Not sure what it means… Maybe I’m worried about backups.

Thinking about the OpenAI industry’s PR problem, I’m reminded of Anthropic’s ad during the Super Bowl. People said it was clever, but it reinforced the idea that AI companies are just like other big tech: tracking you and selling your data. For next year’s ads, we will see a more optimistic vision.

Relocated to work at the Laura Bush library. The view is just as beautiful as I remember when I was visiting 30 libraries in Austin. Can’t believe that was 10 years ago.

I was confused for a minute why the coffee shop / bar got so crowded as the morning went on, then noticed that everyone was wearing burnt orange shirts. Hook ’em. 🏈

Developers of popular open source projects are inundated with pull requests. What about a solution somewhere in between a user feature request and a code diff? User writes a feature request, AI checks the project code and turns the idea into a summary that highlights pros/cons based on the codebase.

A couple times over the last year, I’ve turned off fediverse posting from my blog. This is another one of those times. I may keep fediverse posting disabled until Trump is out of office, when I hope it’ll be easier to lower the temperature in online discourse.

Marco Arment blogs about his old neighbors and the divisive nature of our current political environment:

If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?

Really good post.

I’ve got access to Astra now and have no idea what to build, as if I suddenly have writer’s block. Anyone have a feature request or bug that we’ve overlooked?

I think my best essays have short titles that really undersell the scope of the blog post. No clickbait, no tl;dr headers to skim through. I hope people read them, but I’m not going to jump through hoops to make that happen.