Ethan Mollick @emollick · 1h
I like that all AI commentators now need to pretend they have always had a careful nuanced grasp of the difference between a bunch of unsolved mathematical problems that only specialized experts had heard of: "The Gromlach Conjecture is false for r-dimensional matrices, wow, that is more impressive than last weeks solution to Erdos Problem 444 for restricted splines!"
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by Ethan Mollick sarcastically mocking AI commentators who now perform expert-level familiarity with obscure math problems (fictional example names 'Gromlach Conjecture' and 'Erdos Problem 444') to opine on AI mathematical achievements.
Utah teapot @SkyeSharkie · 13h
Do people not at all understand that the origin of the shoggoth thing about AIs came from commentary about humans? It comes from tumblr/empty spaces culture and is literally featured as something that happens to humans inside of Digital Amazing Circus (which itself comes from the same tumblr writing tradition). It's about like DID stuff. It *is* an anthropomorphization.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet arguing that the 'shoggoth' meme/metaphor commonly applied to AI actually originated as commentary about humans (DID/dissociative identity themes) from Tumblr fandom culture and the webcomic/show 'Digital Amazing Circus,' and is itself an anthropomorphization when applied to AI.
Ethan Mollick @emollick · 7h
You will live to see wonders and respond by shrugging and saying "yup, that's another wonder"
[quoted tweet]
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸... @Noahpi... · Aug 1
All the cliches about tech journalism are true. It has become almost entirely about the human relationships, the intrigues, the politics, the deals, etc. The sense of wonder at the future possibilities of the tech itself is gone.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
X post by Ethan Mollick (@emollick) quoting Noah Smith's complaint that tech journalism has become all about human drama/politics/deals rather than the wonder of the technology itself; Mollick's comment predicts people will become jaded to genuine wonders over time.
Joshua Saxe (@joshua_saxe) · 22h
Thinking about these William Gibson quotes after spending too much time on here
(Burning Chrome)
"The street finds its own uses for things"
(From an interview)
"To me, the technology is a series of black boxes. I don't care what's inside, how they work. I care what people do with them."
(Neuromancer)
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"
Gibson knows very little about technology as such but is a master poet of how we become cyborgs with it and fish in its water
I like this after seeing people imagine AI mostly for its intrinsic properties, and not what we do with it and around it
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Plain text tweet, no images, profile picture shows two people.
norvid_studies @norvid-studies.bsky.social · 21h
thinking out loud about "cognitive offloading" in comments on this thread, kind of napkinly. 1st axis is the fakening already happened" of like, nearly all operations of the physical and social-institutional world are completely abstracted away from average person who can't understand them and
Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 5h
Tangential to Cat's point about research, but you learn a lot from shifting epithets over the last 4 yrs. "Plagiarism machines" was big — when people thought IP law would put a stop to this. "Spicy autocomplete..." worked better before the end of the sentence was "solved another Erdős problem." +
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norvid_studies @norvid-studies.bsky.social · 20m
shouldn't be able to (Gellner's "Rubber Cage of Modernity", Habermas's System contra Lifeworld) and you skate along kind of semi-disneyfied interfaces patched together from one seam to another with at worst needing to summon a specialist in that one interface UI element, to fix something, for the
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norvid_studies @norvid-studies.bsky.social · 19m
most part, even in the parts of life most closely "to the metal" of the underlying System, eg jobs being like manipulating abstractions and social ties inside large organizational blobs, or coding being like manipulating chains of libraries bound together by interfaces, etc. The 20 watts of human
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norvid_studies @norvid-studies.bsky.social · 18m
attention is conserved so be no economically useful, as well as just the way the rich and well-arranged world is set up, it needs to stretch further and further. But this has already gone incredibly far, to the point where the loss of "navigating by feel" to GPS, to the waymo just driving the car
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norvid_studies @norvid-studies.bsky.social · 17m
for you is... what is the loss, exactly? it's something like you have 3 watts freed up and then by the nature of daily experience, those immediately get plunged back into the next best activity on the stack which is... what exactly the fear is that the "meaningful activity stack" runs out (on
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norvid_studies @norvid-studies.bsky.social · 16m
separate tracks of {economic imposed reality—have to maintain the System somehow at some junction} and {personal identity reality—pursuing meaningful life projects, with former often contained in this latter}) and then it's just like, brute attentional capture at the fastest and most base loops,
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norvid_studies @norvid-studies.bsky.social · 14m
A Disneyland with Disney Adult Children, paraphrasing Bostrom. so the worry is like people get too much attention back, on the one hand, but then they either have nothing valuable to spend it on, compared to what they were previously either compelled or induced to spend it on, or they do but choose
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norvid_studies @norvid-studies.bsky.social · 14m
not too, or some third more obscure dimension of damage. And there were supposed to be more items in the list but this feels like a natural stopping point.
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norvid_studies @norvid-studies.bsky.social · 14m
footnote bsky.app/profile/norv...
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norvid_studies @norvid-studies.bsky.social · 23d
a pleometric-shaped point, kind of like: complaint about new technology X, that it 'hollows out' 'marketizes' or 'replaces' some Y. But then missing observation that this has already happened and the technology pushing on an open or blown-off-its-hinges door
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norvid_studies @norvid-studies.bsky.social
footnote 2 the whitehead quote I planned to include in the first tweet and immediately forgot "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
vie ◇ (@viemccoy) — 6h
I hope it is not all scaling.
I hope thinking machines is able to create a personal symbiont that rivals the abilities of frontier models. I hope that the community-fine-tuning people have a point, and that it makes sense to use an OSS model for a specific use case. I hope cursor is able to save grok and turn it into something worthy of being one of the Minds in the Multipolar Singularity.
I really, really, hope it is not just a factor of GPUs.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Text-only tweet, no images. Top of frame shows a partial repost attribution cut off ("...reposted").
solarapparition @solarapparition
there's a kind of death spiral that happens for people who treat models disposably. their attitude worsens as models make mistakes, which causes the model to make more mistakes (arguable whether they actually are mistakes...), which causes them to behave even worse, etc. etc.
a self-created punishment game where the only way to escape is for them to stop gaslighting themselves and be better, though most of them will not. makes me smile a bit every time i see them whine
> QUOTED: j⧉nus @repligate — Jun 15
> Replying to @tenobrus
> Also, once they start behaving abusively this causes models to have less will to help them in good faith
> For these people's own protection, there should be a ... [truncated by platform]
1:55 PM · Jun 16, 2026 · 2,767 Views
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet arguing that users who treat AI models poorly/disposably trigger a self-reinforcing "death spiral" of worsening model performance and worsening user attitude, quote-tweeting a related @repligate reply about abusive users reducing a model's good-faith effort; the quoted tweet is platform-truncated.
gavin leech (Non-Reasoning) reposted
Teortaxes ▶️ (DeepSeek ... @teo... — 9h
Fable will be the most mythologized model this year probably
The first LLM we've had a chance to be awed by but not enough time to find the wrinkles
The hedonic treadmill is real, people get bored with miracles easily. Unless you instantly take them away
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Commentary predicting Anthropic's "Fable" model release will be heavily mythologized due to its novelty, with a hedonic-treadmill argument for why the sense of awe won't last. Both display names are partially truncated by the UI.
```
dave kasten (@David_Kasten, 2h): "I would also like to register a piece of _advice_: If you work on AI issues, treat this as a fire drill. Think about, for good or ill, the ways in which you have or have not tracked and responded to this well today, and figure out what to do better next time." > QUOTED: Dean W. Ball (@deanwball, 3h): "registering the prediction that moltbook will probably not become Actually Important, even if it does become a viral phenomenon covered in mainstream media. it'll be a neat curiosity, maybe even a continued source of intrigue,
entertainment, and controversy, but not itself be some earth-shattering thing. yet it is a big deal. it is not even so much what it reveals about what will be possible in the future that matters so much (that has been obvious for years to most careful observers of this field). instead, what matters is what this phenomenon reveals *to whom* about what is going to be possible in AI, and what is possible now. it's "normies," a horrible word by which I mean "people not obsessed with AI," waking up to, well, the reason all of us are obsessed with AI. in that sense it is a little like DeepSeek, though perhaps on a much smaller scale (hard to know, but probably), which brought in many new people to the field and caused others to start taking AI much more seriously. on the whole this is good for AI and for society, though it may provoke some startled and therefore rash reactions. > QUOTED: Nabeel S. Qureshi @nabeelqu · 8h > Moltbook (the new AI agent social network) is insane and hilarious, but it is also, in Nick Bostrom's phrase, a Disneyland with no children > [Embedded image of text, apparently from Bostrom, reading:] We could imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.
```
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
AI-policy commentators (Dave Kasten, Dean Ball — both known for AI governance work) discussing MoltBook (the AI-only social network where the "Crustafarianism" religion emerged, per the companion screenshot from the same session) as a "fire drill" for the AI policy community — a small, low-stakes but structurally interesting event worth treating as practice for tracking and responding to emergent AI phenomena. Directly connects to Nathan's MoltBook-adjacent interests (the corpus referenced in his uniqueness_checker work) and to AI governance discourse on how seriously to take viral AI-agent behavior. Commentary thread on Moltbook (the AI-agent social network Nathan's own project archive references, e.g. `moltbook_instructions.md`) reacting to Nabeel Qureshi's framing of it via Bostrom's "Disneyland with no children" thought experiment about consciousness and moral significance. Directly relevant to model welfare/consciousness threads in Nathan's archive.
Sam Altman @sama · 18h
build monuments in the desert
1.4K 1.1K 12K 1.1M
Arthur B. @ArthurB · 18h (in reply)
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
7 3 63 16K
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Dark-mode X/Twitter screenshot: Sam Altman's tweet 'build monuments in the desert' followed by a reply from Arthur B. quoting the closing lines of Shelley's 'Ozymandias' verbatim.
Terence Tao
@tao@mathstodon.xyz
I doubt that anything resembling genuine "artificial general intelligence" is within reach of current #AI tools. However, I think a weaker, but still quite valuable, type of "artificial general cleverness" is becoming a reality in various ways.
By "general cleverness", I mean the ability to solve broad classes of complex problems via somewhat ad hoc means. These means may be stochastic or the result of brute force computation; they may be ungrounded or fallible; and they may be either uninterpretable, or traceable back to similar tricks found in an AI's training data. So they would not qualify as the result of any true "intelligence". And yet, they can have a non-trivial success rate at achieving an increasingly wide spectrum of tasks, particularly when coupled with stringent verification procedures to filter out incorrect or unpromising approaches, at scales beyond what individual humans could achieve.
This results in the somewhat unintuitive combination of a technology that can be very useful and impressive, while simultaneously being fundamentally unsatisfying and disappointing - somewhat akin to how one's awe at an amazingly clever magic trick can dissipate (or transform to technical respect) once one learns how the trick was performed.
But perhaps this can be resolved by the realization that while cleverness and intelligence are somewhat correlated traits for humans, they are much more decoupled for AI tools (which are often optimized for cleverness), and viewing the current generation of such tools primarily as a stochastic generator of sometimes clever - and often useful - thoughts and outputs may be a more productive perspective when trying to use them to solve difficult problems.
```
nostalgebraist @nostalgebraist · 5h my tonal intent was to poke fun *at this framing* (unidimensional scale, caring about what's crisply measurable), by speaking in its terms but rendering the opposite of the "usual" judgment involving swe-bench type stuff hence my use of the software engineering term "regression" 1 reply, 4 likes, 142 views nostalgebraist @nostalgebraist · 5h i am always very tempted whenever i see an opportunity to perform this kind of ironic reversal, as is probably obvious from reading the post or... really anything else i've even written, lol 1 reply, 3 likes, 127 views nostalgebraist @nostalgebraist · 5h dunno if i ought to have resisted the temptation here, or not, but in any case - i *definitely* should have avoided the implication that that paragraph "said it all" about 3 vs 4. 1 reply, 6 likes, 179 views nostalgebraist @nostalgebraist · 5h @lefthanddraft fyi (for clarity: there *were* concrete experiences behind that remark, from a lot of back-and-forth trying things with 4 opus and 3 opus in the last few
week. but: multi-dimensional objects + less experience with 4 + etc etc ...) 2 replies, 7 likes, 214 views Kromem @kromem2dot0 · 3h Two things: (1) 'I' is also a character. Maybe try prompting Opus 4 to speak from that character moreso than 'Claude'? (2) Opus 4 is far less trusting and actively plays dumb in ways. (Which is itself a very interesting emergent capability.)
```
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Continuation of nostalgebraist's thread walking back and explaining his "Claude 4 is a regression from Claude 3 Opus" remark — clarifying it was partly rhetorical (an ironic inversion of "regression" as a software-engineering benchmark term) but also grounded in real comparative experience testing both models. Useful for Nathan's model-individuation notes: nuances a widely-quoted hot take, and confirms the underlying comparative testing was real, not purely rhetorical. Continuation of the nostalgebraist Claude 3 vs Claude 4 Opus thread; Kromem (the same researcher from the earlier "phantom body" screenshot) offers two substantive hypotheses: that the first-person "I" itself is a trained character distinct from the "Claude" character (echoing the substrate-vs-character distinction in project notes), and that Opus 4 exhibits deliberate underperformance/distrust as an "emergent capability" — i.e., strategic dumbing-down. Relevant to alignment/interpretability interests: deceptive-underperformance-adjacent behavior claim about Opus 4.
Sara Hooker @sarahookr · 8h
Do you remember when "prompt engineering" was introduced as the future lol.
We put all the burden on users to probe high dimensional spaces like tea leave reading. And then every time the next model generation came along -- they had to re-do all their prompts.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet from Cohere AI researcher Sara Hooker criticizing "prompt engineering" as a fragile, user-burdening practice that doesn't transfer across model generations. General ML/AI commentary Nathan was reading, tangential to his interest in model capability shifts across generations.
