Best of Twitter week of November 25-December 1, 2024

I had an idea in college which I've long thought could be, in many ways, the ultimate BCI technology. What if instead of using electrodes, we used biological neurons embedded in electronics to communicate with the brain?

Enter biohybrid neural interfaces: science.xyz/news/biohybrid…

— Max Hodak (@maxhodak_)
7:48 PM • Nov 23, 2024

"We have learned that many things are lost if one looks at averages, but are revealed when one studies single events"

A lot of Bayes-obsessed ppl I know would be angered by this but it's from a biologist who successfully cured his own daughters rare cancer in a relative rush

— Ruth Hook (@ruth_hook_)
3:25 AM • Jun 12, 2024

Janan Ganesh, FT: "Most people get through their lives without reflecting on their interior state very much. This behaviour is not just compatible with a functional life, but with a successful and happy one."
I've had these conversations with a navel-gazer or two.

— Miloš Miljković (@miljko)
3:59 PM • Nov 30, 2024

sitting next to a software engineer at Apple on my flight

he doesn’t know what cursor, bolt, claude or perplexity are

it’s still early, X is a bubble

— quinn (@quinnslcm)
10:35 PM • Nov 27, 2024

I spent 12 years at Amazon in leadership, and I spent 12 years repeatedly fighting off efforts to measure (and improve) our engineer's efficiency.

Below is my general view.

— Dave Anderson (@scarletinked)
2:24 PM • Nov 25, 2024

If tech workers are doing measurable work, they're doing easy work. They're doing repetitious work. This work isn't the most valuable work, and you should minimize it when possible.

— Dave Anderson (@scarletinked)
2:24 PM • Nov 25, 2024

This is exactly what "memorization" means, to be clear. They memorize procedures (in the form of vector functions) that match their training data, and reapply those procedures at test time. And these procedures tend to generalize poorly, precisely due to being vector functions.… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— François Chollet (@fchollet)
1:57 PM • Nov 24, 2024

People really overestimate the utility of "simple intuitions" of dubious applicability.
The intuition against open sourcing AI: "competition with smarter species"
The intuition for communism: "cooperation is more efficient than wasting resources on zero sum competition"
So true!

— Teortaxes▶️ (@teortaxesTex)
11:42 PM • Aug 2, 2024

What I like about this quote is not just how wrong they were on the timescale - but how wrong they were on the method.

They assumed that new developments would come from a top-down theoretical approach led by respectable experts, spending years doing research before attempting… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— Peter Hague (@peterrhague)
7:21 PM • Sep 12, 2024

Researchers are finding alarming patterns associated with the legalization of sports betting:
- "depletes households’ savings"
- "increases the risk that a household goes bankrupt by 25-30%"
- "leads to a roughly 9% increase in intimate-partner violence"

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins)
6:29 PM • Sep 23, 2024

> find awesome thread on microprocessors
> "wow so cool so informative i follow now"
> 3 hours later my feed is overrun by insect furry porn retweets

it's every damn time with you fucking  freak genius perverts

— skooks (@skooookum)
4:59 PM • Nov 26, 2024