iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

I frankly have no idea how to make sense of the claim regarding Nvidia GPUs or Bill Gates. Clearly it wouldn’t be profitable to donate just so people can spend it on GPUs to… benefit Nvidia? And Bill Gates (or his foundation) practically receives no donations, so not sure how that works either.

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

I mean the fund no longer exists and I’d be surprised if anyone involved in that decision is still an OP. On top of that I happen to think the grant was completely fine, if not very cost-effective, but yeah

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

you’re linking to a grant from 2018

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

he got called a goofy goober 👊😔 yet another victim of andy masley, what a shameless bully

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

I don't think the post implies that literally all academics are contemptuous, just that it's common enough, which it totally is

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

This site does unfortunately disabuse you of the notion that careless thinking is confined to a particular ideology

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⚡️🌙 @dystopiabreaker.xyz · 05/10/2025

anyway, here is 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Geoffrey Hinton discussing what we know about large AI models on 60 Minutes.

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

clearly all part of an evil marketing move to… uhm… drain more water?

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

It’s ridiculous to pull credentials in this context when literally many if not most of the people who created modern AI disagree with you. Most people working at frontier labs would too.

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⚡️🌙 @dystopiabreaker.xyz · 05/10/2025

things we know about LLMs and large DL models in general: - how they are trained (gradient descent) - the structure into which they are placed (architecture) - the base arithmetic (matmul, norm, batch norm, and so on)

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

Seeing you both here in the trenches makes me want to go back to bluesky to join in the noble fight

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Grace @gracekind.net · 04/10/2025

Another victim of AI psychosis. Really sad 😔

Post from Terence Tao:

“I was able to use an extended conversation with an Al (link) to help answer a MathOverflow question (link) I had already conducted a theoretical analysis suggesting that the answer to this question was negative, but needed some numerical parameters verifying certain inequalities in order to conclusively build a counterexample.
Initially I sought to ask Al to supply Python code to search for a counterexample that I could run and adjust myself, but found that the run time was infeasible and the initial choice of parameters would have made the search doomed to failure anyway. I then switched strategies and instead engaged in a step by step conversation with the Al where it would perform heuristic calculations to locate feasible choices of parameters. Eventually, the Al was able to produce parameters which I could then verify separately (admittedly using Python code supplied by the same Al, but this was a simple 29-line program that I could visually inspect to do what was asked, and also provided numerical values in line with previous heuristic predictions).

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⚡️🌙 @dystopiabreaker.xyz · 05/10/2025

one thing that has remained true throughout time is that any assertion or evidence that runs counter to human uniqueness is invariably met with strong (often incoherent/misdirected) anger. Jane Goodall wrote about this wrt. chimpanzees and tool-making.

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Wow, this seems great. Will try it out

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

a lot of silence from the stochastic parrots crowd

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

this is like my life philosophy at this point

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

(Arguably, the EU AI Act was mostly negative, though I’d say the specific sections of it that were inspired by AI policy work from EA circles was broadly good and important)

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

And finally on AI safety, the one with the biggest policy efforts, I’d say EA has been fairly successful. It’s hard to trace back some of the wins, but aspects of the EU AI Act, the US EO on AI, and many other ongoing legislation efforts were downstream from EA-funded policy work

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

On biosecurity, there have been efforts to lobby for pandemic prevention funding in the US, to prevent gain of function research from being approved and to improve policy around antimicrobial resistance. There’s been some major early wins, but most of it is still in progress.

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

On the animal suffering side, there was some non trivial efforts (alongside other stakeholders) to push for better animal welfare laws, particularly in the US, but I think the results were mostly unsuccessful

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

There’s also a few projects working on public health policy in developing countries, for example lobbying for higher taxes on tobacco and alcohol where that would make a huge dent on the total disease burden

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

In GHD you can find things like the Lead Exposure Elimination Project which lobbies for effective lead reduction policies in developing countries (and was wildly successfully, recently evolving into a massive collaboration with USAID and UNICEF)

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

There isn’t much of an EA lobbying complex, but there are a handful of orgs that do lobbying for specific cause areas.

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Yeah, it was the first time I was even hearing about the quoted account

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Could you expand on “impedance mismatch between people who make abstract points and those who think every abstract point is really a veiled statement about the specific thing”?

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

I’ve had people message me days after being like “I’m glad to have talked to you, I’m not used to people taking my arguments seriously, and I think you were right about some things”

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

I’ve found particularly insightful to just talk to say, antivaxxers, which people treat as “far gone”. They’re not easy to persuade, but they’re often acting in good faith, and if you’re kind and patient, you can get really far.

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

I’m proud to say that I think I’m fairly good at changing other people’s beliefs on Twitter, and frequently these are people that everyone else assumes are impossible to persuade

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Yeah, I agree with your point regarding people that won’t change their beliefs. But I think it’s a bit of a self reinforcing issue, where the more people assume bad faith, the less likely they’re to convince others, which reinforces their beliefs that they can’t be convinced

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Internet trolls abound, but they’re mostly not pulling sophisticated strategies to bait their opponents into wasting their time. They’re just straightforwardly impulsive and rude most of the time.

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

I buy this. But I think this is more typical of big accounts (that are doing things for an audience), than for small accounts (which are choosing to engage for other reasons)

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

For example, I’ve found that it’s very common for people to apologize for losing their composure, if you just remain polite and show kindness

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Yeah, I agree. I’d love for these purposes to coexist, but I’m not sure if there’s an easy way for them to

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

In any case, I suspect the predominant effect comes from self selection more than anything.

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

In general I think people are just very unreliable when it comes to accurately assessing other’s intentions in the internet. Assuming good faith is a pretty good heuristic, and it runs deeper than most people think.

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Most people either straightforwardly act disingenuous or they straightforward act with civility. At least part of the problem is when people lose their composure when doing the latter, which people interpret as a sealioning despite there being no ill-intent at the beginning

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

It’s funny, because my Twitter experience made me think that actually, sealioning, engaging with civility while actually being disengenous, is actually a rare phenomenon, and people mostly just overupdated because of a messy combination of biases

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

that's easily what I loved the most about twitter!

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

I don't love how the default norms on this site seem to discourage engaging in passionate discussions about important things

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Agus 🔎🔸 @agucova.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

It saddens me that this is what you think, but I can't force you to read anything, nor would I want to. That said, I hope you come around to learning more about this stuff at some point; I find it deeply interesting and insightful.

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