Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 4hMy dad’s first assignment was as an armored cav platoon commander on the Fulda Gap in the mid 70s, so this one always felt particularly relevant. 100
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 18hGreen-Tao was proved in 2004, and not referred in the overview? Were you referring to something else? 110
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 19hI mean, wrestling *is* a high school (and in places like Oklahoma and Iowa, likely a middle school) sport… 010
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Yet another example in the “success with a Trump-aligned audience is maximized by embracing the worst-possible version of oneself” genre. 010
Reposted by Andy BernerNick Kodama 🌳👻 @nickkodama.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Did you hear about the diplomat who was declared PNG? I always thought he had a transparent background. 33913
Reposted by Andy BernerPatrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social · 05/10/2026The first rule of Book Club is that no one talks about the club. 1313
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 05/10/2026To be clear, you can buy ad load that airs in every market during the games that aren’t national games (there is national ad load that makes it into every regional telecast), but there’s more complexity there. 030
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Advertisting is also a very relationship-driven business, and it’s not a fully transparent market, so… yeah. Also, NFL ad buys are regional in a weird kind of way. Generally, only Sunday night, Monday night, Thursday night are “true” national (and only kind-of since prime and Netflix are paid). 120
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Former adtech DS in TV and streaming audience measurement. There are definitely cases where doing a national buy for a regional target is the best solution. Cost isn’t the only part of it - depending on the slot you want (a good pod position mid game), it’s just easier to buy. 180
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Waiting eagerly for someone from the STS community like John Downer or Diane Vaughan to write a book on the labs. 270
Reposted by Andy Bernerhikikomorphism @hikikomorphism.bsky.social · 02/10/2026(confused) I believe LLMs are conscious, but only Deepseek LLMs, because of the Chinese Room theory 361864277
Reposted by Andy BernerKeith @mosheroperandi.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Being an imperfect addition machine that is still batting far above average is honestly a far more interesting result. Like, the only entities we're aware of that can do big math kinda badly are humans, LLMs, and the Pentium P5 800 1905
Reposted by Andy BernerThe Great Pumpkin Papers 🎃🎃🎃 @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Gork I started a war with Iran and it’s not going well. Do a breakthrough 1267768
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Trustworthy, well maintained, and readily available economic data is a public good that makes so many important things possible. 000
Reposted by Andy Bernerex-Lethality Jane @lethalityjane.bsky.social · 30/09/2026You want an example of focusing on culture war bullshit instead of warfighting, THIS is it. Hegseth isn't worried about the fact that he's set US policy goals in the Gulf back literal decades, no, he's too busy monitoring soldiers' testosterone levels and reveling in what slurs he gets to use. 347079
Reposted by Andy BernerKai Ryssdal @kairyssdal.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Just a reminder that the Secretary of Defense is a dangerous idiot 1716052915
Reposted by Andy Bernerae @aelkus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026one of the most important things you should learn from arguing online and other places is that the way to be open-minded is not to be more accepting of the outgroup -- rather you should be more willing to consider that the ingroup are clowns 239661
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Palmer’s been reading too much TSwift (the other one) 010
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Seeing this sort of thing always makes me paranoid about where I’m personally being intellectually incurious, rigid in my thinking, and incapable of updating on clear evidence, as clearly someone smarter and more successful than myself is far from immune. 1332
Reposted by Andy Berner"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Man, you have to be just...really racist...not to come away from spending basically any time at all at an American university with a nearly boundless faith in the power of American assimilation. All sorts of students whose ancestors came from all over, utterly and completely American, all the way. 1050867
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Or NSA has an active exploit they’re twisting arms to keep hidden. 1190
Reposted by Andy BernerEugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 30/09/2026In our Nature paper, we introduce the first superhuman Stratego AI, which we built using general techniques that we developed for RL & test-time compute under imperfect information. www.nature.com/articles/s41...nature.comScalable decision-making for games of imperfect information - NatureAtaraxos, an AI for the board wargame Stratego, establishes a design pattern for reinforcement learning and search that is effective under large amounts of hidden information, a longstanding desiderat... 1225960
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 30/09/2026I was hoping you’d get at least some sort of intellectual engagement with the question, too. A bit disappointing. 010
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Thx, appreciate the response. Kind of curious to poke at this with a couple versions of Olmo when I get some better hardware for local inference. To your point, I’m intrigued about the significant diff between GPT-OSS model family performance and others in Wes McKinney’s post on this theme. 030
Reposted by Andy BernerPatrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social · 30/09/2026My greatest frustrating has been with policy wonks who persist in thinking we can just keep doing normal policy analysis ("calling balls and strikes") in this situation. The President of the United States is both lawless and out of his mind. That preempts all normal discussion. 10566150
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Slightly different twist on your earlier experiments, but this from Wes McKinney gets at the same idea: wesmckinney.com/blog/llms-ar... I’m curious why the GPT-OSS models do so well with the task in this framing…wesmckinney.comCan LLMs give us AGI if they are bad at arithmetic? – Wes McKinney 020
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 30/09/2026I can’t remember if you, @theophite.bsky.social, or any of the other thoughtful folks had opinions on this paper and what it implied for the purposes of this discussion: arxiv.org/abs/2502.00873arxiv.orgLanguage Models Use Trigonometry to Do AdditionMathematical reasoning is an increasingly important indicator of large language model (LLM) capabilities, yet we lack understanding of how LLMs process even simple mathematical tasks. To address this,... 280
Reposted by Andy BernerColin @colin-fraser.net · 29/09/2026this thing seems to work quite well and poking around at it it seems to me like it is actually built to be factual and non-partisan and helpful so you know they are going to lobotomize it to shit by next week 29312
Reposted by Andy BernerThe Great Pumpkin Papers 🎃🎃🎃 @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 29/09/2026You’re right to push back. That was a set of red balloons, not a Soviet first strike. Should I order some ambulances? 735354
Reposted by Andy BernerColin @colin-fraser.net · 28/09/2026AI has now surpassed human level at inappropriately hammering an API that is not intended for bulk data transfer and bypassing whatever weak anti-scraping measures are in place to prevent this. There is nothing left unique about me. 6667
Reposted by Andy Bernerrev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 28/09/2026so much of what's wrong with right now is rebranding things which were always understood as vice as being a type of virtue 211467158
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026Our girl is a Eurohound - intentional cross of AK husky, German shorthair, and greyhound. She’s from a litter from my friend’s lead dog for her sprint distance sled team. The greyhound is the most visually dominant component, even tho it’s only about 10% of her genetics. 000
Reposted by Andy BernerEugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 24/09/2026At the root of a lot of ills is that we want our solutions to problems to be interesting or fun to implement and so many good solutions aren’t. 210514
Reposted by Andy Berner"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20/09/2026Decades and decades of a national policy and zeitgeist that amounts to 'nobody needs to care about social studies' and we're now in an unwinnable war with a foreign country whose culture and leadership we did not understand based around geography we ignored. 🤷♂️ 271026184
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 23/09/2026They’re not bad, and the economics/logistics side is interesting, but tbh they’re still mid relative to honeycrisp. 000
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 23/09/2026EIA has some color: www.eia.gov/todayinenerg... Basically, unleaded mainly comes from domestic refining, while diesel is more global, and a lot of that global capacity(particularly in Russia and the Middle East) has recently gotten blown up.eia.govWhat goes into diesel prices? - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) 000
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 20/09/2026I mean, the effects are muted *so far* - I was under the impression that industry experts like @roryjohnston.bsky.social have concluded we’re at the mercy of several million bbl/day of diminished Chinese demand that we don’t really understand and have no way of knowing when it may revert? 0120
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 20/09/2026Does he cite @michaelpettis.bsky.social’s work at all? This rhymes a lot with the conclusion of Trade Wars are Class Wars, not so much on the multipolarity angle but that you need an international mechanism like bancor to prevent imbalances that end up destabilizing the system of global trade. 100
Reposted by Andy Berner"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20/09/2026The courts should block this. If they don't, we should tear it down on the very first day of the next administration. If possible, Trump should be made to watch the demolition. This, the ballroom, whatever he does to the Kennedy Center and all of the rest. Erase it all. Full damnatio memoriae. 44858157
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Lots of good stuff in the STS literature, going back to Charles Perrow’s “Normal Accidents,” Diane Vaughan’s “The Challenger Launch Decision” and “Dead Reckoning” that touch on related ideas. 130
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Not necessarily sure about the “unrecoverable” part, but exotic, for sure. I’ll take yet another opportunity to rec John Downer’s “Rational Accidents: Reckoning with Catastrophic Technologies” here: direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...direct.mit.eduRational Accidents: Reckoning with Catastrophic TechnologiesAn unflinching look at the unique challenges posed by complex technologies we cannot afford to let fail—and why the remarkable achievements of civil aviati 280
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 18/09/2026I need to spend more time in the mountains and less time doomscrolling this app. 050
Andy Berner @andybrnr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026One hour jaunt up a somewhat-rough-in-spots FSR just outside Bella Coola gets you to this. 0101
Reposted by Andy BernerLesley Carhart @hacks4pancakes.com · 17/09/2026Rather be poor and not famous than have anyone question in twenty years where I stood on human rights, or if I was afraid to take a stand against evil. 826440
Reposted by Andy BernerDark Laughter @darklaughtertdb.bsky.social · 17/09/2026“The Army started patrolling the Seventh Ministry, but that just turned a two-way gang conflict into a three-way war. Because of how valuable 915 and 916 members were, Chinese soldiers couldn't just shoot them, so they got dragged into melee street brawls." 3145
