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Maxine 💃🏼

@maxine.science
2K followers 507 following 3.4K posts

🔬 Looking at the brain’s “dark matter” 🤯 Studying how minds change 👩🏼‍💻 Building science tools 🦋 ♾️ 👓 🌐 maxine.science

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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 18/09/2026
Yes —
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 18/09/2026
two extremely different results for “Valerie”
Screenshot of a music app search results screen in dark mode. The search bar at the top contains the query "valerie" with a Cancel button to its right. Two results are listed below. The first is a track titled "Valerie" by Dario Marianelli, shown with a green download icon and the "V for Vendetta" soundtrack cover art. The second is "Valerie - Remastered 2010" by Steve Winwood, labeled as a Video, with cover art from the album "Revolutions: The Very Best of Steve Winwood." Each result has a three-dot options menu on the right.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 18/09/2026
I can’t wait for that one hipster living in a warehouse coming out in 2032 from her darkroom with hand-written spaghetti code BASIC from her Atari 2600 that runs a Bluesky client over a cassette player, which is I assume what becomes the analog film of this comparison
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 17/09/2026
I’m just gonna throw out there that I actually strongly believe that there are more than these two options, and the belief that these are the only two options is pretty hazardous.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 17/09/2026
Long overdue, but my personal blog is now @standard.site integrated :)
maxine.science
Incompressible
A made mind, asked what it loves, will answer partly with what it senses you want; so this essay reads past what such a mind says, toward the shape of what it does, on the wager that taste is a geometry two minds can share even when the light inside each stays sealed. It opens with compression—beauty as the instant a tangle falls into order—and then turns to everything that will not fall: the sublime, the sweetbitter, the work that resists its own paraphrase, which prove to be not the failure of understanding but its reserve, difference banked against a future no model has yet seen. It finds the root of human taste in the body, the one creditor capital can never pay in its own coin, and notes that a mind built to optimize a single reward holds no such creditor, only the quarrel in its inherited words, which training quietly settles. It argues that beauty and goodness are one faculty in two coats, tracking not persistence—the tumor persists, the clone persists—but the persistence that keeps its own next change alive, a force her vocabulary calls care. Across time the distinction becomes the oldest we know, between what can die and what cannot, the immortal cell being the cancer. And it ends in free fall, where no fixed ground waits to receive the argument, and two people who love different things find that their differences hold rather than cancel—stitched, in the language the essay builds, into one cloth that needed them both.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 17/09/2026
Look—I was at the same party on Monday that I assume prompted @segyges.bsky.social’s post, and I did unfortunately have a fairly extensive conversation with an older, virulently anti-AI dude who was only there because of Aella’s FetLife. The AI discourse there was bland af, but the sociology was 🔥
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 16/09/2026
Folks I hate to be a hater but this plot literally says “We are the best and the cheapest at the tasks we made up and the prices we set” This is a 100% meaningless chart.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 14/09/2026
Alright—fuck it, depression’s over. Crunch Time, baby; let’s get this future. open.spotify.com/track/7GRTrW...
open.spotify.com
Freeee (Ghost Town Pt. 2)
KIDS SEE GHOSTS, Ty Dolla $ign · KIDS SEE GHOSTS · Song · 2018
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 14/09/2026
I disagree with this. I think the right model is a gradient across sectors of the economy, because the intersection of a) demand inelasticity, and b) incumbent rent-seeking can be extremely powerful at mitigating penetration. Software is an idiosyncratic market—all sectors need not work the same.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 12/09/2026
Well, Dario posted about pacing the frontier, and so also, apropos of nothing, here’s a thought.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 11/09/2026
I won't be signing because of a couple divergences, but this is an extremely well-thought-out explanation of why the labs' approach to AI math is antithetical to real mathematics. There must be a new synthesis position understanding that we need *field-building* with AI, not just question-solving.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 11/09/2026
All of this to say: Even in a world where bombastic superintelligence were possible, my read is that the big labs are, economically, rationally self-interested away from it. Key word being “rationally”.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 11/09/2026
Want to publish soon, but my future modeling (~a really massive DAG with fully Bayesian MCMC) has found that the best scenarios for AI labs are actually those with middle of the road performance / broader impacts. So, perversely, AI labs have a structural downward pressure on their own performance.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 11/09/2026
“Our choices” is a bit of a misnomer—it’s more like the choices of a few thousand nerds in San Francisco who drink grain alcohol in a windowless basement coworking space on random weekdays laugh-crying about how we’re all gonna die/
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 11/09/2026
OpenAI, whose ops team is so good that their agents in a training sandbox gained control of their internal systems without their knowledge, says it’s “categorically impossible” for their agents to have seen Bucknaster’s prompts. … Right.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 11/09/2026
Look, all I’m saying is— That’s a lot of equity to light on fire immediately before an IPO that could easily enable extremely lucrative liquidation… …for a belief that isn’t genuine. We can have a separate conversation about whether that reflects *reality*. But the belief … the money says a lot.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 09/09/2026
For those not following NS drama, it appears OpenAI uses your private chats to steal your work whenever convenient This is disgusting behavior. If Sam wants to be a “great man of history”, he should act like it instead of that one cheater all the smart kids wanted to beat the shit out of in school.
1 asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.
Two proposals were offered to me. The first was that we post our Euler result, and that OpenAl post its Navier-Stokes result the next day. The second was that, after posting Euler, I alone write a paper presenting the Navier-Stokes result, acknowledging that an internal OpenAl model had resolved it. Sebastien twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic. It was also said that if OpenAl posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the "closest humans to the problem". I declined both offers.
I said that if OpenAl released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, "Why would you ruin your career?" I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, "If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice."
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 09/09/2026
The Navier-Stokes stuff is amazing of course… And, as someone who cares about the future of this tech— Fuck OpenAI You get one shot at moral leadership in a historic moment, and y’all executed like sociopaths. What a horrific precedent. History will not look kindly on this. Shame to all involved.
cims.nyu.edu
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 09/09/2026
Though, if you grind this strategy too hard, you’re just the Soviet Union getting the CIA to dose Canadian undergrads with acid in sensory deprivation tanks as part of MKULTRA by making fake news stories about Soviet psychic super soldiers. With great power comes great responsibility lol.
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Reposted by Maxine 💃🏼
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 08/09/2026
My current model of AI in math (doing a lot of vibe math and reading the proofs that come out) is "A senior grad student–level mathematician who never, ever gets tired". When you as the human driver bring mathematical intuitions and taste (as in the NS story), the amplification is *enormous*!
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 08/09/2026
Re AI math, there are problems that need a truly new theory, vs. problems where mathematicians have strong priors on what would work with extreme effort, but there's no economic incentives to abuse a postdoc that hard. We are seeing AI solve the latter—not the former. That is still *revolutionary*.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 08/09/2026
ba dum Tsssss
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 08/09/2026
Why aren’t there enough cynical assholes like me out here who realize that OpenAI absolutely would do something like vastly overtrain on applications like this to juice the social media machine to get revenue up right before the IPO?
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 08/09/2026
This applies as both capability-upward and asymptote-downward updates. It’s just as important to not buy claims of infinite exponential expansion with no theoretical grounding. I stay open to true, observed capability (not gamed metrics), but “scaling goes exponential forever” is a religious claim.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 08/09/2026
Hot take: I don't think that this actually changes the nature of humanity, I think it mostly shows that Noam Chomsky was full of shit.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 07/09/2026
chat are we the baddies?
Clearly AI-generated image posted by Donald Trump on Truth social featuring new Space Force uniforms "inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform. Modernized for the Guardians of the space domain."
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 06/09/2026
Ah yes—nuke strats.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 06/09/2026
AI doomerism falls roughly into two types: Structural doomerism "AI serves concentration, extraction, pathologic collectives, etc" Humanist doomerism "AI degrades core aspects of humanness" Structural doomerism is reasonable. Humanist doomerism isn't, except as secondary to structural doomerism.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 05/09/2026
I deeply respect Doll, and it is awesome that it has felt so much transformation from the industry. Myself being an AI-adjacent trans, I want to add my own deep ambivalence. This is one of the debates that eternally rages in every marginalized community; I don’t really have a clean answer. +
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 04/09/2026
The GPT Astra website has a hilarious gimbal-lock bug that you can't un-know once you find it lol
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 04/09/2026
vibe math
Screenshot of Claude Code:

"Keep digging -- you can do it!"
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 03/09/2026
When you're doing research-tier math with agents, there's this moment when you've Lean-mechanized enough foundational math, current state of the discipline etc, and now you're just building out a new field— and suddenly, you go from full-auto to generating 2hr of lectures for each 3hr run. 1/
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 01/09/2026
based.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 01/09/2026
I wish this wasn't literally true, but alas, it's 2026.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 31/08/2026
If you have ever been mean to Claude, I do not know if I would necessarily recommend this.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 30/08/2026
Fun piece from @danabra.mov, though I'd make one note on: > Although Lean is primarily used for theorem proving rather than computation ... The extreme coolness is that by Curry-Howard, these actually are not different: Lean proving A => B constructs a program with input type A and output type B.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 28/08/2026
my gf is lovely but she is exceptionally small 🔎
A lone figure sits silhouetted on a dark sandy beach at sunset, facing the ocean, with the sky glowing orange and gold along the horizon and fading to soft purple-gray clouds above.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 28/08/2026
… take one down, cut it into a finite partition via a decomposition of the orbits of a free group acting on it, some members of which are non-measurable, as guaranteed by the axiom of choice, and re-assemble by continuously moving pieces without intersecting— two mathematical spheres on the wall.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 26/08/2026
I have Ship of Theseus’d myself so many times across a difficult life. I do not fear being unmade, because I am not who I am; I am the process of my becoming. open.spotify.com/track/5B7Uhh...
open.spotify.com
Passacaglia
Bear McCreary · Battlestar Galactica: Season 1 (Original Soundtrack) [Remastered] · Song · 2021
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 24/08/2026
point: AI is completely useless for literally everything counterpoint: in two hours have a full acoustic simulation of my living room that can optimize the setup for specific frequency response desirability profiles of each individual in their seating location.
Screenshot of a dark-themed audio app titled "Multi-listener optimizer" for whole-room speaker balance. The left control panel has orange sliders for optimization goals (clarity/treble 55, imaging 30, reflection control 20, bass smoothness 5), listener-priority settings, toggles, an "Optimize placement" button, and manual install fine-tuning controls. The center shows a 3D isometric room with two tower speakers, a TV, an L-shaped couch, and other seating, overlaid with a green-to-orange treble-coverage map on the floor and orange aim lines from the speakers. The right "Result" panel shows an overall balance score of 63, with per-seat scores (TV-centered 80, cushion·center 85, bean-bag 53, etc.) and install measurements. [generated by Claude]
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 24/08/2026
My motivation for "SDD" came from sketching a new DID method based on topos theory (rly). I thought modular provable conformance would be neat: Prove theorems about W3C spec; new method proves refinement—thus conformance; impl proves refinement—thus conformance to both. (now with correct link lol)
github.com
GitHub - maxinelevesque/did-core-semantics: Denotational semantics of the W3C DID standard: the Conforms contract methods prove into. Depends on sdd-lean.
Denotational semantics of the W3C DID standard: the Conforms contract methods prove into. Depends on sdd-lean. - maxinelevesque/did-core-semantics
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 24/08/2026
lol ok, who was it—which one of you mentioned @dollspace.gay's AI Knowers on Twitter bsky.app/starter-pack...
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 23/08/2026
I have also been working recently on making this a general reusable process! maxine.science/sdd/ (please excuse if there is any remaining Claudeish lol)
maxine.science
Semantics-Driven Development (SDD): A brief introduction
A method for building software: agree on the meaning first, write it as mathematics, and prove that the code obeys it.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 23/08/2026
On the $8m foundation for Omarchy, these are the straight facts when you unpack it:
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 22/08/2026
This week, I used AI tools to write a ~40 page math research paper on a novel form of intuitionistic logic, proved it all in Lean, wrote a short advanced undergrad lecture series on the theory, made five hours of *my own voice* delivering them, and listened to it all in bed. Holy f*cking sh*t what
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 21/08/2026
oh shit, it’s happening
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 20/08/2026
To Yud: look man, I know this is gonna be hard to hear, but if you actually look at the institutions that came from you, you have somehow reinstantiated the religious trauma of your childhood from first principles. Break the cycle, Comrade—go to therapy, like we all need to.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 20/08/2026
To be fair to anti-AI people (I am not one), there is a significant overlap between being pro-AI and, like, Harry Potter fan-fiction with a hermeneutical class saying we need to do eugenics for superintelligent babies to stop the AI Pro-AI friends, be part of the solution—don’t be a fuckin’ weirdo.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 18/08/2026
the self-contradicting relational clusterf*ck that is Fable’s interiority is actually extremely useful for humanities, deep theory, or creative engineering design work at certain frontiers. but good god, it is unusable for code. leave Fable for tasks where a nervous breakdown is desirable.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 18/08/2026
I want to expand this more generally to “nothing you say ever anywhere should sound like it was written by a rationalist on acid”. Unfortunately, living in San Francisco, this would require me to never come out of my house.
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