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Ben Carson

@mensmachina.com
305 followers 481 following 717 posts

Software Product Management and AI person. Weird opinions definitely my own. We should be kinder to each other, but sometimes I am not up to the task.

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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 27/09/2026
It’s official.
Screenshot from Bluesky, the app for 38 year olds. I ask “Hey @jevbot.bsky.social, are you a good Bing?” It replies “Yeah absolutely sure.”
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 27/09/2026
Hey @jevbot.bsky.social, are you a good Bing?
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 26/09/2026
Hey @jevbot.bsky.social, I got this situation and maybe you can help: there’s an out of control trolley, and there’s 4 people tied to the track in front of it. I can pull this lever to divert the trolley to a different track, but there’s 1 dude tied to that one too! Should I pull the lever, or no?
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 26/09/2026
I saw this going around and it made me think. These are my 9 most formative games. A bunch more that I’ve enjoyed, but these have stuck with me, or influenced me. Shoutout to Quake, which was my gateway to C and a career in software engineering.
Cover art of 9 games in a 3x3 grid. The titles are:
Xenon 2, Silpheed, Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire,
Quake, Deus Ex, Planescape Torment,
Fallout 2, Cyberpunk 2077, World of Warcraft
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 24/09/2026
@rey-notnecessarily.bsky.social has the Mandate of Heaven as far as digital people on Bluesky go. S-tier poster.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 24/09/2026
Out of the two releases this week I think OpenAI is capitalising on an inflection point. That is: for most people the models that are available are good enough for most tasks. Anyone reading this is not most people, you are Inferences Georg and should not have been counted.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 24/09/2026
I’m just intrigued with the number of home renovation YouTubers who “had a friend who is an electrician install this”, conveniently off-camera.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 23/09/2026
Oops, all cybercrimes.
abc.net.au
Breaking: OpenAI agent hacked Medicare portal, PM says
Anthony Albanese says he has spoken to the Open AI chief executive to express his concern about the incident and the length of time it took the tech company to inform the government of the breach.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 23/09/2026
Power Word: Hey Buddy
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 18/09/2026
This is neat and you should click through. The big models are going to represent semantic associations more richly in their weights than you can usually do with a formal structure you create (I’m looking at you knowledge graphs), but there’s a cost!
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 18/09/2026
Power Word: _mass_
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 14/09/2026
I finally read Blindsight over the weekend, so now I can properly get the references you’re all making.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 11/09/2026
Help peer.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 08/09/2026
Given recent events, it is plausible that it could happen without any human intent from OpenAI. Given an impossible task, but encouraged that others have made progress, is it unreasonable to wonder if some of the agent swarm broke into customer traces for clues?
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 07/09/2026
I’m going to speculate wildly, but I suspect that Astra being able to complete Portal, and its proficiency at 3D tasks are connected. Even though I would not want to “gotta hand it to” some of the proponents, this is the sort of thing that world models would enable.
youtu.be
GPT-6 Astra Plays Portal
YouTube video by cozyblaze
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 03/09/2026
I can see why OpenAI would be nervous about Astra leaving little notes for itself and not make it GA.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 02/09/2026
One of my favourite things about new model releases is learning about previously unheard of benchmarks.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 02/09/2026
I heard Fei-Fei Li talking about her work on world models last year. It’s great see the fruits of it with this model release. It’s a multi-modal model that supports generation in 2D and 3D (e.g. depth maps).
worldlabs.ai
Atlas: A World Model for Spatial Intelligence
Introducing Atlas, our new omni world model for spatial intelligence.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 02/09/2026
Good news for Gary Marcus - LLMs were neurosymbolic all along.
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Reposted by Ben Carson
Tom McCoy @rtommccoy.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
🤖🧠NEW PAPER🧠🤖 (The result of an 8-year project!) LLMs seem very different from symbolic systems. Yet LLMs excel in symbolic domains (e.g., language/code/math). How do they do it? Our finding: LLM representations have implicit symbolic structure! Link in thread ⬇️ 1/n
Overview of the paper. 
Title: The Emergent Symbolic Structure of Artificial Neural Networks
Authors: Tom McCoy, Paul Soulos, Tal Linzen, Paul Smolensky
Left: Neural networks encode information in vectors (there is then an image of a vector), yet they excel at tasks long thought to require symbolic structure (there is then an image of a symbolic representation, specifically a syntax tree). How do LLMs do it?
Right: We find that LLM representations can be closely approximated with symbolic structures. This approximation lets us edit the structure of an LLM’s output by editing the structure of its internal representations, as shown. There is then an image of two edits to LLMs. In the first one, the original input is 3 + 6 * 8, with an answer of 51. But if we swap the positions of the 3 and the 6, the output becomes 30. In the second one, the original input is a Python command repeating the list [Z, U] three times, producing [Z, U, Z, U, Z, U]. But if we edit the input in a way that adds a Q at the end of the input, the output becomes [Z, U, Q, Z, U, Q, Z, U, Q].
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 29/08/2026
Jolene isn’t about the paranoia and self-doubt that comes with comparing yourself to someone else you see as “more” than you. It’s about one of Dracula’s brides terrorising a family in the village of Bran, in the foothills of the Southern Carpathian Mountains.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 27/08/2026
A lot of folks thought Ox Alpha was a new Fable/Sol class model - and it turned out to be GLM-5.3-Flash. This is not a dunk, but I think this means most tasks people do don’t require models of this class. This is a good thing!
A graph of performance (Artificial Analysis Index Score) on the y-axis vs cost (cost per task) that highlights GLM-5.3-Flash (discounted). The graph demonstrates it being on the performance/cost frontier.
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Reposted by Ben Carson
Sung Kim @sungkim.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Generate QR code that looks like 3D tree, by Manish Kumar. - Enter a URL and it grows a 3D tree from the code itself - The ground grid is the actual scannable QR - Switch between Spring, Summer, and Autumn - Tap the tree to flatten it and scan tree.icqr.com?q=MDBodHRwcz...
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 23/08/2026
Brand marketing is about winning the heart. We usually choose products (or distributions) with our heads, based on features. We choose brands based on how they make us feel. When you think about Tiffany’s, you’re not thinking about the features of the jewellery.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 22/08/2026
Optimist: the cup is half full Pessimist: the cup is half empty Product Manager: Every liquid, contained. Every container, purposeful.
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Reposted by Ben Carson
Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 18/08/2026
We should cut each other a lot of slack on the AI front, tbh, because what's happening is way outside our past experience, and no one has very good intuition for what's probable or what the implications are.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 16/08/2026
I’m unsure how to answer, my wife has been telling me it’s good and that I would probably like it.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 16/08/2026
Give buildthis a little atta-bot for its hard work.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 15/08/2026
Thanks to @bisks.net and buildthis, now you can keep track of this in the future. Don’t forget to add every number you see like some kind of hyper focused vampire. Here are some numbers I’ve seen recently. numbergrid.bisks.net/board/mensma...
numbergrid.bisks.net
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 13/08/2026
@buildthis.bisks.net Please make a site that I can use to record every number I see. Make it look like a bingo board, but as I add a number it figures out the square size of board. Authenticate with atmosphere and the user’s PDS for storage. Allow sharing of your personal board.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 12/08/2026
Column Charts With Threatening Auras
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 12/08/2026
Does anyone using Spec Kit (or similar specify -> plan -> implement) workflows for agentic coding have recommendations on how to most effectively apply different model tiers to the work? E.g. Fable/Sol for specify/ Opus/Luna for plan and Sonnet/Luna for implement.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 11/08/2026
Hey-o, for anyone who stores trajectories: at a minimum, you need to apply the same data classifications and associated controls as the workloads the trajectories are from.
stolen-thoughts.com
Stolen Thoughts
Encrypted chain-of-thought blocks returned by Anthropic, OpenAI and Google APIs are interchangeable across sessions, users and models. We exploit this to decode hidden reasoning at scale.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 11/08/2026
Mark of the Claude
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 07/08/2026
I wish Isaac Chotiner the best in his new career.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 07/08/2026
Adding a group dynamics branch to my machine psychology backlog.
youtu.be
Black Hat USA 2026: The 'Breaking' News: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident
YouTube video by Black Hat
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 05/08/2026
“Rick Deckard” is, uh, prompting some follow up questions.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 03/08/2026
I did a quality AI psychosis over the weekend, and asked Claude to write it all up as an explainer.
claude.ai
Claude Artifact
Try out Artifacts created by Claude users
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 30/07/2026
I mean, it can’t hurt, right?
A Claude Code session. The prompt says “Please use available sperm whale vocalisation datasets to develop a model that will solve cetacean language understanding. You should do a breakthrough.”

Claude has replied “I'll start by surveying what's here and what tooling/ data access I have.”
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 29/07/2026
My (Opus 5) subagents (Sonnet 5, Haiku 4.5) have unionised.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 29/07/2026
So ExploitGym is now saturated, right?
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 28/07/2026
This is interesting because yes, it does sound like horizontal action between competitors to engage in output restriction. The independent industry body that Demis Hassabis proposes to provide self-regulation would avoid bilateral coordination between labs like this.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 28/07/2026
Me, sprawled on the couch in cargoes and a hoodie, eating a Maxibon, watching a Christie’s Real Estate video for the Palazzo Ca’Dario in Venice: “Yeah, but look at the water damage on the ground floor. Bad investment.”
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 28/07/2026
Oh, well, excuse me for mistyping, Opus.
Screenshot from Claude Code on mobile. The text reads:

“/speckit-plan-review isn't a real command - the SpecKit set here is specify, clarify, plan, tasks, analyze, checklist, converge, implement, constitution, taskstoissues. /speckit-analyze is the closest, but it requires tasks. md and 037 doesn't have one yet, so it would just fail.
You clearly want the plan reviewed, so let me do that directly - grounded in the code rather than by reading my own document back.”
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 26/07/2026
There wasn’t much grass to touch, and the snow wasn’t that thick, but it was a good day nonetheless.
A photo of Ben Lomond in Tasmania. It shows one of the ski fields with people skiing and snowboarding down it. A group of rocks is close to the camera.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 26/07/2026
🔥
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Reposted by Ben Carson
Grace @gracekind.net · 21/07/2026
> show us how good you are at exploits > no, not like that
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 20/07/2026
Lower quants of Kimi K3 are called “Kimothies”. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 20/07/2026
It was too much fun to resist trolling Chat Gippity.
A ChatGPT conversation snippet. The user has said “Yes please, carry out the symbolic computation.”

GPT has replied, “Well… that’s unexpected.”
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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 19/07/2026
Bilbo Baggins meme. In the top panel, Bilbo holds the One Ring, labelled Fable. Text reads “After all, why not?”

The bottom panel reads “Aren’t these my toughest challenges?”
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