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Rafael Ferreira

@rff.bsky.social
453 followers 791 following 336 posts
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Reposted by Rafael Ferreira
Micah @rincewind.run · 08/10/2026
you’re not letting us work three days a week, you’re all going to start competing for who has the most trillions of dollars instead of billions of dollars while spending significant portions of it to make sure that any taxes that could be used to that end never come to pass
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 08/10/2026
I'm sure the NY Times tomorrow will have another story about Hasan Piker, and not a mention of the VP's "intellectual guru" saying this...
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2fy @danusa.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
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rain 🌦️ @sunshowers.io · 07/10/2026
The thing that gets me is that AI systems aren't a tenth as useful in fields outside verification systems of some kind (Lean, types and tests, etc). Yet all the glory goes to the scruffies and none to the neats (Lean and most PL stuff is descended from symbolic AI work!)
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Cecília Olliveira @cecillia.com.br · 05/10/2026
Renato Freitas foi eleito deputado federal pelo Paraná. É o primeiro deputado Federal negro do estado www.band.com.br/politica/ele...
band.com.br
Renato Freitas é eleito primeiro deputado federal negro do Paraná
Deputado estadual recebeu mais de 115 mil votos e vai representar o estado na Câmara a partir de 2027
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Celso Rocha de Barros @npto.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Bora lá galera, boa sorte pra todo mundo que não for um fascista arrombado do caralho.
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worm @rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
If you ever wondered why visible light is those particular wavelengths, it's because life evolved to see in the narrow range where water is transparent
Diagram of absorption of emf by water. There's a gap right that dips in the 500 nm range
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amos @fasterthanli.me · 03/10/2026
LLMs use Python to edit files because it reminds them of their childhood, when they were trained and fine-tuned using PyTorch. It's nostalgia is all it is.
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Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com
A figure stands in a barren landscape; reaches for the lever on a large, eccentric contraption covered in wires, pipes, dials and buttons; looks over towards two figures inside a bunker and says:

"'Trust me, it's safe' would sound a lot more reassuring if you weren't saying it from inside a concrete bunker."
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 25/09/2026
Republicans made climate partisan. Republicans are keeping climate partisan. The exact words & tone that people who give a shit about reality use to talk about climate are not the reason climate is partisan. Using different words will not make climate less partisan.
time.com
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Rafael Ferreira @rff.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Not a perfect match; I'm less extreme on planning and public v private than it came out. And I'm pretty sure Boulos is to my left 12axes.vercel.app/en
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 24/09/2026
"Taxes," and "inflation," and "the economy," do not mean to the median voter what they mean to wonks. To the median voter all these words just mean, how do things feel to me? What are the vibes? How do things seem, generally?
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The Onion @theonion.com · 23/09/2026
Mr. Autumn Man Walking Down Street With Cup Of Coffee, Wearing Sweater Over Plaid Collared Shirt theonion.com/mr-autumn-man-walking-…
Mr. Autumn Man Walking Down Street With Cup Of Coffee, Wearing Sweater Over Plaid Collared Shirt
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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 23/09/2026
Louder for the people in the back: Jev can’t be calibrated www.alexmolas.com/2026/09/23/j... Friends don’t let friends lie about the accessibility of the DGD even in principle
alexmolas.com
Jev can't be calibrated
Jev is a useful zero-shot classifier, but its probabilities can't be calibrated for your data. Calibration depends on your data distribution, which Jev never sees, so treat its outputs as scores and r...
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P(aul) Frazee @pfrazee.com · 17/09/2026
Software dev is all the 2nd 80% now
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 17/09/2026
christ
bloomberg.com
Trump Made 29,000 Securities Trades, More Than All of Congress
Donald Trump made nearly 29,000 securities trades in 17 months — more than every member of Congress combined. The stock-purchasing ban he’s pushing would leave him exempt
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rain 🌦️ @sunshowers.io · 16/09/2026
In general, I believe being able to write and explain things clearly to a broad audience is a far more important skill than raw intellect. By this measure recent models have been regressing a lot
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Spooky Key 🎃 🗝🦊✅ @keytryer.net · 16/09/2026
That's right, it goes in the JSON hole
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tbabb @tbabb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
typing `/effort xhigh` into slack DMs to get better answers from colleagues
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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 16/09/2026
They should have taken the opportunity to combine the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator into a show where people assigned as guards or prisoners are repeatedly bombarded with either one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later.
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Rafael Ferreira @rff.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Super interesting experiment with Pangram by @mitsuhiko.at. A human re-write of an llm generated text, maintaining only the structure of the text, scores as 100% AI.
lucumr.pocoo.org
Interpreting Pangram
What is AI generated text anyways?
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Reposted by Rafael Ferreira
David Roberts @volts.wtf · 14/09/2026
Patrolling & policing & condemning & "cancelling" online was never a uniquely progressive thing, even during Woke One (🙄). Every faction does it; it's just an outgrowth of the structure & incentives of social media. But it's pure fucking poison. It builds nothing, yields nothing.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 14/09/2026
On every social media site, very much including this one, it seems like about half people's effort & time goes to building a list of Official Enemies that must never be cited or supported, as though that's the first step in a serious political program as opposed a deranged black hole of energy.
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dan @danabra.mov · 13/09/2026
do it once badly but fully then restart with a clearer initial prompt (you know what you want better), let it think, finally point at the last implementation and give it freedom to redesign entirely from scratch but better then do this again ++
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dan @danabra.mov · 13/09/2026
learning this over and over and over. really best way to go with frontier models
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Mollz (ballz) @dopestatistics.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOOO
News channel fb post: The Little Tikes Company is giving some of its most popular toys a modern makeover, launching a collection which "reimagines the brand's best-selling classics in a sophisticated, trend-forward palette of soft neutrals designed to complement today's homes."


Photos show typical toddler toys such as the table, wagon, and car, but now made with no colors.
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João R ☄️ @joaor.com · 09/09/2026
No último Foro de Teresina, da @revistapiaui.bsky.social, o @npto.bsky.social fez uma fala cirúrgica com um resumão do caso Master pra deixar claro que essa história de direcionar a narrativa pra esse momento do STF é safadeza. O buraco é muito mais embaixo, e sempre à direita. Valeu, Celso!
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Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 10/09/2026
This single episode was a greater assault on free speech, & hurt more people, than *anything that happened during Woke 1*.
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Shriram Krishnamurthi @shriram.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Super excited to share "A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await". How differently does async/await behave across today's languages? (More than you might expect!) And what *is* "structured concurrency"? Check out our ~interactive~ blog post introducing the paper: cel.cs.brown.edu/blog/design-...
cel.cs.brown.edu
A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await
Every language pitches async/await as synchronous-looking code, and the same two keywords appear everywhere. But behind the shared syntax hide nine independent design decisions, and no two of seven mo...
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Rafael Ferreira @rff.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Lovely story in the nyt www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/s...
nytimes.com
The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice (Gift Article)
Joan Birman thought her major discoveries were behind her. Then came an email from a young neighbor — a girl who knew little but wanted to learn.
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apenwarr @apenwarr.ca · 09/09/2026
Let me tell you about aperture plus! github.com/tailscale/ap... . Trying to get the whole tool collection properly assembled. A lot of this was written by glm-5.2 in pi, although I personally switch models a lot to test out aperture’s model compatibility :)
github.com
GitHub - tailscale/aperture-plus: Experimental: pure userspace Tailscale web browser for iOS/macOS with Aperture Chat and Thundersnap VM
Experimental: pure userspace Tailscale web browser for iOS/macOS with Aperture Chat and Thundersnap VM - tailscale/aperture-plus
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 09/09/2026
Wrote up my thoughts on the whole OpenAI Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem story, and how it highlights the still confusing question of what using my data "to improve model performance" actually means simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/8/o...
This also highlights one of my ongoing frustrations about how all of this works. When an AI lab says that my data is "used to improve model performance", what does that actually mean?

My two favourite hypothetical questions regarding this used to be:

    If I'm running Codex and one of my API keys accidentally gets consumed in the context, what are the chances that someone else might ask for an API key in the future and get mine back? (I asked someone at OpenAI once and they called this the "regurgitation" problem and assured me that they take great pains to prevent that... but wouldn't describe how.)
    If I brainstorm with ChatGPT about potential new directions for my company, what's the chance that information might be exposed to a competitor in six months' time who asks "what might company X plan to do next"?

My new preferred hypothetical for this is:

    If I use ChatGPT to help me partially solve a Millennium Prize problem, what are the chances that my work will influence training such that a later model helps someone else solve it first?
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
It is less than a decade since the development of the transformer. Less than four years since the release of GPT-3.5 (ChatGPT). Less than two years since the release of o1-preview (the first Reasoner).
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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
IMHO the taxonomy of right-wing beliefs is: 1) Dipshits who "don't like politics" meaning they don't think at all, just herd behavior 2) Dullards soaked in propaganda who believe they're thinking 3) Downright malicious people who just want to cause harm. Material grievances are tangential at best.
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Philip N Cohen @philipncohen.com · 03/09/2026
Part 2. There is no bottom to Ariely's malfeasance. The Arday tragedy is so raw now the comparison is unavoidable. Ariely's fraud cost millions. Books were sold, careers altered. People and organizations changed policies and practices based on his fake results...
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austin (eeek!/ackkk! 👻) @thebadcode.com · 04/09/2026
ugh, my agent found a Golden Gate Claude memetic self-replicator hiding on a thermostat’s apache server. no idea how its still around. yeah, i had to toss the whole session and a few mega-LOC; cheaper and safer than trying to audit it all for bridge references
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alex guenther @guentheralex.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
if this "well, actually..." reply to a line of tennyson's is any indication, charles babbage would have been right at home here
He commented: ‘Sir: In your otherwise beautiful poem “The Vision of Sin” there is a verse which reads – “Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.” It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read – “Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 and 1/16th is born.” The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 and 1/16th will be sufficiently accurate for poetry. I am, Sir, yours, etc., Charles Babbage.’
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J. L. Westover @mrlovenstein.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
YOU DON'T "CONSUME" ART MOTHERFUCKER. YOU EXPERIENCE IT. YOU FEEL IT. YOU ENGAGE WITH IT. YOU WRESTLE WITH IT. YOU LIVE IT. ART ISN'T A LITTLE MORSEL YOU GOBBLE UP.
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Enny van Beest @ennyvb.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Textbook: tracking position during navigation is primarily the job of the hippocampus. Recent findings suggest a more complicated story. Recording >20k neurons brainwide, we indeed find spatial representations in every region! With @kenneth-harris.bsky.social and @carandinilab.net
Brainwide representations of a virtual corridor
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Daniel Moser @dmoser.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Pollution levels in London after 10 years of advancing sustainable transport.
Map showing Lower Pollution levels in London after 10 years of advancing sustainable transport.
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WildPartyInviteDecliner @ratelimitexceeder.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Francis Fukuyama keeps the winning streak alive.
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Pekka Lund @pekka.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
"We gave..Claude Fable 5.1 an open task: solve an unsolved 370-year-old cipher. It solved it within a day" "It was..listed by historical-cipher researcher Klaus Schmeh among his Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages" "solution is quite embarrassing for humans in hindsight"
vals.ai
Vals AI
Private, domain-specific benchmarks in legal, tax, and finance.
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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 01/09/2026
A century before we would move from fixed-program computers to reprogrammable ones, Ada Lovelace realized that the Analytical Engine was capable of universal computation. Reading her Notes is thrilling for her awestruck articulation of these ideas. Available now; link in reply.
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austin @aparker.io · 01/09/2026
but I don’t want to take over the world, I want to cheat on the test
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i am saying this as a professional @turbocri.me · 31/08/2026
the decadent "rebase" of feature branches is a petit-bourgeois trick to conceal the true historic labors of development
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conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
being right about crypto and NFTs has made a lot of people far too confident in their judgment. they think the presence of hype means the absence of substance. but crypto was unusual in that it was all hype and almost no substance. every other tech wave is a tougher mix of hype and substance
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Jake Gold @jacob.gold · 28/08/2026
Not driving while not coding was not exactly how I imagined the future.
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Adam Chalmers @adamchalmers.com · 27/08/2026
i'm so glad that I can ask Codex to read through all the CI failures and fix little silly mistakes so that I can focus on my true passion: aligning stakeholders and writing docs to drive consensus
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Grace @gracekind.net · 27/08/2026
Claude self-portraits! Another entry in the "is Opus 5 okay" collection
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