Author of A Window on Intelligence. Software engineer. Founder @veritula. Ex Apple. Translator of The Beginning of Infinity. I build tools for thinkers.
Chicago
Joined August 2012
- Tweets16.3K
- Following1.1K
- Followers1.3K
- Likes56.6K
Pinned Tweet
New homepage 🥳
dennishackethal.com
ALT Dennis Hackethal’s new homepage at dennishackethal.com
What do you guys do when your AI claims to have made a discovery you’re not qualified to judge?
I worry about wasting experts’ time but also don’t want to *not* publish it at all, in case the AI really is on to something.
I suppose I could just blog about it… Is there some etiquette for this type of situation?
3
5
489
I asked Claude to discover something new.
It found a mathematical proof that only 5 numbers of oranges can be rearranged from centered flat triangles into pyramids.
Not yet checked by a mathematician, so I made every step reproducible.
veritula.com/ideas/6103-oeis…
27
I asked Claude to discover something new.
It found a mathematical proof that only 5 numbers of oranges can be rearranged from centered flat triangles into pyramids.
Not yet checked by a mathematician, so I made every step reproducible.
veritula.com/ideas/6103-oeis…
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
Someone I know asked Astra to play Factorio. It wins, but it takes forever and guzzles tokens. If you ask Astra instead to “design a system to win Factorio,” it builds software that runs 1000x faster. Mechanistic software gives you cheap leverage, and LLMs can write mechanistic software on demand.
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
Norway now has more than 2,000 underwater AI laser robots shooting lice off its salmon
they're made by a company called Stingray, and they already guard more than 50 million salmon and trout 24/7
the reason is sea lice, tiny parasites that latch onto salmon and feed on them
as few as 11 can kill a small fish, and one pen can hold 150,000 salmon
the usual fix is pumping the fish out and blasting them with warm water or water jets to knock the lice off
but the handling is so rough that Norway's fish health report ranks it the top cause of death in full-grown farmed salmon
so instead, Stingray puts a robot inside the pen that hunts lice one at a time, all day:
> two cameras watch every salmon that swims past
> AI checks two frames to make sure it's really a louse
> then a green laser fires from up to 2 meters away
> the salmon's scales reflect the beam, so the fish swims off fine and the louse is dead
we now live in a world where AI lasers do pest control on your dinner lmao
THIS is how you help kids. So they can be part of the online community, not shunned. Unwanted protection is oppression
here ya go
This filter removes X/Twitter's age verification prompt by replacing the AgeVerificationPrompt text in XHR responses.
Add it to My filters:
x.com##+js(set, __INITIAL_STATE__.featureSwitch.defaultConfig.rweb_age_assurance_flow_enabled.value, false)
x.com##+js(set, __INITIAL_STATE__.featureSwitch.user.config.rweb_age_assurance_flow_enabled.value, false)
Use the filters below only if the filters above do not work:
x.com##+js(trusted-replace-xhr-response, /AgeVerificationPrompt/g, , url:/UserOriginalsTimeline|UserRepliesTimeline|UserRepostsTimeline|UserVideoTimeline|UserPhotoTimeline|UserHighlightsTweets|TweetDetail|TweetResultByRestId|UserTweets|HomeTimeline|HomeLatestTimeline|SearchTimeline|UserMedia|Bookmarks|Likes/)
EDIT: I noticed that the filter above doesn't work in the user feed. It's been a while since I checked uBO's syntax, so I'm not sure why, but this approach might work better:
!#if !cap_html_filtering
x.com##+js(trusted-replace-xhr-response, /AgeVerificationPrompt/g, , url:/UserOriginalsTimeline|UserRepliesTimeline|UserRepostsTimeline|UserVideoTimeline|UserPhotoTimeline|UserHighlightsTweets|TweetDetail|TweetResultByRestId|UserTweets|HomeTimeline|HomeLatestTimeline|SearchTimeline|UserMedia|Bookmarks|Likes/)
!#else
/UserOriginalsTimeline|UserRepliesTimeline|UserRepostsTimeline|UserVideoTimeline|UserPhotoTimeline|UserHighlightsTweets|TweetDetail|TweetResultByRestId|UserTweets|HomeTimeline|HomeLatestTimeline|SearchTimeline|UserMedia|Bookmarks|Likes/$xhr,1p,domain=x.com,replace=/AgeVerificationPrompt//g
!#endif
EDIT2: I take a look in uBO doc and I updated the scriptlet to use a regex in the first parameter, replacing AgeVerificationPrompt with /AgeVerificationPrompt/g and added method:GET. The scriptlet filter should now work without problems.
EDIT3: Added HomeTimeline|HomeLatestTimeline|SearchTimeline and removed method:GET to apply filtering to the Home, Following, and Search feeds. Additionally, the network filter was updated by replacing the hostname with a regex and including domain=x.com.
EDIT4: Added UserMedia to remove prompt/block in media tab in user profile.
EDIT5: Added Bookmarks to remove prompt/block in bookmarks page.
EDIT6: Added Likes to liked posts tab.
EDIT7: Twitter changed the endpoint for some tabs, but it seems to be progressive. So, I kept the old endpoints and added: UserOriginalsTimeline|UserRepliesTimeline|UserRepostsTimeline|UserVideoTimeline.
EDIT8: Added UserPhotoTimeline|UserHighlightsTweets.
EDIT9: Added filters using set-constant, based on the filter created by paintboth1234 comment
EDIT10: Replaced rweb_mvr_blurred_media_interstitial_enabled with rweb_age_assurance_flow_enabled
Tested on x.com. It removes the age verification prompt when viewing tweets marked as adult content.
NOTE: Since this relies on the current response structure and endpoint names, it may stop working if X changes either in the future.
3
235
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
There's an admittedly funny bit of satire about a libertarian (Rand flavor) society in which the characters have to continuously pay to use the objects they need, like putting a nickel into a gun or a quarter in a siren.
What's really funny is the story will show for a few seconds and then the New Yorker paywall pops up.
newyorker.com/humor/daily-sh…
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
Nobody on this board wants a segregated neighbourhood. Each person only asks that at least 3 in 10 of their neighbours look like them. If not, they jump to an empty spot where that is true.
Then the colours pull apart into big blocks, and the average person ends up with about 3 in 4 neighbours like them, far more than anyone asked for.
Thomas Schelling showed this in 1971 with pennies and dimes on graph paper, and he shared the 2005 economics Nobel for work on how individual choices add up to patterns nobody chose. The lesson is that a pattern in the whole does not prove a wish in the parts.
In the second run each person asks for 5 in 10, and the blocks are even sharper.
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
Peter Thiel’s bets are just too unique.
A few months ago, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led a $220 million investment in Halter at a $2 billion valuation.
Halter is a New Zealand startup that has essentially made physical fences unnecessary for cattle farming.
It puts solar-powered, GPS-enabled collars on cows, allowing farmers to create invisible fences, move entire herds from their phones, and monitor animal health in real time.
As a cow nears a boundary, speakers on one side of the collar emit a tone that grows faster as she gets closer, telling her which way to turn. A gentle vibration confirms when she is moving in the right direction. Only if she ignores both does the collar deliver a mild electric pulse, weaker than a standard electric fence.
After about a week of training, cows respond to sound alone.
In effect, Halter has turned one of the oldest forms of physical labour into something that can be managed through software.
we have a winner for the most absurd AI startup ever
this Peter Thiel backed company uses AI robots to stab fish in the brain so they taste better and last up to 3x longer
it's called Shinkei and it modernizes a centuries-old Japanese technique
dozens of Michelin-star restaurants are already lining up to buy the fish
here's how it works:
> the problem is when a fish gets caught, it usually just suffocates on the boat
> that stress floods the meat with hormones and lactic acid, which hurts the flavor and texture
> the old Japanese fix for this was spiking the fish through the brain right after the catch, which stops all that
> but doing it by hand is impractical for most American fishing crews
> so Shinkei built a fridge-sized robot that sits right on the boat's deck
> the crew feeds in a fish and AI identifies the exact species, so it knows exactly where the brain and gills are
> the robot then drives the spike through the brain and cuts near the gills in about 7 seconds
> the fish goes into an ice slurry so the blood drains out
> so the fish doesn't sit there stressing out, and that tasty flavor and texture is preserved
example number 5,392,417 of how AI can be applied to literally anything
ALT A gloved fisherman on a boat feeds a live salmon head-first into the steel intake of a white Shinkei Systems robot, with the ocean behind.
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
It’s funny how some people demand near-perfect safety guarantees from AI while accepting political systems that routinely put absolute morons in charge of nuclear weapons. 🙄
This video makes me think Claude could, in principle, program and operate a universal constructor, too. Now we ‘just’ have to build one!
i went to bed and asked claude to paint an autumn tree overnight.
at around 4am, it realised that it didn't have some shades -- so it stopped and titrated its own paint: diluting red, sienna and madder step by step on a second palette, then measuring each pocket from a photo.
woke up to this beautiful watercolor painting. 303 brush marks, took about 4.5 hours 🍂 (still working on the speed)
2
13
826
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
Veritula member @MoritzW42:
“Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do.” And: “Beauty is accumulated knowledge.”
Read more in his piece ‘In Defense of Ambition’:
veritula.com/ideas/5970-in-d…
