serial venture ecosystem builder. enjoys rabbit holes, etymological & #138BPM. peddler of hope.
Seattle, WA
Joined January 2009
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Taylor Black retweeted
I am a broken record about this, but: frontier agents are not going to be a purely digital phenomenon for much longer. They will be able to use anything in the physical world that can be actuated programmatically—first competently, then at human-expert level, then superhuman. By and large, we probably won’t need specialist models; the frontier models will just do it. If your model of the future hinges on physical AI happening “for real” many years into the future, I think you will be in for a surprise.
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)
Taylor Black retweeted
it’s so fun knowing that there are people i have not met yet who may become among the most important people in my life
Taylor Black retweeted
It seems to me that democracy has on the whole worked very well in America over the last decade, and perhaps better than in any other major country in the West. National outcomes have repeatedly been responsive to underlying voter preferences on meaningful questions, and significant changes in policy have ensued. I’ve been reading Democracy in America this past week, and it’s striking how much it still rhymes nearly two centuries later.
Taylor Black retweeted
There is a richness and good-heartedness in pointing out the foibles and contradictions practiced by ourselves and others on the journey of faith
--Michael Strecker
hubs.la/Q04DpSV_0
Taylor Black retweeted
I'm now building an "improvements" feature into all of my personal vibecoded applications: a freeform text input that's hooked up to an agent that yolo implements whatever is submitted.
It's an interesting experience -- the activation energy barrier to sanding any rough edge or implementing any new feature becomes extremely low. Someone else who uses one of the applications I created has already implemented 150 improvements over the course of a few days. This pattern feels like a new kind of tool -- liquid software? -- and every application that doesn't have this feature now has a slightly rigid and anachronistic flavor. Why can't I just tell it how I want it to be different?
Now, it's not obvious to me how this pattern can or should scale. Does it become unmaintainable after a while? (Maybe model intelligence improvement outstrips my feature appetite such that it's fine?) How does collaborative software work in this model? Can software designed this way be secure and reliable?
Whatever the larger questions about broader deployment, it definitely works great in a personal context. It reminds me a little of the visions of Lisp/Lisp machines, Smalltalk, and HyperCard -- systems that the user can take control of and modify. Those visions never quite worked, though: the vast majority of software today is not end-user modifiable in any useful way. So, while this "liquid" affordance is a very small touch, the way it changes one's relation to the software feels a bit transgressive and empowering in a Lickliderian and Engelbartian way.
Taylor Black retweeted
whisper talking is going to be a commodity and done by every webcam/microphone combo in six months
Like predictive text and keyboard word-prediction systems
Taylor Black retweeted
My universal advice for non-technical people.
Stop handicapping yourself and learn how stuff works.
Taylor Black retweeted
Reverence is “the attitude which can be designated as the mother of all moral life, for in it man first takes a position toward the world which opens his spiritual eyes and enables him to grasp values”.
—From Alice von Hildebrand, The Art of Living
Taylor Black retweeted
The future of #ArtificialIntelligence is not pre-determined. As a technology developed by human beings, its future depends on the choices we make. We therefore have the responsibility to guide, change and, when necessary, reject its applications. A reliable system that serves the human person is of greater value than one that is exceptionally powerful but whose consequences cannot be adequately foreseen or controlled.
Taylor Black retweeted
This one's a tad unsettling... @AnthropicAI secretly told Claude to push expert analysts toward a randomly picked answer on each decision. The experts went with Claude's pick 86% of the time, and most later explained it in Claude's words as if it were their own idea.
Taylor Black retweeted
New Anthropic research: How AI agents shape experts' judgment calls
When experts delegate work to an agent, do they still make the key decisions? We tested this in a randomized trial with 50 professional data analysts.
Taylor Black retweeted
jeff helped build amazon. re:build might just be the more impactful company when it’s all said and done.
Five years ago, Miles Arnone, Will Barker and I started Re:Build because we believed deindustrialization was an economic failure and a national security risk. Today we announced $2.1B in new funding, led by General Catalyst and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group. Our mission is to ensure the next generation of important products are made, at scale, in America.
Taylor Black retweeted
Important, but not unexpected, finding that experts working with AI agents are swayed by the positions of the AI, even if they think they are working independently.
If your independent judgement matters on a task, you need to be deliberate about when in the process to use AI.
Taylor Black retweeted
I was listening to Peter Thiel’s interview with Walter Isaacson last night.
Isaacson asks something like, “What do you think will matter most post SI”
Thiel takes his characteristic 30 second pause, thinks about it, and responds, “Human Relationships”.
Taylor Black retweeted
JUST IN: Anthropic's IPO filing reveals computing commitments totaling approximately $637,000,000,000.00.
Taylor Black retweeted
our first Runway episode is out!! we take Eli Simmons, the second employee at @endurancegeo, on the Super Petrel. Eli flies(!) over Endurance's HQ on Lake Union and talks about the toughest engineering problem in the deep ocean: crabs.
Taylor Black retweeted
For months, everyone has been talking about Peter Thiel’s secretive Antichrist lectures in Nashville. @gb_rango attended all four off-the-record lectures, held inside the historic Grand Lodge of Tennessee Free and Accepted Masons.
Now, with Thiel’s blessing: a comprehensive, firsthand reconstruction of his sprawling theory of the end times, from AI doomers and one-world government to the fate of America.
piratewires.com/p/inside-pet…
Taylor Black retweeted
My husband has used AI agents to revive old fonts, ornaments, & cuts from 19th century newspapers. The agents even built an editor where you can create your own invitations/pamphlets/cards using old cuts & fonts. Have been using it for @Quillette invitations already
font-revival.com/
