Terminally American in Europe
The Netherlands
Joined January 2013
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I’m an ideas guy. All my life I’ve cooked up dreams, schemes, cons and scams without action. Now I can without the dirty work. I find it amazing things are implemented (well) at all. You need to have an iron spirit or simply a brutish persistence I’d likely mistake for stupidity.
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Only a matter of time now until the laundry folding problem is reliably solved and every household will have a machine like we have dishwashers.
Fable 5.2 shows substantially improved skills in controlling physical robots, even on tasks it has never explicitly been trained to do.
On RoboDojo, a benchmark with a simulated two-arm robot, it outperformed other models and most AI systems built to control robots.
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Marcel retweeted
The Past Was a 3rd World Country.
Remy Cogghe (Franco-Belgian, 1854 - 1935) - Cockfight in Flanders, 1889. Oil on canvas 206 x 131 cm.
@Empty_America one of those "past is a foreign country" images... :-)
Marcel retweeted
Maybe I’m a bit philosophy brained but I think with the right kind of conceptual engineering you end up with a view of redemption, salvation, God and the pursuit of the highest good as ordained without lifting an ounce of theology, making you sort of religious without religion.
If "Agentic" is not whatever dictionary's 2026 Word of the Year, you can rest assured we're still early.
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It’s not that we’re fake though it can be perceived this way. We’re old stock Puritans. What that means is that we never touch on heavy matters. Ironically if you manage to befriend a Dutch Calvinist type they will cry in front of you but the hard part is befriending them at all.
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Marcel retweeted
“Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy.” -Soren Kierkegaard
Wonder how many people are starting to feel like they were born too early rather than too late.
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Marcel retweeted
What is scary about the end of literacy as a culture is that people who do sit down and read actual books are probably the losers now who can't function.
The people who just are zonked out on various apps all day consuming short form video content are working jobs, buying homes, raising families.
Marcel retweeted
People who have been in research fields develop a felt sense that most "research" (in almost any field that isn't exactingly technical) is research theater, and many superstar careers enjoy star status not because of a unique connection to the truth but because of a unique connection with an audience. No one really has the time or stature to, from a position of objectivity and trust, bring popular researchers to heel. But it will get increasingly hard to hide from serious critique. The machines can do critique now, at the level of depth and rigor previously only possible for the academically deranged. We're going to have to revise a lot of what we "know" about the world that isn't really knowledge but is actually just received popular consensus - like floating voltages without grounding wires. The grounding wires are coming.
Tyler Cowen:
'I am not even sure what to say at this point. We need a radical revaluation of this work, and of the associated policy arguments. More generally, this is only a single step in the story of how AI is going to revise economic science, and indeed past research more generally. As I stress in many of my recent talks, there will be significant gains and losses in status, with the losses often outweighing the gains. I see this as one of those cases.'
Rolling the garbage bin out to the curb. Its hollow rattle billows through the street—Suburban Sharia’s call to prayer. I am a snake shedding its skin. A burden is relieved. I am renewed once more.
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