Been a rough couple of weeks so it’s a Nebraska kind of morning.

From the little bit that I know, I think Liang Wenfeng is the hero and Sam Altman is the villain in this AI story…

Why DeepSeek Is a Gift to the American People

China’s AI breakthrough has exposed our policy failures. And not a day too soon.

My dog is at the age where it’s unclear whether he can’t hear us or has just stopped giving a shit about what we say.

I’ve not had a physical injury this bad since I broke my collar bone in two places in high school. It’s been a long 8 days but my ankle is slowly improving. Very grateful for my wife who has had to take on basically everything, including taking care of me.

I exercised for 300 days in a row - and then I crushed my ankle

Around spring break of last year (2024) I decided to exercise every day. I worked out fairly consistently, 3-4 days a week, for close to two years ...

Quote from Seneca that resonated with me. “I say, let no one rob me of a single day who isn’t going to make a full return on the loss.” —SENECA

Totally agree that parents need to take responsibility. Although this (thankfully) is changing quickly, many parents don’t understand the harms. What’s the big deal with fun dances snd funny videos? When a company is doing this level of harm at such a scale, and doing everything they can to hide it from parents, I don’t see a major problem with banning it. Suppose a food company creates a food that is highly addictive but also toxic and targeted at children. (Honestly this is probably already happening - is a pop tart or a taki even food?) I don’t see a problem with banning that food. This is analogous to the TikTok situation, in my view. Actually I think the better justification for banning it is that it’s a tool of the Chinese government to use soft power to manipulate, spy on, and stupidly jot only our children but our entire citizenry. In my mind that’s root reason we should ban it - the fact that it would minimize its impact on our kids is a positive second order effect. View quoted note →

Hopefully TikTok will be banned as scheduled. “And even if parental controls worked and parents chose to shield their kids from bad stuff, they can’t because TikTok’s content moderation is poor. An internal study found that the “leakage rate” (of bad stuff getting past moderators) is as follows: 35.71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia” content; 33.33% of “Minor Sexual Solicitation” content; 39.13% of “Minor Physical Abuse” content; 30.36% of “leading minors off platform”; 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault”; and 100% of “Fetishizing Minors.” For those who think that social media is relatively harmless, we urge you to read the quotations and internal studies described below, in which employees of TikTok discuss the vast and varied harms that they are causing to literally millions of American children each year.”

TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale

Recently revealed text in legal briefs tells a damning story about the company, in its employees’ own words

It dawned on me today as I was taking notes on a video about weekly reviews that I could probably upload a picture of my notes to Claude and ask it to transcribe them into text. And, even with my poor handwriting, it did a great job. I also asked it to format it as a bulleted list with sub bullets, which it did. If my handwriting was slightly better it would’ve done an even better job. I love to take hand written notes but I hate that those notes get stuck in a physical notebook and are difficult to reference or build on later (unless you carry that notebook everywhere). They’re also difficult to search. This is especially the case if you’re looking for notes from months and years ago. It seems this problem is solved.

Some things related to AI that I don't think are being discussed enough.

AGI or not, we can't close our eyes

There’s been a conversation about when AGI will arrive for a long time. That time horizon has shrunk since chatGPT came on the scene, obvious...

I suspect Altman and OpenAI's sole motivation is money. Nothing wrong with that, I just wish they wouldn't lie about it.

The “connected car” is the worst for me because I don’t see any way around it. I think you can still buy a dumb tv. You can lessen the amount that Google knows about you. But we bought a new car last year and I don’t think we can turn off the connectedness. View quoted note →

#math

Why do dragons hoard gold? Because the things you most need is always to be found where you least want to look. - Jordan Peterson #quotes #grownostr

Get it. View quoted note →

I will say that over the last 18 months several of the non-bitcoin focused people I found only stuck around for a couple months and then left. Maybe I would’ve too, I guess, but I really want this thing to work. And hate Twitter so I’m not posting my thoughts there. But it can seem like you’re talking into the void. View quoted note →

My friend turned me onto the show Archer and I love it. If you want some mindless and funny tv then I highly recommend it.

Part two of three from the series “breaking my silence on SEL”

Reflections on Holes in Graphs and Reasoning

What happens in the classroom, stays in the classroom?

Part two of a three-part series called “Breaking my silence on social-emotional learning.” You can find part one, “I am not a therapist,&...

#education #grownostr

Found a new favorite for instrumental background music for working and writing. #blues #tunestr

Wow. That is wild. View quoted note →