AI research | deeptech yapper | Mil Intel/history Enthusiast| Founder | Clanker shepherd
Joined August 2021
- Tweets2.1K
- Following15.9K
- Followers16.4K
- Likes242K
soul retweeted
a 10yr old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs on cancer diagnosis
it seems inevitable that similar training data will be available to LLMs, and it's surprising that's not already the case
the "long tails" of the real world, where precision really matters, continue to need domain specific training
lynchlab.net/llm-skin-cancer
soul retweeted
Geoffrey Hinton once noticed that the tellers at his bank kept changing. When he asked one of them why, the teller didn't know, only that they got moved around a lot.
Hinton guessed the reason... if staff never work with the same people for long, it's much harder for a few of them to team up and cheat the bank.
That thought became one of the most useful tricks in deep learning. While a neural network trains, you randomly switch off about half its neurons at every step. No neuron can lean on a particular partner, so each one has to learn something useful on its own. The trick is called dropout, and it helped AlexNet win the 2012 ImageNet contest, which set off the modern AI boom. It's still built into many of today's networks.
soul retweeted
Thank god we can find and intercept lost hikers as they mistakenly run away from rescue in dense forest!
Purdue University's IDEAS Lab built an autonomous drone that tracks runners through dense forests completely without GPS or cloud networks.
By running 3D LiDAR mapping and obstacle-avoidance AI entirely on-chip, it can weave under tree canopies and predict target movement through blind spots in real time.
Massive implications for next-gen search & rescue and edge AI.
soul retweeted
For years people have said "no the ___ isn't listening, that would take up too much bandwidth"
pretty clear for a while that you don't need full recordings, just NN detection of key phrases, feelings, vibes run locally then exfil is piggybacked on the next check-in.
if done right you can also make custom nets for individuals and ship them with the next update for more refined targeting. Bandwidth use is tiny and it's super effective for targeted ads.
it's nice(?) to be proven right about a paranoid assumption
soul retweeted
Japan is fully aware that its cultural exports make it look cute and kinda effeminate and this is entirely on purpose.
Keep in mind this is a country which both denies its past warcrimes and genocides and which is actively building up its military.
This is entirely in line with the art of war, be strong appear weak.
Durong the first half of Imperil Japans existance they could rely on the great power constantly underestimating them out of racism and it ended with Japan being allowed a significantly greater naval power than France or Italy in the post WWI world order.
soul retweeted
harnesses are everything. and they help smooth out the jagged edges of intelligence. here's a primer on them.
a few months ago, I wrote a series documenting learnings and useful patterns around building and working with harnesses with my friend @zakkeener42 at @baseten.
last week, we compiled them and turned it into a small book. it covers how to optimize existing harnesses, how to choose the best one for you, how they are co-evolving with models. as a bonus, we added some thoughts on what the future might look like. link in description:
soul retweeted
I just solved "Drone engineering" education with Opus 5.5 + /colorfigures skill
no need to crash a $400 FPV build to learn how drones work, just visit my interactive site
• 13 real drones: 5" freestyle, cinewhoop, racer, flying wing, VTOL, heavy-lift octo...
• build them part by part: frame, motors, wiring...
• then fly them: 13 ranges + first-person FPV view
send the skill to your Claude:
> april-zhu.com/colorfigures
try it free, no sign-up ↓
soul retweeted
tonight is the night
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
