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Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Basing European immigration on recent immigrant crime rates by country of origin is common sense and would make Europe much safer.

  immigrationEurope

  Their words

  I think this is the most common sense policy and it'll make Europe much safer

  @levelsio on Xx.com

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

From one piece @fchollet on X 2 beliefs · x.com

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  In the near term, more capable models should mean safer models.

  Their words

  In the near term (definitely not in the long term), more capable models should mean safer models (maybe paradoxically).

  @fchollet on Xx.com

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  Current models are unsafe because they are not smart enough, not because they are too smart.

  Their words

  Current models are unsafe not because they're too smart, but because they take goals too literally or take nonsensical shortcuts to achieve these goals, i.e. they're RL-fried. They lack common sense. They don't do the right thing in the face of ambiguity. Basically, they're not smart enough.

  @fchollet on Xx.com

Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.

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  Framing anti-genocide protests as antisemitic and unsafe began under the Biden administration, not Trump's.

  Their words

  The campaign to paint anti-genocide demonstrations as "antisemitic", violent and threatening to people's "safety" began not under Trump but under the Biden administration.

  The Situation at Columbia XXXVIImath.columbia.edu

Founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, a nuclear-reactor company founded in 2023.

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  Nuclear is empirically the safest form of energy -- safer even than solar, once you count the people who fall off roofs.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount amount of deaths, um it's even safer than solar, which is very strange because how does someone die from solar? that actually most solar is installed on roofs and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar and if you add those deaths up it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world.

  youtube.com

Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.

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  A software ecosystem made of many tiny modules from many different authors is unsafe against malicious actors and should give way to larger, vetted libraries.

  Their words

  Software that's composed of hundreds of little modules from hundreds of authors is a lovely idea that doesn't work with malicious actors.

  Technology optimism hourmacwright.com

Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Claude Connectors

  Their words

  This is why I recommend ignoring the vast web of custom and “community-built” MCP servers you can find out there, and focusing your attention on the two safer bets instead

  fortelabs.com

Economist at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute; works on what advanced AI would do to growth, saving and the long-run economy.

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  There is far less trade-off than people assume between a safer AI race and widely shared gains: a big lead can be held by a widely owned public company.

  Their words

  some people think either uh frontier AI gets commoditized and we all enjoy the benefits, but there might be some risk because like it's the market's really competitive and cutthroat, or um things are safer because there's a big gap between the leader and the laggard, but that means that the leaders get fantastically wealthy. No, like you could just have a relatively big gap, but it's a public company ownership and it's widely distributed.

  youtube.com

Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

From one piece Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The unsafe keyword does not switch the borrow checker off; it only unlocks a few operations you then have to justify yourself.

  Their words

  And it's interesting to point out here that unsafe does not disable the borrow checker or anything like that. It just gives you a few more operations you can perform that are not safe in general.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

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  Application code should contain no unsafe at all: unsafe is how you add a missing feature to the language, not how you write a server.

  Their words

  So usually it will never show up in say a backend server. You would have zero uses of unsafe there. Generally when unsafe is used, it's to add a new feature to the language.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

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  The guarantee Rust makes is conditional: write no unsafe, and no amount of bad code can produce a memory-safety bug.

  Their words

  What Rust ensures is that if you have no use of unsafe, then no matter how stupid your code is, you will never have one of those bugs.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

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  Left to their own devices and under competitive pressure, companies will cut safety corners even when safer alternatives are possible.

  Their words

  History has shown very extensively that, left to their own devices, even if something could be done safely, people in a hurry will find all sorts of ways to f*** things up.

  We're in Triage Mode for AI Policymilesbrundage.substack.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

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  Covering desert in solar panels is good for the desert: it shades the ground, holds moisture, and would pay for reversing desertification.

  solar

  Their words

  And the impact of solar array on desert is arguably positive because it shades the ground and improves like soil moisture retention. Um there like if you wanted to reverse desertification, you would basically just deploy solar panels on it and that would pay for the process.

  youtube.com

Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.

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  The metaverse is a harder technical problem than a web page, so it needs a language more powerful, safer and more scalable than JavaScript.

  JavaScript

  Their words

  But the metaverse and 3D gaming in general needs something that's rather more powerful, more safe, more scalable, and more capable than JavaScript because the metaverse is actually a more difficult technical problem than a webpage.

  youtube.com

Programmer known online as technomancy; author of Leiningen, the Clojure build tool, and a maintainer of the Fennel programming language.

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  A library that skips certificate verification by default is unsafe and should not be trusted.

  Their words

  However, luasec does not perform any certificate verification by default! This makes its out-of-the-box behavior very unsafe, and I have to recommend against using it for anything.

  in which web pages are served but also fetchedtechnomancy.us

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

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  Below about a thousand dollars a kilowatt of capital cost, the right way to run a plant is intermittently on raw solar with no batteries at all.

  solar

  Their words

  For loads below $1000/kW, intermittent operation with some modest solar array oversizing is the winning strategy. Above $1000/kW, we charge and discharge batteries daily to run them.

  Solar and batteries for generic use casescaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

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  It is rare to find one person who is great at every dimension of team leadership.

  Their words

  Team leadership covers a huge array of things-as you can see from how long this post is-and trying to find someone who can be great at all of them is often a unicorn hunt.

  Categories of leadership on technical teamsbenkuhn.net

Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.

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  A good life rests on things that demand skill and effort from you, not on goods that arrive requiring none.

  Their words

  A good life is supported by a diverse array of focal things and practices, which tend to reward us with deeper, more meaningful experiences; a gratifying measure of bodily skill and competence; and possibly even a stronger fabric of relationships.

  The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Lifetheconvivialsociety.substack.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

From one piece How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordable 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Letting generators cover one per cent of the year is what makes an off-grid solar data centre affordable, because the last few gloomy days set the whole array size.

  solardata centersenergy

  Their words

  The optimal scenario is typically when the generators supply 1% of yearly electricity (shown below).

  How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site

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  A data centre powered by solar and batteries alone needs an array so oversized that the design is not worth building.

  solardata centers

  Their words

  The solar array sizes under these assumptions are prohibitively large.

  How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site

Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

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  Frontier AI systems cannot be presumed safe unless proven unsafe; developers must bear the burden of proof that risks stay within acceptable limits.

  Their words

  Despite evaluations, we cannot consider coming powerful frontier AI systems "safe unless proven unsafe". With current testing methodologies, issues can easily be missed. Additionally, it is unclear if governments can quickly build the immense expertise needed for reliable technical evaluations of AI capabilities and societal-scale risks. Given this, developers of frontier AI should carry the burden of proof to demonstrate that their plans keep risks within acceptable limits.

  arxiv.org

Technology journalist; writes Understanding AI, after reporting at Ars Technica, Vox and the Washington Post.

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  The evidence that driverless cars are already safer than human drivers is piling up, especially for Waymo.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  But the evidence for better-than-human performance is starting to pile up, especially for Waymo.

  understandingai.org

Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.

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  It is too early to know whether robotaxis are safer than human drivers where it counts, in fatal crashes.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  It is too early to know whether current robotaxi technology is safer than human drivers for fatalities.

  AV Safety and the False Dilemma Fallacysafeautonomy.blogspot.com

Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.

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  A self-driving car should be roughly ten times safer than a human driver before it is deployed, to leave engineering margin for what nobody can predict.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  Taken together, there is an argument to be made that AVs should be safer than human drivers by about a factor of 10 (being a nice round order of magnitude number) to leave engineering margin for the above considerations.

  safeautonomy.blogspot.com