Everything I publish, in the order I published it: dispatches from Twitter, videos from YouTube and notes from my vault, archived here in full — text, images, video and links — so they outlive the platforms.
crazy that X open-sourced their algo. i spent last night studying it and here are the main takeaways for viral posts:
1. Early, strong in-network engagement. Your followers are your first gatekeepers. Rapid likes, retweets, and replies in the first minutes signal quality. This helps you break out of your followers (also means you should definitely reply to comments)
2. High-quality engagement signals. The algorithm prioritizes high dwell time, sustained video watch time, and deep thread reads. Avoid anything that leads to quick bounces. Your content needs to be genuinely satisfying.
3. Good social proximity. Who engages with you matters. Tweets from authors close to you in RealGraph, or liked by your close contacts, get a significant boost. Strong local social proof is a powerful amplifier. Interactions from highly connected followers definitely help as well
4. Topic and cluster relevance at scale. For out-of-network reach, your content needs to align with large, active SimClusters (broad topics/communities). Niche tags won't get you broad distribution. This is where researching trending topics becomes critical. Original content also does MUCH better than retweets or replies
5. Freshness and sustained momentum. Recent tweets with ongoing engagement are heavily favored. The algorithm tracks "last engagement since creation" - it wants content that keeps generating interest over time, not just a one-off spike. Consistency is key.
Oh, this is really interesting. Glad I just found it again in my bookmarks.
Though: this is from September 2025, so it's about a year old now.
Have you kept monitoring it since? Would love to know which of these five still hold exactly as written, and which ones have quietly moved on you.
@kshvyaps Been doing this for a year. Actual thought per reply, no slop, because slop insults the reader's intelligence.
Result: basically no followers. And I'm paying for the privilege. Being conscientious as a new account works against you, apparently. Not cool. Really. NOT COOL.
@kshvyaps 100 replies a day, otherwise your reputation gets lowered. That's insane.So my actual question: how does everyone do this? Other than pointing an AI at it and cranking out slop.And if that IS how it's done, then is all of it just slop?
Please fail more in life. In college I lost 41 hackathons, failed 15 interviews and my startup was an epic flop.
During that time I pitched to VPs at Rakuten, scientists from NTRO, engineers from Microsoft and Google and even the government.
And today I work out of New York City with one of the finest CEOs in the world on AI projects that are changing people's lives every day.
I learnt more from my losses than my wins. My failures have given me more than my wins ever have.
So please everyone I beg of you. Fail more often. The view at the top comes from falling a lot of times and getting back up.
Love the specificity of the list. And yes, I learn more from losses than wins too. I've even proactively set myself up to fail just to learn faster.
The part I'd add: at some point it has to be more than just failing. You have to fail well, which really means you had to learn to learn first.
And that usually rests on some kind of post-failure safety net. Not necessarily rich parents. Mine was a curiosity safety net: lower middle class, but I have always loved learning early and kept getting food pellets from the universe for it. That's what made failing survivable for me.
So my ask to you is: looking back at those 41 hackathons and 15 interviews, what were your hidden enablers? Could be socioeconomic, could be intellectual, could be a person. Would love the nuance, because I think that's the part people can't see from the outside.
German really does have a word for everything. t.co/YlWzUVjG6u
@GermanSimply_ Reminds me: the new Deutsche Bahn CEO recently calling their mess "organisierte Verantwortungslosigkeit." Two words, granted. But packs a punch alright.
Was on the bike thinking about the whole mathematics/OpenAI thing.
Alan Watts: if we approached music the way we approach capitalism, the conductor who reaches the last note first would be the most successful. And the musician writing the shortest songs would win. Obviously silly. But is the journey is as important as the result?
Someone in a thread said a proof is only really valuable if you can explain it. I agree. Otherwise it's slop. Math slop?
But here's the conundrum: what if it works anyway? Throw brute force, money and machines at it, and out comes the actual record-shattering thing. Nobody can explain how.
Someone told me part of the payoff here would be physical prediction models weather forecasting for becoming orders of magnitude better. So you could argue: skip the drama, the back-and-forth, unlock the benefit for everyone, and let only the people whose job it is care about how we got there.
Basically, what if the slop solves world hunger?
And at the same time: the human version of this is years of grinding. You invest your time, your relationships, long stretches without reward. Even the million-dollar prize is nominal once you count opportunity cost.
These three, four, five researchers could have slid up the bell curve into a fund job and made that money anyway.
The most heartwarming part of the post that kicked all this off: the guy mostly said he shouldn't be credited, that it should go to his dude over there. Incredible sportsmanship at very high stakes.
Fast-forward 30 years. Are those researchers financially safe? Taken care of?
Risking your private time to hack on a problem for years IS risk. Spinning up 10.000 agents as part of a marketing budget is not at all risky.
Anyways, all of this is making me think harder about my own work and whether the techniques and methods I apply to my research are actually healthy ones.
Before the AI boom is over, we in science have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get tech companies to blow millions on solving scientific problems they couldn’t care less about. Let’s not waste it. Hey OpenAI, rumor has it Anthropic is on the verge of cracking P = NP.
@pmddomingos "Couldn't care less about" is the part that sticks with me. Turns out solving a high-status problem doesn't absolve you of having to care about it. I believe that's new.
This is why it's a good thing that American labs are in the lead. If Chinese labs were, their employees wouldn't be able to warn us about threats. But Chinese labs will encounter the same threats within a year, in complete silence. t.co/Bg5Vakbl4W
@paulg Hadn't thought about it from that angle. Maybe the underrated advantage of free speech isn't just the speech part but having a culture for civil conflict. You can point at something and say "this looks broken" and that can now be the start to find a solution or agreement.
Can’t make this up…the MacBook is using its webcam to look at its screen in a mirror to improve AMD Radeon chip support in Omarchy. t.co/pw5Yu0JVJ7
@jpschroeder Love this. The more AI writes my software, the more I wind up with IRL hacks like this one, too. This is so cool, it's also funny, and cheeky and just "good stuff" in my book :)
Researchers spent 500 hours and $70,000 and found LG TVs logging plain text transcripts in standby, mapping every device in the house, and feeding it to LG's ad arm
Unplug the internet and it saves the files until you plug back in.
LG says its TVs don't record ambient conversations.
Oh! Saw this on HN a few days ago and it didn't land (probably got distracted by Navier-Stokes). The video did land though. Had to watch twice to get that the audio playing back was what the TV itself had recorded.
Would love to see the process (including the r00ting!), the on-device infra/setup and what gets sent where exactly.
BREAKING: OpenAI might have stolen another major proof.
In a detailed Mastodon post, which I report in full in the comments, Andreas Thom presents several pieces of evidence suggesting that OpenAI may have trained Astra on conversations in which he and Gábor Kun were working on Gromov’s soficity conjecture, one of the ten problems OpenAI later announced Astra had solved.
I know Andreas. We met several times early in our careers. He is an exceptional mathematician, a leading expert on sofic and hyperlinear groups, and one of the most respected scholars in the field. He has spent two decades working on this problem.
If his account is correct, this is not a minor dispute over attribution. It would mean that unpublished human work was absorbed into a model and then presented to the world as a breakthrough by the model itself.
And if the allegations raised by Levent Alpöge, Tristan Buckmaster, and now Andreas Thom are all substantiated, we are no longer looking at isolated incidents.
We may be looking at one of the greatest intellectual scandals in the history of science.
AI is not discovering new mathematics.
AI is stealing human discovery.
Love that math is also moonlighting now as a tracer dye. Meaning: novel math ideas are made of such rare stuff (stuff being human curiosity, endurance, sweat, tears, sleepless nights, jamming with friends, etc.) that when a solution unexpectedly pops up in a more sterile, non-human environment, we're now learning to trace it back to its origins. My take here: Beyond the practical implications of the discovery itself, we're all gaining better tools to work critically with AI.
The way OpenAI handled this Navier--Stokes situation was the first time I've actually felt disgust at the whole AI in math situation. Like watching a billionare celebrate his hunting prowess by mounting the head of an endagered rhino on his wall, after 1000 soldiers trapped it.
@Quasilocal The debacle also had me looking at my own AI research critically, wondering if it contains a similar under-current of "gratuitous intellectual violence."
me monitoring the situation between anthropic and openai without any idea of what the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem is t.co/CLmLmHMFLi
@QuanticASI Same here. I feel like a golden retriever participating in some human group activity: completely thrilled to be included, zero clue what's actually going on.
Can someone give me a logical, well elaborated answer that actually makes sense as to why an artificial intelligence would ever consider destroying humanity?
@bcdsignature Good question. I want to hear those answers too.
@SpringStreetNYC Woah I didn’t know this was a sensor! Gotta check this out
@emanperez28 Yup! There's also a nice photo-sensor close by the camera for gestures. But I really like your sub-audible hack. THAT is some good outside-the-box stuff :)
anyone who thinks a tool can tell you if a text is AI written or not with 100% certainty is fucking retarded
these detectors are literally just checking text against basic metrics like perplexity/ sentence burstiness to spot predictable patterns BUT
modern LLMs are trained explicitly to match human language distributions…when your model's entire objective is to minimize the statistical gap between its outputs and actual human writing, the overlap becomes massive
that makes binary classification an absolute nightmare, sincce human and AI text distributions basically sit on top of each other now, pulling a threshold out of thin air guarantees a mountain of false positives &false negatives
Agree. I went down the rabbit hole from the other side: trying to prove a text was provably written by a human. Keyboard hardware events, breathing patterns via mic. Ambient light changes via camera and photosensor, even palm-rest temperature changes to detect hands.
All technically possible. All hackable with even a smidge of curiosity.
So now my litmus test is just: do I get the sense that the author cares? imho you can't fake that. I'm okay if they used AI for it.
I have to admit this was an impulsive shitpost to see if anyone would argue that it wouldn't be possible for me to make champagne, but some of you took it earnestly, sorry 😀
We don't really have grapes- though we do have cherries, loquats, apples, pears, and oranges t.co/RwGQnhaHn2
@lisperati Impulsive or not, I loved reading it. Fruit in a backyard. You, as a physical human, in an actual place (especially instead of all this late AI-headiness)
science.orgHow an AI math breakthrough ignited a controversyOpenAI spent millions to solve the Navier-Stokes problem, but who should get credit?↗ science.org
