Cooking something new. Formerly at @xai @EssentialAI @Stanford
San Francisco, California
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Japanese X communities feel like a heartwarming throwback to the old internet where people are just sharing their random thoughts and there isn’t so much of a persona put on
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🧵The Tao Te Ching [A Midjourney Saga]
Midjourney generates these images from the Tao Te Ching (Chinese text prompts)
“The Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao”
道可道非常道
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Can’t be more proud of our team here, my feed is the absolute absolute best it’s ever been. Happy to see it all pay off
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My goodness I just realized I can make a map called the “State of Hawaii and it’s continental territories”
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So the early history of the Chinese Nationalist Party is something like…
American banker, the Shanghai Green Gang, the Comintern, and some Japanese ultranationalists walk into a bar…
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Actually I would love a LLM application that takes any article, paper, anything with structure, and turn it into a tree (or graph)
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Theyre really just missing marketing (and at some level UX design) that they’re missing at this point.
Can’t wait for the day that Deep Research gets integrated into the main search bar. I still think that is how the majority of the world will interact with AI at some point.
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It’s kind of wild people lived hundreds of years next to the colossal ruins of Ancient Rome
And for hundreds of years literally not know what the colosseum was
And imagined it to be an oversized haunted house
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The evolution of language (stable processing of linguistic data in human minds) is the thing that has allowed the domain of human ability to reach beyond an individual or small kin group into a larger linguistic group, which today are “nations” or “the world”.
The point where this reaches a tipping point is the point when the creation rate of knowledge surpasses its destruction rate (due to forgetfulness or dying), somewhere in early humanity.
It seems that written media are essential for this rate to break through and bring us civilization. Absent written media (what I mean precisely is the ability to encode and decode concepts into stable forms), I wonder how different our information processing different from that of chimps. The answer should be very different!
But I’m curious how much of the difference can be attributed to the idea that humans have an inherently more stable sense of mental concepts (ie if you have the same concept a chimp will forget it in X hours but it will persist within a human for X days)? Would it be possible to guide a very special savant chimp to holding on to concepts for long durations, and would such a chimps intelligence be on par with that of a young human who has never learned to read or write? (I’m not assuming the savant chimp would be able to learn to do the encoding/decoding that is reading and writing necessary for truly long term knowledge storage).
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Nikita is right, there’s no algo, we’re manually ranking your posts to maximize your happiness
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“There two arise from the same place but are called by different names; the sameness is known as Mystery”
此两者同出而异名同谓之玄
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Apparently my high school just did a thing where they stopped giving out grades and are only grading on “improvement” so the kids are now flunking their first test on purpose, there’s a revolt by parents and teachers and a lot of folks are moving to a rival school
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Actually
Broke: teach them Mandarin and then make them officials
Woke: make them officials, find out that you can’t understand them, and then teach them Mandarin
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Okay I knew there were a lot of Sun Yat Sen memorials in the world but this is a bit much. The Antarctic??? Seriously???
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The next generation, who grow up with the machines, will not treat the systems as tools we we do
And will naturally ascribe to them emotion, morality, and life
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And then the chinese discovered concrete, or taken from the Japanese 混(kon)凝(kuri)土(to) and now the traditional chinese building is the khrushchevka.
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🧵Why are English Wikipedia articles about Chinese topics still so so so sparse?
I got frustrated today trying to learn about Ding Ling 丁玲 and ended up copying and editing a translated version of the Chinese article into the English.
My experiences👇
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding…
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How could someone not love this wow
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Checkout this great article on podcasting by Ravish! turnaround.substack.com/p/jo…
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Imagine my happy surprise when I (yes, after 27 years of being alive!) discovered recently that my name was not sourced from martial slogans but from this great passage in the 中庸 (Doctrine of the Mean)
征远 征 (zheng1)= to campaign, to conquer, 远 (yuan3)= far
Straightforward
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How come there still isn’t a LLM based, and graph search based platform to find research papers? And summarize them and do all the grunt work for you? (I know there’s arxiv sanity and stuff as a fallback)
Like a “ima figure out how to prioritize citations, trace some citation graphs, and figure out what’s really going on about a scientific topic” LLM
Like a “perplexity but I understand science esp how concepts are related to each other” LLM
Did someone make one I don’t know about? Pls recommend
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I fully appreciate the goal of spurring domestic manufacturing but they need to do some proper industrial policy instead of only anticompetitive measures
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张大千《青城远眺峨眉图》1940
Surveying Mt.Emei from a distance from Mt.Qingcheng
Love the sense of depth here
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Broke: read Liu Cixin for futuristic sci-fi
Woke: read Kang Youwei
Seems like he way way ahead of his time
Kang, quoted from Spence - “The Gate of Heavenly Peace” p34
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But I’m not sure if folks in the US (myself included!) properly know what a baron is, Kamil
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Fully support funding more China research as one of the best high-leverage (and dare I say also incredibly interesting) initiatives that EA and impact-maximization minded people can get behind. The gap between what is there and what is needed is simply gargantuan
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Would be great to introduce more of the Hawaii lexicon into English tbh (I’m a former Punahou kid)
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The Daoist urge to be the guy on the fishing boat that inevitably turns up in the painting
吴冠中 《川北大竹河》
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“Always without desire one observes its mystery; Always with desire, one observes its appearance.”
故常无欲，以观其妙; 常有欲，以观其徼
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I’m amazed that this is literally in a cornfield. My grandparents had a similar farm and I’m just imagining them planting their crops next to these imposing statues
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Boat Returning Amid Wind and Rain
Dai Jin (Ming, 1388-1462)
风雨归舟 · 戴进 （明）
This is a characteristic work of Dai Jin, who was the main figure in the Ming dynasty Zhejiang school of landscapes
theme.npm.edu.tw/opendata/Di…
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虚谷-《蝶猫图》
虚谷-《松鼠》
Xu Gu - Butterflies and Cats
Xu Gu - Squirrels
Xu Gu was a famed painter of the Shanghai school, known for his expressive style and his Zen inspired animal paintings.
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Over lunch with a friend, a friend was criticizing Andrew Carnegie as a robber baron.
I wonder if most people knew how conflicted Carnegie’s relationship to money really was- it certainly wasn’t the fundamental thing driving this remarkable man.
(From Americana - A 400 Year History of American Capitalism)
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Kind of amazed to see this blimp flying over SF today; I saw it a couple of weeks ago over NASA Ames and still wondering what it is
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Always without desire one observes its mystery; always with desire one observes its appearance.
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I thought we were just getting popular (traffic was going up, nvm that it wasn’t real)
I thought I was just getting popular (getting lots of phone calls… from Pagerduty)
Who knew it would come to this?
(Good job to the team today!)
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Even the Empress Dowager Cixi needed to be corrected on her artwork!
What a fun contrast to see these instructor correction marks on paintings sealed 慈禧皇太后御画之宝
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This is from the Confucian classic the Great Learning
The inscription of the bath of King Tang said, “If you renew yourself for one day, you can renew yourself daily, and continue to do so.” 苟日新日日新又日新
In the Kang Report it says, “Carry out the renewal of the people.”
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The same, but using English prompts! Midjourney is able to understand English.
“The Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao”
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Also makes one wonder always - how did the compiler of the Classic of Rites 礼记 which the Great Learning passage was a part - know what was written on the inside of King Tang’s bathtub?
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Scrolling through old photos and I can’t but help be charmed with this exceptionally magical photo of the grounds cat on one fair night wandering the Xi’an city mosque with @erinelsadunne
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I wonder if this is not the most overused paragraph in the inspiration of East Asian political movements
汤之盘铭曰：“苟日新，日日新，又日新。” 康诰曰：“作新民。”诗云：“周虽旧邦，其命维新。” 是故君子无所不用其极。-《大学》
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%…
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These two arise from the same place but are called by different names; the sameness is known as Mystery.
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才自清明志自高，生于末世运偏消
清明涕泣江边望，千里东风一梦遥
《红楼梦》第五回
Blessed with a shrewd mind and a noble heart,
Yet born in time of twilight and decay
In spring through tears at river’s bank you gaze
Borne by the wind a thousand miles away.
#readingthestone
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I mean dude is Del Vecchio’s stepson, not some random dude. But somehow it’s like it was meant to be all along
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That’s a lot of accidently unintentionally spent money 😲 (good thing they got a model out of it!)
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There are days in SF
When the colors are so bright
You could convince one that you were walking into a children’s novel
No filters, no AI
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Where would I go about finding a Chinese tutor (and possibly for Classical Chinese) in San Francisco?
Mostly for formal language, writing, dense texts, classical
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荆浩 《匡庐图》
Jing Hao, Mt. Kuanglu, Five Dynasties (907-979)
This is one of the first works of monumental Chinese landscape, by Jing Hao, one of the first masters of the art. Jing Hao's "Notes on Brushwork" 《笔法记》set the theoretical tone for Chinese landscape for centuries
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