Buzz Andersen
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andersen.buzz
Buzz Andersen
@andersen.buzz
900 followers 380 following 810 posts
Tech veteran (Apple, Square, Tumblr), old school indie Mac/iOS developer, Eagle Scout. Kind of also trying to be a screenwriter? @buzz on Twitter. Mail: buzz at http://andersen.buzz
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andersen.buzz
It’s kinda like HAM radio, but for data. Creates a giant mesh network using unregulated radio frequency bands. You can connect one of these devices to your phone via Bluetooth and communicate with people. Theoretically.
November 11, 2025 at 11:44 PM
andersen.buzz
Guess I’m a Meshtastic guy now
A Sensecap T1000-E Card Tracker
November 11, 2025 at 10:58 PM
andersen.buzz
Heartening to see these around. (Took this on the LA River over the weekend).
A “Don’t Poke the Bear” flyer advocating voting yes on Proposition 50.
November 5, 2025 at 6:39 AM
andersen.buzz
Speaking of buildings as metaphors for our times, I really liked the ending of this review of “The Great Miscalculation” (a book about the race to fix a dangerous flaw in the design of New York’s Citicorp Tower).

www.wsj.com/arts-culture...
In 1995 Joe Morgenstern, a former film critic for this paper, wrote about the ordeal for the New Yorker in "The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis." Why is Mr. Greenburg retelling this story now? One can only surmise that it is because he wants to gently remind us that confronting the challenges we now face-be they technical, social, economic or political-requires more than intellect, skill, charisma or treasure. It also requires moral courage: The courage requires moral courage: The courage to acknowledge unpleasant truths that put ourselves in a bad light; to admit our mistakes; to shun pretense that all is well; to respect the law; to honor professional norms; and to accept blame rather than shift it to others. Mr. Greenburg's book is compelling because stories about doing the right thing touch us all in a deep and intimate place, often capable of flooding us with tears of unexplained wellbe-ing.
October 23, 2025 at 12:18 AM
andersen.buzz
👆🏻 Exactly my point above.

open.substack.com/pub/davidzmo...
Klein: Your book is not called if anyone builds it, there is a 1 to 4% chance everybody dies. You believe that the misalignment becomes catastrophic. Why do you think that is so likely Yudkowsky: Um, that's just like the the straight line extrapolation from, it gets what it most wants and the thing that it most wants is not us living happily ever after, so we're dead. That's it, the jig is up. His argument is a straight line extrapolation. That's the level of nuance and sophistication we're looking at here. We've let rubes and clowns masquerade as intellectuals because they serve the political purposes of billionaires, and it's all going to come home to roost.
October 22, 2025 at 4:48 PM
andersen.buzz
Double feature of Ghost World and Scream at @vidiots.bsky.social tonight. Or, as I like to call it…“Ghostface World.”
October 19, 2025 at 4:22 AM
andersen.buzz
Incredible stuff
“Professor, thank you so much for doing this.” “Great, thanks. If we go light on the Kissinger part, I wouldn't complain, because it could dwarf everything else.”
September 23, 2025 at 10:46 PM
andersen.buzz
Incredible stuff
A post from X user eigenrobot indicating that he didn’t expect anyone to take his post seriously enough to turn them into actual policy, as appears to have been the case with the Trump administration’s new H1B visa policy.
September 20, 2025 at 8:58 PM
andersen.buzz
So inspiring to see Joe Dante at @vidiots last night! Truly one of the keepers of the flame.
September 20, 2025 at 7:08 PM
andersen.buzz
Not great, Bob!
The Finch app on an Apple Watch asking how I’m feeling.
September 12, 2025 at 2:41 AM
andersen.buzz
“Explain it to me like I’m a Faulknerian Idiot Man Child”
“And I think sometimes that l am like it, the perceptron, because I gather, too, the faces and the motions and the sounds of their breathing in the night, and I do not know why they come to me or why I cannot let them go, but they press upon me, Vardaman with his eyes like the questions of a child who does not know if fish can be mother, Dewey Dell with her silence swelling until it breaks, Jewel burning with the fire of his horse as though the horse were not flesh but flame, and all of them leaning inside me, pressing me toward some threshold beyond which I am already falling, though I do not know if the word for that fall is yes or if the word for it is no.”
September 9, 2025 at 7:03 AM
andersen.buzz
Whatever their flaws, it still rules that LLMs can do this trick so well.
An explanation of the AI concept of “perceptrons” in the voice of various characters from William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.” An explanation of the AI concept of “perceptrons” in the voice of various characters from William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.” An explanation of the AI concept of “perceptrons” in the voice of various characters from William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.” An explanation of the AI concept of “perceptrons” in the voice of various characters from William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.”
September 9, 2025 at 7:01 AM
andersen.buzz
Impressed with Gold Hill, Colorado’s display of resistance.
A “No Parking” sign modified so that says “No King Any Time.” A sign that says “When democracy dies, freedom, liberty, and rights no longer matter. Neither does your vote.” A sign that says “US mail not for sale” A Smokey the Bear sign that says “Only you can resist fascist liars.”
September 9, 2025 at 2:18 AM
andersen.buzz
FYI I keep getting this when I try to subscribe!
September 6, 2025 at 8:09 AM
andersen.buzz
A quality wedding anniversary
The marquee at Vidiots in Los Angeles. It read “Aliens.” Me wearing a USCSS Nostromo hat and drinking a cocktail.
September 2, 2025 at 6:38 AM
andersen.buzz
Make America Healthy Again
A CVS endcap with a sign that reads "Stock up on seasonal symptom support." It's filled with Pringles cans and M&Ms.
August 31, 2025 at 6:41 AM
andersen.buzz
Our dog is doing physical therapy, and the photos they’re sending us make him look like a Far Side character.
A dachshund with shaded goggles receiving a laser treatment
August 29, 2025 at 2:30 AM
andersen.buzz
Wow, how could German elites have been that dumb…
But there was nothing strategic about this vote. Along with all of Germany's other opposition parties, the Center Party was dissolved within months. The Center Party's support for the act did not moderate Hitler; it gave him total control. This was the final, fatal miscalculation— the belief that democracy's protections could be bargained away but democracy itself could still somehow survive.
August 28, 2025 at 9:14 PM
andersen.buzz
The funny thing is that movie pretty much tells you exactly what the point of it is at the end
“If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you?”
August 24, 2025 at 7:38 AM
andersen.buzz
Really had to hunt this one down /cc @dcpierson.bsky.social

Reskeet with a tweet you still think about
DC Pierson @DCpierson "Of course, my favorite Mario Kart racer was Dry Bowser. I found his name and aesthetic incredibly appealing, as I'm sure anyone would." 11:51 AM • Dec 26, 2017 (Over a photo of serial killer Ed Kemper, as portrayed in the Netflix series Mindhunter)
August 23, 2025 at 3:20 AM
andersen.buzz
Did not realize the president of Heritage Foundation was named Kevin Roberts.
#SNL I'm Kevin Roberts and I have a very important question.
August 23, 2025 at 3:02 AM
andersen.buzz
Same energy
Abbott and Costello doing their famous “Who’s on First” routine.
August 12, 2025 at 4:55 AM
andersen.buzz
Exactly what I’ve been saying! These models are simply “yes and…”-ing scenarios set up by the user. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
A useful way to look at these models is as "role-players:" Their vast training on human-generated text has taught them to generate language and behavior in the context of a given role, where the context is set by the user's prompts. For example, if you want to use an Al model, such as Claude, to analyze financial data, Anthropic advises that you can "dramat-ically improve its performance" if you first prompt the model with the fictional role it should play: "You are the CFO of a high-growth B2B SaaS company. We're in a board meeting discussing our Q2 financials." Simi-larly, it's well-known that if you want to get the best results for, say, solving math prob-lems, then you should start your prompt with something such as "You are a genius math-ematician." This presumably helps steer the model toward the part of its huge learned "se-mantic space" that will be relevant for performing the given task.
August 5, 2025 at 4:29 PM
andersen.buzz
Summer vibes
A poolside dachshund Carne Asada on the grill
August 3, 2025 at 2:44 AM
andersen.buzz
lol www.wired.com/story/chatgp...
But perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence suggesting that ChatGPT regurgitated the language of Warhammer 40,000 is that it kept asking if The Atlantic was interested in PDFs. The publishing division of Games Workshop, the UK company that owns the Warhammer franchise, regularly puts out updated rulebooks and guides to various characters. Buying all these books can get expensive, so some fans try to find pirated copies online.
August 2, 2025 at 6:13 PM