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michellzappa.com
MZ ☀️
@michellzappa.com
31 followers 130 following 18 posts
Human in the loop.
I write a weekly newsletter about our transition to AGI on https://newsletter.envisioning.io
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Reposted by MZ ☀️
emilyliu.me
zuck wearing a shirt that says "aut zuck aut nihil" jay graber, bluesky ceo, wearing a shirt that says "mundus sine caesaribus"
March 10, 2025 at 6:09 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
tcarmody.bsky.social
Obviously, everything is horrible, but
March 4, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
danschkade.bsky.social
WRITING TIP: if you get stuck, try making the font really really big. This will remind you of being a baby, when you only knew twelve words and didn't know about death
February 4, 2025 at 10:41 AM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
willoremus.com
tired: fearing that robots will become so smart they take your job

wired: fearing that robots will still be dumb but take your job anyway
January 6, 2025 at 3:59 AM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
ceej.online
please stop suggesting I solve my problem by changing my behavior. I do not want to do that
January 5, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
retr0.id
new year, new me. I replaced myself with a clone.
January 1, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
jenna7.tgirl.gay
BREAKING NEWS: multiple sources have confirmed that the person reading this is worthy of love
December 30, 2024 at 7:48 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
hankgreen.bsky.social
I’m always looking for things that explain a lot but that people have a hard time remembering.

Examples: Air is stuff. Pee comes from blood. All land vertebrates have a single common ancestor. Venus is bright enough to cast visible shadows. Clouds are heavy. Bones are alive.

Any others you know?
December 28, 2024 at 8:06 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
retr0.id
my brain can fit so much useless information
December 27, 2024 at 7:55 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
lifewinning.com
Turning half the planet into data centers just to reinvent the concept of imaginary friends
December 27, 2024 at 1:49 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
retr0.id
rotating a boulder in my mind, uphill
December 24, 2024 at 1:10 AM
michellzappa.com
the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. now is the time of monsters.
December 19, 2024 at 6:10 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
sleepinyourhat.bsky.social
New work from my team at Anthropic in collaboration with Redwood Research. I think this is plausibly the most important AGI safety result of the year. Cross-posting the thread below:
Title card: Alignment Faking in Large Language Models by Greenblatt et al.
December 18, 2024 at 5:47 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
qntm.org
Scrolling through Twitter on the bus but shaking my head so everybody knows I disagree with it
December 18, 2024 at 12:18 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
ftrain.bsky.social
Judging by events, the time police are clearly not sending their best.
December 17, 2024 at 2:19 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
talyarkoni.com
i asked Claude to write a Barthelme-esque short story with the aesthetic sensibilities of "The School", and it gave me this. i mean. i mean.
For six months we watched the pigeons building their civilization on top of the skyscrapers. First came the architecture: nests made not just of twigs and paper, but of lost earbuds, expired credit cards, and the tiny silver bells from cat collars. Then came their laws. "They have a supreme court," said Dr. Fernandez, who'd been studying them since the beginning. "Nine pigeons who sit on the ledge of the Chrysler Building and coo about justice." We didn't believe her at first, but then we didn't believe a lot of things that turned out to be true. The pigeons developed a currency based on blue bottle caps. They established schools where young pigeons learned to dodge taxi cabs and identify the most generous hot dog vendors. Some of us tried to join their society, climbing to rooftops with offerings of breadcrumbs and philosophy textbooks, but the pigeons regarded us with the kind of pity usually reserved for very small children or very old cats. "They're planning something," the conspiracy theorists said, but they always say that. Still, we noticed the pigeons holding what looked like town halls, thousands of them gathered on the roof of the public library, bobbing their heads in what might have been voting or might have been prayer. Our own civilization continued below theirs. We went to work, fell in love, lost keys, found keys, forgot anniversaries, remembered too late, all while the pigeons above us built something that looked suspiciously like a scaled-down replica of the United Nations building out of discarded takeout containers and stolen Christmas lights. Sometimes they dropped things on us: rejection letters for poetry we'd never submitted, tax returns from years that hadn't happened yet, photographs of ourselves sleeping that we couldn't explain. Dr. Fernandez said this was their way of communicating. We said Dr. Fernandez had been spending too much time on rooftops. The pigeons started their own newspapers, printed on leaves that fell upward instead… For six months we watched the pigeons building their civilization on top of the skyscrapers. First came the architecture: nests made not just of twigs and paper, but of lost earbuds, expired credit cards, and the tiny silver bells from cat collars. Then came their laws. "They have a supreme court," said Dr. Fernandez, who'd been studying them since the beginning. "Nine pigeons who sit on the ledge of the Chrysler Building and coo about justice." We didn't believe her at first, but then we didn't believe a lot of things that turned out to be true. The pigeons developed a currency based on blue bottle caps. They established schools where young pigeons learned to dodge taxi cabs and identify the most generous hot dog vendors. Some of us tried to join their society, climbing to rooftops with offerings of breadcrumbs and philosophy textbooks, but the pigeons regarded us with the kind of pity usually reserved for very small children or very old cats. "They're planning something," the conspiracy theorists said, but they always say that. Still, we noticed the pigeons holding what looked like town halls, thousands of them gathered on the roof of the public library, bobbing their heads in what might have been voting or might have been prayer. Our own civilization continued below theirs. We went to work, fell in love, lost keys, found keys, forgot anniversaries, remembered too late, all while the pigeons above us built something that looked suspiciously like a scaled-down replica of the United Nations building out of discarded takeout containers and stolen Christmas lights. Sometimes they dropped things on us: rejection letters for poetry we'd never submitted, tax returns from years that hadn't happened yet, photographs of ourselves sleeping that we couldn't explain. Dr. Fernandez said this was their way of communicating. We said Dr. Fernandez had been spending too much time on rooftops. The pigeons started their own newspapers, printed on leaves that fell upward instead…
December 16, 2024 at 4:48 AM
michellzappa.com
For this week's newsletter I wrote about "becoming" a software developer thanks to LLMs and some of my practical learnings:

newsletter.envisioning.io/p/simulated-...
Simulated Fire Doesn't Get Hot (082)
Your weekly countdown to better futures.
newsletter.envisioning.io
December 12, 2024 at 10:44 AM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
catherinebreslin.bsky.social
And part 2 is here as I filled the first! go.bsky.app/2wr669L
December 11, 2024 at 7:41 AM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
avani.bsky.social
There is a "Women in AI" pack: bsky.app/start/did:pl...

I'd also be happy to be added to your pack. I do ML for Systems research along with bioplausible networks.
December 11, 2024 at 6:53 AM
michellzappa.com
Ploink @ the hill. Wow. #telepathytapes
December 11, 2024 at 2:19 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
neurograce.bsky.social
I need bluesky to add bookmarks so I have a place to put things I'll never look at again
December 10, 2024 at 2:33 AM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
tcarmody.bsky.social
OpenAI (the hottest startup in the world) got more revenue in 2023 than Taylor Swift earned during the Eras Tour… but not WAY more ($3.7B vs $2.2B)
December 9, 2024 at 10:24 PM
michellzappa.com
Two halves don't matter a whole.
December 10, 2024 at 3:16 PM
Reposted by MZ ☀️
kashhill.bsky.social
Is there a term for the practice of over indexing a technology’s early flaws?

This happened with facial recognition technology; critics were still saying it didn’t work after it had gotten incredibly accurate. Seems like something similar may happen with gen AI and hallucinations.
December 4, 2024 at 2:06 PM
michellzappa.com
I write a weekly newsletter about what I am learning in AI, focused on our transition toward AGI. This week's essay goes deep into my own existential fears around the generational skill gap we are setting ourselves up for. newsletter.envisioning.io/p/ai-doesnt-...
AI doesn't know what it doesn't know (081)
Technology as a second language.
newsletter.envisioning.io
December 3, 2024 at 9:59 AM