Part-time urban cyclist, proud monkey descendant. Geography, typography, open source. VP Tech @paradigmpubserv | he/him | my opinions (evidence based).
London, England
Joined January 2022
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Francesco retweeted
Now compare that to the ones that have remained private.
This post is purposely misleading.
🚨NEW: All train services that were nationalised by the Labour government have seen their performance plummet
It comes alongside ticket prices to use the services remaining the exact same
[@thetimes]
Francesco retweeted
Breaking: Oracle of Delphi pollster proven correct that invasion of Persia would lead to the collapse of an empire.
Francesco retweeted
Where the Romans fought: 1,709 land and sea battles, from Romulus (753 BCE) to the fall of Theodoro (1475), in 44 of today’s countries. Rome won 916, drew 41, lost 512; 236 more were civil wars.
Interactive map, full list, the Roman armies, sources:
iosiflazaridis.github.io/bat…
Francesco retweeted
Just not true. The Romans made one of the entire city. It was hung in the Roman senate tax offices. We've been finding pieces of it for centuries.
Leonardo da Vinci created the first ever
"satellite view" map in 1502 of Imola, Italy.
He did this by manually measuring the angles and distance of every corner on every building in the city.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Leonardo’s 1502 Imola map was not the first overhead city plan. The Forma Urbis of Rome, made in 203–211 CE, mapped every building’s ground plan at 1:240 scale. Leonardo’s work was a surveyed Renaissance plan, but calling it the first “satellite view” is inaccurate.
formaurbis.stanford.edu/docs/FURmap.ht…
rct.uk/collection/912…
Francesco retweeted
tristan buckmaster just published a statement that is, if accurate, one of the ugliest things i’ve read out of a frontier lab.
not because of the math. because of what happened after openai found out two people were about to beat them to the punch.
buckmaster and levent alpöge spent a year pushing the córdoba / martínez-zoroa program to smooth forcing. august 15 they got blowup for boussinesq and 3d euler. lean-verified august 22.
they were paying openai out of pocket and dumping every draft into private codex sessions.
the program is obscure. almost nobody else was on it. this was not “paste the clay problem into a chatbot.”
then this:
> thursday sept 3, buckmaster emails openai privately. rumors are flying. he is trying to stop a mess, not start one.
> they reply the same day: give us details so we can “avoid competing.” also, want free compute?
> sunday they suddenly need a call “at any point today.” sebastien bubeck gets on. levent is not invited.
> openai says an internal model has a ~100-page proof of forced navier–stokes blowup. fefferman options c and d. the exact route buckmaster and alpöge had quietly chosen.
> they show him a prompt and claim the model was “simply given the problem statement.” levent is told “very little human input.”
> that falls apart on the same call. a whole team had been on it. they started on the unforced problem, warmed the model up on easier equations including euler, and even the prompt they showed him was written by prompting codex.
> he asks when the first prompt went out. they stall. then agree: the past few days. after information about his work reached openai.
> he asks whether the model was trained on, or had access to, the private codex sessions where they put every draft of this project.
> answer: the model does not look up user data.
> he asks again. about training.
> no answer.
then it stops being a science story and becomes an hr story.
> offer 1: you post euler. we post navier–stokes the next day.
> offer 2: after you post euler, you alone write the navier–stokes paper, credit our model, and we cut levent.
> bubeck says twice he wants levent removed from authorship because he works at anthropic.
he declines both.
he says if they release it that way, he goes public.
the reply is not a scientific objection.
> “why would you ruin your career?”
> “if you don’t want me to be nice, then i don’t have to be nice.”
later, a text to levent proposing a one-on-one:
> “i don’t know if tristan is being fully rational right now.”
that is not how you treat a collaborator. that is how you split one.
openai got word two researchers were closing a path almost nobody else was on. they spun up a team on that exact path. they would not answer whether the researchers’ unpublished drafts in openai’s product were used. they tried to dictate the announcement order. they tried to remove a coauthor because he works at a competitor.
when that failed, someone reached for a career threat.
this is a lab finding out academics were about to publish, sprinting the same narrow program, refusing the data question, and trying to manage credit around a rival affiliation.
really slimy if even half of this holds.
what the fuck is happening.
holy shit.
tristan buckmaster is saying openai has a forced navier–stokes blowup via the córdoba / martínez-zoroa program.
and that it may have used drafts from his and levent alpöge’s private codex sessions.
that’s the córdoba / martínez-zoroa route. almost nobody else was on it.
he also says the first prompt went out after information about his and levent alpöge’s work reached openai. that “very little human input” was not true. that a whole team had already been set on easier problems, including euler. that even the prompt they showed him was written by prompting codex.
then he asked:
did the model have their private codex sessions.
no answer on training.
if any of that holds, openai didn’t just scoop a math result. they may have done it off two researchers’ unpublished drafts, then tried to cut the coauthor because he works at anthropic.
a millennium-problem-adjacent result just became employee drama before an ipo.
i don’t even know which part is crazier.
this is one of the slimiest things i’ve seen in this industry.
Francesco retweeted
£90Bn spent by UK's councils visualised as apple maps
107m rows of (public) data
bentossell.com/council-spend…
Francesco retweeted
Have written today on a fascinating - and v v important - economic puzzle. Either:
1) AI is driving a boom in entrepreneurship everywhere but Britain
or
2) AI is driving a boom in British entrepreneurship, but our economic data is too broken to notice.
Which is it?
Francesco retweeted
Chart of the Day 🤓
Here is some real data (not "vibes") on what has actually happened to wealth inequality in the UK, compared to a selection of peers.
Key takeaway: wealth inequality collapsed between 1900 and the mid-1980s, and has edged up only slightly since then... (1/2)
Francesco retweeted
What if Andy Burnham could raise £15bn – without a tax rise?
There's one catch. He'd need to solve the UK’s biggest and least-discussed tax problem.
Almost half of all small business corporation tax isn't being paid - and nobody knows why.
Thread:
Francesco retweeted
📢💣 ¡Descifran el primer Papiro de Herculano completo!
Ojo a esto porque gracias al Vesuvius Challenge, y mediante IA y tomografía avanzada, se ha logrado la lectura completa de un papiro carbonizado por el Vesubio sin desenrollarlo, atribuido al estoico Crisipo de Solos 🧵👇
Francesco retweeted
Sorry the only scientific way is the Trieste division:
Below Trieste Parallel: Southern Europe
East of Trieste-Rome line and Trieste-Amsterdam line: Eastern Europe
West of Trieste-Rome line and Trieste-Amsterdam line: Western Europe
This Post is from a suspended account. Learn more
I'd probably add "austerity" and "brain drain".
Britain starts from _very_ different premises, but it's worth noting that every mistake compounds over the years.
It's never too late to adjust the trajectory
Italy is the clearest example of how a rich country can slowly destroy itself through decades of bad management.
Since the late 1990s, Italy has had almost zero productivity growth.
Real wages have stagnated. And public debt is now around 137% of GDP, projected to move toward 139% overtaking Greece as the highest in the eurozone.
It is the result of 25 years of
1. Low innovation and very low adoption of new technologies
2. Family and insider succession in many companies, weakening meritocracy
3. Underdeveloped VC industry, startup ecosystem and R&D base
4. Political capture by lobbies and organised crime
5. Extreme administrative, judicial and business bureaucracy
6. Political fragmentation
7. Demographic collapse
No country can remain rich forever if productivity does not grow, debt keeps rising and politics only manages decline instead of reversing it.
Francesco retweeted
1996 issue of the magazine Venerdì, featuring a cover story on Umberto Eco and his relationship with the Internet:
“The Internet is the latest craze. But how many people really know how to ‘navigate’? In Bologna they will teach it. The world’s most famous semiotician explains the project.”
“Without intervention by public administrations, these [Internet] media will divide society: a proletariat deprived of information,which must make do with television; a small bourgeoisie of passive users; and a nomenklatura of privileged people who will fully exploit interactive communication.
This is democratic problem to be solved: creating a mass nomenklatura…”
[via @Ivan200001]
Francesco retweeted
The token cost to build a production feature is now lower than the meeting cost to discuss building that feature.
Let me rephrase.
It is literally cheaper to build the thing and see if it works than to have a 30 minute planning meeting about whether you should build it.
It’s wild when you think about it.
This completely inverts how you should run a software organization. The planning layer becomes the bottleneck because the building layer is essentially free. The cost of code has dropped to essentially 0.
The rational response is to eliminate planning for anything that can be tested empirically. Don’t debate whether a feature will work.
Just build it in 2 hours, measure it with a group of customers, and then decide to kill or keep it.
I saw a startup operating this way and their build velocity is up 20x. Decision quality is up because every decision is informed by a real prototype, not a slide deck and an expensive meeting.
We went from “move fast and break things” to “move fast and build everything.”
The planning industrial complex is dead.
Thank god.
Francesco retweeted
Londonmaxxing is a good meme with a strong foundation. Business R&D in London -- especially in digital, data, tech, AI -- has exploded since 2012 on the back of decades of high public sector spending on R&D and enormous investments in great infrastructure. tomforth.co.uk/londonmaxxing…