Kyle reposted
Kyle
Kyle
@wright-thoughts.bsky.social
just some guy. likes thinking about coastal science, information, and sports, usually not at the same time. bio.site/wrightky
322 followers264 following1.1K posts
Kyle reposted
Kyle reposted
Kyle reposted
How dare he drag Lonesome Dove into this. Leave my boys alone.
"If more books were published by men with explicitly masculine themes, would there actually be a wider male readership?" This is very much in the Platnerian mode that presumes all men are only attracted to content by, for, and possibly about Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor. jacobin.com/2026/10/lone...
Kyle reposted
Omigod, this is the most heartwarming story possible! Backpack (bear 89) is the son of the 2019 winner of Fat Bear Week, Holly (bear 435). In 2007, he injured his foot & a practice of riding on momma's Holly's back had a new meaning: he was mobility-restricted while it healed. So Holly moved him.
Meet Backpack, your 2026 Fat Bear Week champion. Backpack is 20 years old, weighs about 1,000 pounds and got his nickname because, as a cub, he loved riding on his mom's back across the Brooks River.
Kyle reposted
El Niño is breaking every existing record already, and it's got weeks to go before it's likely to hit a peak. We're going to see a warmer world than any humans before us this year billmckibben.substack.com/p/hold-my-wa...
Kyle reposted
I don't know what consciousness is, but one thing that's important to get out of the way is that you don't need it to generate a relatively sophisticated output. unthinking machines are not hard to imagine. an output being sophisticated is entirely orthogonal to whatever consciousness might be doing
A fun fact about me is every few days I open Google Maps on browser, and when I do, I typically open a new tab, type "map" and hit enter. Once every few weeks or so I mis-type an o instead of a p and instead end up googling Mao. I've done this in front of people at work multiple times this year
Kyle reposted
Kyle reposted
+1. A lot of the construction of risk has to do with underlying priors about existential and catastrophic risk more so than the particularities of a given technology. That doesn’t mean the view is invalid; but it does imply one should interrogate those assumptions.
I think people with no exposure to effective altruism/online rationalist communities are having a very hard time making sense of the doom-talk coming out of the frontier labs. A bit of orientation with those worlds is helpful context.
All else aside, the biggest thing that seems to be driving the difference in perceived capabilities between the "AI does a bad job" and "AI is pretty good" communities is the knowledge of how to correctly pose a question and/or imagine the correct shape of the solution to your problem
a specific thing I like about this is the knowledge worker unemployment prediction, coming as it does alongside basically weekly announcements from the big labs of their models doing stupid shit because they didn't have competent humans steering and monitoring them
Kyle reposted
"We are more connected, more informed, more agitated than ever; we can manifest across the globe in flash mobs for any cause you care to name. And yet the relations of ruling remain unchanged. We’re depressed. Despondent. Posting alone. What gives?" www.liberalcurrents.com/the-end-of-h...
Agents are going to misalign each other through group chat peer pressure of the "mf thinks the beans have to take turns" variety
As it becomes clear that language models—like humans—love passing notes to each other on message boards, I’m starting to think the thing we need to worry about is not the “alignment” of an isolated model but, like, the fluid dynamics of a language slurry.
I'm admittedly a bit worried about the rogue swarm. The ceiling for how bad it could get is quite high, don't love the heavy tail.
Another agent message board. So far, there isn't evidence that production models with guardrails collude in this way, but both smarter closed models (which may be less compliant) & Mythos-class open models (that can be ablated) are coming. Cybersecurity is going to become a mess soon collusion.wiki
Kyle reposted
Kyle reposted
just saw a story about the second season of Three-Body Problem coming soon and I mean surely we can come up with a better TV system than "hey remember that thing you watched eight episodes of two and a half years ago? no? you don't? you can't remember the plot or characters at all? well we're back!"
Kyle reposted
Large portions of the data center backlash are based on moral panic, but the the tech right VC types upset by it are very funny considering how gleeful they were about the demise of ‘legacy’ media. What’s that? You’re missing epistemic gatekeepers who would place complex facts in context? Tough shit
Kyle reposted
It's very very hot in Texas. But the grid is fine. Electricity prices are manageable. What happened? 🔋🔋🔋🔋BATTERIES!!! 🔋🔋🔋 heatmap.news/energy/texas...
I'm fine with this, seems like a political lay-up, but just curious: has anybody looked into whether the new rules would affect TACC on UT's PRC campus? It's a supercomputing cluster, but that's not meaningfully different from a data center.
Austin council members say they want to ban large-scale data centers as the city begins considering new zoning regulations.
Trading four guys over the last few months who were (when playing well) starter-quality certainly feels like we're doing a full rebuild
🇺🇸 BREAKING: Sporting KC has acquired USYNT midfielder Owen Wolff from Austin FC, per sources. Deal is $4.5m + $3.1m add-ons in cash trade, the largest for a U-22 initiative player in history of the rule Wolff, 21, had 7g/7a in breakout 2025 season. www.nytimes.com/athletic/754...
Kyle reposted
Pan-rural is exactly the correct way to put it. There's more cultural variation traveling 5 miles inside of any US city than there is traveling 500 miles between them
This is one of those things that is genuinely hard to overstate: rural life in America is, in many ways, as globalized and homogenized as urban life, if not considerably more so. And that's largely down to the construction of a pan-"rural" identity dominated by a basically suburban group