Fin Moorhouse
@finmoorhouse
Followers
3,767
Following
300
Media
359
Statuses
1,777
Currently @ Longview, prev. @FHIOxford , co-host @HearThisIdea
Oxford, England
Joined October 2013
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
#RejectFinanceBill2024
• 2278567 Tweets
Julian Assange
• 647193 Tweets
Australia
• 352622 Tweets
WikiLeaks
• 305885 Tweets
Afghanistan
• 276354 Tweets
#ENGFAxHONOR200Series
• 237378 Tweets
#OpeningYSLthXCharlotte
• 209629 Tweets
Costa Rica
• 147310 Tweets
Nairobi CBD
• 144648 Tweets
Panthers
• 121248 Tweets
Safaricom
• 81485 Tweets
#AFGvsBAN
• 70264 Tweets
INI THE FRAME
• 67056 Tweets
CHARLOTTE AT YSL EVENT
• 56562 Tweets
Gulbadin Naib
• 46876 Tweets
INI 6th THE FRAME
• 37960 Tweets
Tommy Robinson
• 21070 Tweets
ふるさと納税
• 14180 Tweets
ロジャーバローズ
• 13599 Tweets
キャラソン
• 11891 Tweets
新スキン
• 11457 Tweets
魔法少女
• 10032 Tweets
Some gradients between two colours look good, others suck. It's easy to tell the difference, but what *is* that difference?
407
8K
79K
The Game of Life can be emulated, recursively, inside the Game of Life
58
884
6K
Here are two slices of the HSV cylinder for colours of the same value (~brightness).
The linear gradient in RGB space is on the left, the linear gradient in HSV space is on the right.
19
515
5K
Here's
@JoshWComeau
's excellent article where I got this from:
I thought it was a very neat point! 🎨
33
293
3K
I think
@JoshWComeau
has figured it out! Here's the thought: gradients trace a line between two points in colour space, but there's more than one way to represent colours in a (typically 3D) space.
5
49
3K
One way to pick out a colour is by specifying how much red, green, and blue it contains. These are RGB colour spaces.
Second pic is my phone screen under a microscope, which uses this idea of adding together R, G, and B
2
60
3K
Another way to pick out a colour is by specifying its 'hue' (where on the colour wheel?), its saturation (how pastel vs colourful?), and its 'value' (how bright?). These are 'HSV' or 'HSB' colour spaces.
4
116
3K
Josh's idea is that attractive-looking colour gradients are linear gradients in HSV-type colour spaces, and other gradients are unattractive because they trace a straight line through RGB-type spaces.
4
54
2K
A puzzle:
Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward, in a straight line along the Earth's surface.
56
256
2K
This is because bad-looking gradients typically have a greyish bit between the two colours, while attractive gradients are colourful throughout (see above).
3
34
2K
If you imagine the RGB cube, there is a channel of greyish colours running between the "all 0%" corner and the "all 100%" corner. Two colours with significantly different hues are going to have to pass through that channel.
2
13
1K
In HSV space, two colours with significantly different hues avoid that grey zone by orbiting around it, remaining colourful.
Notice that just varying the hue to get between two colours of similar S and V means circling around vs cutting through the colour wheel.
2
22
1K
Scott Aaronson: "I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time."
26
43
899
Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he 'just used his free will.'" Ha.
From 'Quantum Computing Since Democritus'
7
20
539
In Jan of this year,
@bryan_caplan
bet
@MatthewJBar
that no AI would reliably score an A on his economics midterm exams before 2029.
Three *months* later, GPT-4 scores an A.
12
83
490
I recently learned: Derek Parfit had no formal academic qualifications in philosophy (he studied history as an undergrad, and never completed a PhD)
15
29
446
In Jan of this year,
@bryan_caplan
bet
@MatthewJBar
that no AI would reliably score an A on his economics midterm exams.
Three *months* later, GPT-4 scores an A.
9
41
424
I like how photos of the moon passing in front of the Earth look totally fake. Hard to break our familiarity with atmospheric blur + eye-like focal lengths!
11
77
392
Yoshua Bengio admits to feeling "lost" over his life's work: "he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve"
15
59
376
Today I learned: Amazon recently bought a $650 million nuclear-powered data centre for AWS (!)
6
35
352
The consumer surplus I get from the Spotify + decent headphones combo is just ridiculous. What an 18th c. monarch would have given for this!
6
9
304
Someone asked Scott how the program worked, and made a version you can try:
16
8
226
A memorably insane detail from 'The Doomsday Machine' by the late Daniel Ellsberg:
In 1960, the US Air Force would sometimes task the RAND Corporation with assessing new technical proposals. One memo titled "Project Retro" fell to Ellsberg to assess.
8
26
226
I really like these low-angle satellite photos of Earth 🛰
→
→
2
11
229
In the original puzzle, you might have been imagining traveling a line of constant latitude — that is, *always* heading east.
But that is not a great circle, and so not a straight line: you'd need to be constantly turning left to maintain that path.
2
5
216
Continued: "I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates...
1
2
206
I think part of the trickiness here is that straight lines on the Earth are not straight lines on most 2D projections of the Earth (maps), and vice-versa.
Which is why the shortest flight path between two cities often looks unnecessarily curved on a map.
2
2
190
... I remember sitting at my desk, looking at that document, and asking myself, for the first time: “Could I be in the wrong line of work?”
3
2
162
(To give an extreme example: imagine driving in a 10 meter radius around the North Pole. In order to always be traveling east — maintaining the same latitude — you'd need to be steering left the whole time)
3
1
161
The entire structure is aperiodic for space and time: it never perfectly resets, nor does it contain perfect copies of itself at any smaller scales. Which makes it especially tough to build a working demonstration without cheating. I'm in awe!
2
4
147
Should settling Mars be a current priority for longtermists? I think no, not by a long shot! (Let’s instead focus on preventing pandemics, decarbonising, making sure AGI doesn’t go terribly...)
Here’s why:
27
19
140
To state the obvious: it is really extraordinary how much more mainstream coverage of AI existential risk has recently become. All these stories in a ~2 month period!
5
11
143
Here's a better perspective: looking at Seattle centered on a globe, any straight line from Seattle will look like a straight line to you.
So with north pointing directly up, the path you take is a straight line directly to the right.
2
0
139
... the array of Atlas engines would be fired, as near simultaneously as possible, to stop the earth’s rotation momentarily.
The Soviet missiles, on their inertial path, would thus bypass or overfly their intended targets.
21
11
129
After pointing due east, and traveling continually forward in a straight line across the Earth's surface, the next country you hit after you leave North America is...
Australia.
4
1
127
Our *World* in Data with 12 new charts on space. Classic example of mission creep!
I love data, but I also love space, so I'm excited to say we have a brand new collection of charts on space exploration & satellites on
@OurWorldInData
! 🧑🚀🚀🪐
12 charts on launches (number & cost), astronauts, exoplanets, asteroids, pollution, spending…
16
59
317
2
9
127
Another Morgenbesser anecdote:
Ordering dessert, the waitress tells him it's either apple pie or blueberry pie. Sidney orders the apple pie. Then the waitress returns to say she forgot that cherry pie is also an option.
"In that case", he responds, "I'll have the blueberry pie"
J. L. Austin: "Although a double negative in English implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative."
Sidney Morgenbesser: "Yeah, yeah"
6
7
115
1
5
122
To be pedantic, by 'straight line' here I really mean 'geodesic' — the generalisation of 'straight line' for curved surfaces. but I think it's obvious enough.
If you're placed on a surface and continually walk "forward", by definition you will trace out a geodesic.
5
3
122
Very neat game to get intuitions for prompt injection: find ways to get LLM Gandalf to tell you the password for the level, except LLM Gandalf is instructed not to reveal the word 🧙
(I'm stuck on level 7)
15
8
116
Being a great circle, exactly half of the path you travel is in the Northern Hemisphere, and half in the Southern Hemisphere. It swoops under Africa to arrive at Australia somewhere near Perth.
4
0
119
Ok, what's going on here?
Forget about the Earth for a second, and just imagine you're standing on a big sphere.
Point in any direction, and begin walking forward along the surface of the sphere, without changing direction.
You'll loop round and return to where you started.
3
2
110
.
@OurWorldInData
has a couple new charts about space! 🚀
They show something striking: launch numbers completely plateaued for half a century, but have very recently *exploded*.
📈 Yearly:
📈 Cumulative:
11
30
111
.
@alexeyguzey
: "if you weren’t at Los Alamos in 1943, you probably thought nuclear weapons were 20 years away"
6
5
106
A few months ago I was hanging out with friends in the park and (I can't remember how) we got to talking with an academic-looking older man sitting on a bench under a tree.
1
2
104
Before all the takes (limitations, worries, predictions etc) I think a really appropriate first reaction to advances like this is, and will continue to be —
"Wow"
Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model.
Sora can create videos of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions.
Prompt: “Beautiful, snowy
10K
33K
140K
0
7
104
Pangrams:
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" → unnecesarily long; not even slightly ominous
"Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow" → why did we go with the one about the fox when this exists?
4
11
99
There are some exceptions: any straight line on a 'gnomonic projection' (pictured) is an arc of a great circle (straight line) on a sphere.
But how natural to think a straight line on a more familiar map is a straight line on the surface of the Earth!
2
0
93
Here's a cool idea I heard from a games designer once: a way to compare the complexity, or depth, of different games →
🧵
11
4
91
Notice, just intuitively, how you'll have walked the full circumference of the sphere: a 'great circle'.
In order to trace out a smaller circle than that, you'd need to be constantly veering left or right.
2
0
86
Anyway, I hope that's clear!
I first saw this puzzle on Marc Ordower's excellent TikTok page, of all places.
6
0
88
I think there's an 'ideas overhang' in EA.
The number of interesting / useful / important ideas has outgrown the number of ideas that have been communicated well, or at all.
7
6
85
Gold medal time in 100m final at the first modern Olympic games (1896): 12.0 seconds
Current record for fastest 100m by a pantomime horse (2009): 12.0 seconds
Progress in athletics!
1
10
87
New White House announcement on AI today.
Some promising signs: interest in the overlap with biosecurity, improving infosec for top labs, and some kind of initiative where labs are committing to model evaluations.
3
16
84
Still pinching myself that this is a working library you can just wander inside and use. What a privilege. And it's rarely full!
2
2
77
I wrote about some EA projects I'd like to see —
11
2
73
Of all the "we're closer to year X than Y"s, the most striking for me is that we're now closer to 2030 than the beginning of 2016
2
8
74
This just in: infinity — as in the smallest infinite ordinal 𝜔 — is even
8
7
75
The map of undersea cables is like a wiring diagram for the planet. They are what connects the internet: ~all international traffic flows through them
5
8
73
I think this deserves appreciation: most UK government websites are noticeably very well-designed.
9
0
73
There's been talk recently about ulterior motives for expressing concern about advanced AI. But it's hard to read this as anything but a genuine, and emotionally difficult, and altogether inconvenient, change of mind
2
2
71
You will travel across North America, and onto the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, you will hit another country.
What is the first country you hit?
19
1
68
I got reminded of that encounter because my friend shared David's obituary from a couple days ago.
"[He] would have been shocked", said a friend of the family, "that he died quietly in his own bed".
RIP — what a life!
0
0
65
The 'centipede game' is one of the strangest things in game theory. Two players take turns to either pass on a growing pot to the other player, or take a slightly larger share of the existing pot for themselves. (1/11)
9
17
62
Ellsberg: "[it] proposed in some detail to assemble a huge rectangular array of one thousand first-stage Atlas engines—our largest rocket[s]—to be fastened securely to the earth in a horizontal position, facing in a direction opposite to the rotation of the earth...
2
3
60
Awesome artistic recreation of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.
I find it hard to imagine how present-day CDMX was raised from a 5000 square kilometre inland sea, since ~entirely drained. Some generation-spanning civil engineering!
a Portrait of Tenochtitlan, my 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec Empire is released!
I've been looking forward to this for a long time, and I am really curious what all of you think.
Take a look:
#tenochtitlan
716
7K
20K
2
9
56
Someone once wrote an anagram of Moby Dick.
As in, a new novel created by rearranging the 935,763 letters of Melville's original
3
3
56
Very fun idea: a timeline of the past where every dot is a historical event from Wikipedia.
2
15
53
First clean water, now clean air
3
15
53
Positive impact via improving important Wikipedia pages: hugely underrated
5
3
53
@bryan_caplan
@MatthewJBar
I forgot to mention the period of the bet, potentially making Bryan's bet look more vague than it was. The bet was that no AI would score an A by January 2029.
1
0
53
I would not have guessed this: the median American adult consumes <0.5 drinks per week
a major American industry that no one talks about is bundling alcoholism with other things so that people will pay without having to admit they're alcoholics
casinos, all inclusive resorts, vibe restaurants with crap food, guy who spent $32k on doordash - all alcoholism bundles
43
72
1K
12
2
53
OpenAI announced their API for ChatGPT today.
1 million tokens processed for $2. It's 90% cheaper to run since December, and 10% the cost per token of their previous best GPT models.
Machine-generated text is already ~too cheap to meter...
1
3
49
... [it] envisioned that if our [radars] detected and reported on the huge viewing screens at NORAD a large flight of missile warheads coming across the North Pole from the Soviet Union...
1
1
49
Play it cool... 😱
6
0
49
Listening to a history audiobook while having breakfast. Learning that one of the great and unusual luxuries afforded to Charlemagne was to hear histories read aloud during his meals, from the finest tutors in the world. We've come far!
0
1
46
I was curious how GPT-4o would do on the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test’ (RMET), which gauges accuracy in recognising mental states from black-and-white photos of people's eyes.
It just got 26/36 when I tested it, which is roughly human-level.
1
0
47
Kevin Kelly (
@kevin2kelly
) is working on a book project trying to imagine feasible AI-enabled futures for humanity that are desirable.
It's sad and surprising to me how little serious attention this question gets!
3
4
45
A neat riddle for the holidays. How can Halloween equal Christmas?
7
3
46
A new kind of space race could be on, and things are moving fast. So shouldn’t we be paying more attention to the future of space governance? 🛰
Excited to share this problem profile I wrote for
@80000Hours
—
2
8
45
The scheme, which had already passed through multiple agencies without being discarded, was prompted by the worry that a surprise Soviet attack with ICBMs could incapacitate US land-based missiles before they could retaliate.
2
2
42
Reading, music, and media highlights from 2023 so far
0
0
9
... Last year, the chip industry produced more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies in all other industries in all human history."
3
7
44
Here's a quick observation about forecasting —
Sometimes the act of predicting the chance of something happening can affect the chance that it happens. You might think this most often makes it impossible to give an accurate guess. But that's not quite right! 🧵
1
5
42
Unclear if there are *ten* people in the world who (i) have experience with or a good practical understanding of US regulation / legislation and (ii) have thought significantly (2+ years) about risks from advanced AI
9
4
43
There’s a nice line in Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’:
“Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”
7
1
41