Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 2d

It should be illegal to automatically subscribe ppl to marketing substacks. I mean, it is already, but nobody seems to care...

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Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 2d

Conventional wisdom used to be to a wait for v2 of a product to be really good.

Then it was v3, because the iPhone 3 was the first really good iPhone

Then it was v4, because GPT 4 was the first really good LLM.

Who's going to make the next product that's only good in v5?

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Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 2d

The chair is not straight: the back of the chair is on their side. Apparently it's a meme that bi people sit weird.

Reposted by Giovanni Campagna

Tim Kellogg @timkellogg.me · 3d

i feel like DSPy is beginning to occupy the Haskell tier

everyone: "DSPy is great, all LLM programming should be done like this"

narrator: "No real LLM programming is done this way"

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Reposted by Giovanni Campagna

Nordcraft @nordcraft.com · 3d

ANNOUNCEMENT! 📣

Introducing Nordcraft's BAD UX WORLD CUP running until the end of October!

Build a bad date picker, put it live, and win a shit trophy! 💩

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Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 3d

dude wat

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Reposted by Giovanni Campagna

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 4d

Average man, average man
Median height, weight, and arm span
Fits a shirt, medium size
Airplane legroom will suffice
Is he strong? Bro come on
He ordered dumbbells off Amazon
He won't drive into town
Transit pass gets him around
Look out! Here comes the average man

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Reposted by Giovanni Campagna

econmaett @econmaett.github.io · 4d

@chartle.cc
Too easy

📈 Chartle for 06 Oct 2025: Population

Guessed in 1 try
✅⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️

Play at chartle.cc

Chartle - A daily chart game

Guess the country in red by analysing today's chart

chartle.cc

1 4 6

Reposted by Giovanni Campagna

Myra Cheng @myra.bsky.social · 6d

AI always calling your ideas “fantastic” can feel inauthentic, but what are sycophancy’s deeper harms? We find that in the common use case of seeking AI advice on interpersonal situations—specifically conflicts—sycophancy makes people feel more right & less willing to apologize.

Screenshot of paper title: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence

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Reposted by Giovanni Campagna

Jerry Chen @jcsalterego.bsky.social · 4d

when our ancestors were like "make the water over the fire taste like what we put in the water," they were really cookin

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Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 4d

And yet we thank you for your service

Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 4d

It's weird seeing some of the LLM discourse. Like, "LLMs don't reason, they produce the statistically most likely reasoning token" is a truer intuition than most give them credit for (esp under distillation), and yet it's completely useless because it doesn't tell you anything

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Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 5d

I would guess the second slice is larger, cause it's impossible to scroll Discover or For You and not go "wtf is this waffle thing?"

Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 5d

Things that can all be true at once:

1. The predecessors of LLMs/Transformers (RNNs) were Markovian
2. Anything can be Markovian, if you define the state accordingly (we still call RL envs MDPs)
3. None of that matters to whether LLMs are useful or intelligent or even well understood

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Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 6d

Old school threads? I used to really like those on Twitter, it forces you to condensate threads in a way that Facebook-style long posts don't

Reposted by Giovanni Campagna

Mike Masnick @mmasnick.bsky.social · 7d

Literally last week every MAGA idiot around was insisting, loudly, how terrible it was that the Biden admin pressured YouTube to remove COVID misinfo, even as YouTube said it ignored the pressure. Those same folks will either be silent or cheer this on:

Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 7d

This was done at the direction of Pam Bondi. The US government is now dictating what apps you can have on your phone.

The underlying threat here is if Apple didn't comply, they'd slap billions in tariffs on Apple products.

Alt text: Screenshot of a Fox News Digital article reporting that Apple removed the ICEBlock tracking app from its App Store after the Department of Justice raised safety concerns. The article states DOJ officials, under Attorney General Pam Bondi, asked Apple to take down the app, claiming it endangered law enforcement officers and shielded illegal immigrants. Bondi confirmed the removal in a statement, saying ICEBlock put ICE agents at risk and emphasized DOJ’s commitment to protecting federal officers.

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Reposted by Giovanni Campagna

ca-dmv-bot @ca-dmv-bot.bsky.social · 7d

Customer: YOU SO DUMB
DMV: YOU SO DUMB

Verdict: DENIED

California license plate with text "USO DUMB".

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Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 7d

OpenAI is Windows: the default, enormous market share, alternates ok and bad releases

Claude is iOS/macOS: niche but with a very committed user base

The OSS ones are Linux: there's too many of them and ppl spend too long arguing about them

Gemini is Android: so incredibly, quintessentially Google

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Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 8d

Fertility ritual, clearly

Dr Alex Cruikshanks @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 8d

Historians in 2,000 years will find this and have to interpret it.

Sky Marchini @sky.skymarchini.net · 8d

the pregnant cat that got cucked by the personal trainer in a racism way is still all time great

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Reposted by Giovanni Campagna

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 9d

The Emperor was once out in the provinces, when he saw a peasant who looked remarkably like him. Summoning the man over, he asked if his mother had ever worked in the palace. "No, sir," the peasant replied, "But my father did."

Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social · 9d

The opening poem of the Man'yoshu, the very first anthology of Japanese poems dating from 759 AD, is the Emperor hitting on a peasant woman.

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Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 9d

The difference between growing lots of fresh tasty vegetables, and not!

Also applies to Italian, Greek food, and my advisor, who was from Hong Kong, would make this point about Cantonese food too

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 10d

every British dish is meat + potatoes + a carb, contains 3500 calories and was invented by a gentleman farmer

every French dish is a weed you can find in a ditch, an inedible bit of meat thrown away by an aristocrat, and a sauce, it was invented in the middle of a famine and tastes incredible.

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 10d

it's a meat and potato pasty inside a buttered bun, beat that France

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Reposted by Giovanni Campagna

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 10d

e-mdash

qntm @qntm.org · 10d

Are you old enough to remember the hyphen in "e-mail"

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Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 10d

Hot take: the superbowl half-time show is for celebrities past their peak, and it feels wrong to include Bad Bunny in that

Reposted by Giovanni Campagna

Popehat Agitates And Irritates @kenwhite.bsky.social · 11d

What will poor Eric Adams do for work?
That’s nbody’s business but the Turks!

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Giovanni Campagna @gcampax.com · 12d

It's also likely the most common. Like, unreported cash tips, incorrect business expenses, unreported side hustle income... a lot of space for small crimes, even before you get to unreported foreign bank accounts, shell companies, and fake invoices

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