My mastodon account: @vardi@fediscience.org
Professor, Rice U., Houston
Joined April 2008
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Supreme Court Rejects Trump Administration Request to Intervene in California Ballot Case nytimes.com/2026/11/02/us/po…
Moshe Vardi retweeted
In the age of AI, students need a “Great Books” curriculum more than ever, the MIT English professor @SirJoshBennett argues. theatlantic.com/books/2026/1…
Moshe Vardi retweeted
The AI people promising cures "generally have never actually worked on disease biology, and don’t have an appreciation for just how complicated it is,” said a retired VP and former CTO at biopharmaceutical company Amgen. healthjournalism.org/blog/20…
Moshe Vardi retweeted
An underground activist group says it plans to start openly doxing billionaires as part of a phased campaign against what it calls the American oligarchy—starting with Elon Musk and Tesla’s board. wired.com/story/anti-oligarc…
Moshe Vardi retweeted
WTF?
We asked GPT-6 Astra to edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math.
It directly changed only 0.016% of weights, fixing 0.8B's reasoning loops & improving math up to 6x and even instruction following 3x, without gradients or training.
We call this Weight-Space Programming: frontier LLMs can now natively read/write neural network weights! 🧵
Blog: rikiyat.github.io/blog/weigh…
Moshe Vardi retweeted
Wikipedia may be the Web's greatest accomplishment, but it is not infallible, and in several hot-button issues, it has been captured by activists. One of the most egregious is its rewriting of "Zionism" after 10/7: quillette.substack.com/p/how…
Moshe Vardi retweeted
In my 2022 CACM article, I wrote "we sit a long way from my dream task of taking one of my research papers, with its informal proofs, and having an AI system fill in the details and verify the proof."
Less than five years later, I learned that I didn't dream big enough.
1/2
Moshe Vardi retweeted
Artificial intelligence will transform more jobs than it eliminates outright. The biggest productivity gains will come not from incorporating AI into existing workflows but from redesigning those workflows entirely. @MITshapingwork mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-…
Moshe Vardi retweeted
‘A lot of Republicans have held their tongues:’ Anger at Trump is growing politi.co/3X16jJJ
Moshe Vardi retweeted
here are my thoughts about OpenAI's amazing Mat Mul result. comments very welcome.
Moshe Vardi retweeted
How can the BBC teach about Adolf Hitler with no meaningful reference to the Holocaust?
In its biography of Adolf Hitler, BBC Bitesize – an educational resource for GCSE students – apparently fails to mention key events which led to the Holocaust, including any reference to the “Final Solution”, a plan devised by the Nazis to orchestrate the mass murder of European Jews. It also makes no reference to Kristallnacht, a coordinated, state-led pogrom where Jewish homes, businesses, schools, and synagogues were looted and burned resulting in over 30,000 Jewish men being arrested and sent to concentration camps.
This pathetic attempt at educating students is so alarmingly vacant of key historical references that it almost reads as a whitewash of the Nazi dictator’s brutality.
At a time when antisemitism in schools is at a record high, how can we expect the situation to improve if our resources even on Holocaust education – let alone contemporary antisemitism – are so woefully inadequate.
Combatting antisemitism starts with education, and the BBC must urgently revise this resource.
gbnews.com/news/bbc-bitesize…
Moshe Vardi retweeted
🇺🇸 Pentagon officials are secretly collecting evidence that could bring down Pete Hegseth.
Several Defense Department officials have reportedly spent nearly two years collecting emails, memos and meeting notes about the defense secretary.
And they're taking no chances with the evidence.
Copies are reportedly hidden in a gun safe in Virginia, a bank vault in Washington, and a third location on the West Coast.
The officials allege Hegseth and his inner circle ignored legal advice, kept information from Congress and threatened the careers of people who challenged them.
Some have even met lawmakers at sandwich shops and dog parks, away from Capitol Hill.
Now they're waiting to see if Democrats win the House next week, potentially opening the door to an impeachment investigation in 2027.
In the words of one officer: "We're ready with the receipts."
For now, the evidence remains hidden, and whether it ever becomes an impeachment case could come down to who controls Congress.
Source: Raw Story / Writer: Dani
Moshe Vardi retweeted
Despite the agency's human resources department saying he hadn’t even been onboarded, Jeremy Lewin oversaw the destruction of USAID. It’s not clear he had the legal authority to do so.
buff.ly/GMndDrY
Moshe Vardi retweeted
Please announce your new results related to not-ETH here: ethdiscussion.blog/2026/11/0…
AI and the Evolution of Academic Research trustindigitallife.eu/event/…
Moshe Vardi retweeted
With a number of anti-data-center candidates poised to win on Tuesday, New York provides a glimpse at the tensions around actually having to do something about the digital infrastructure. buff.ly/sx2Jylp
Moshe Vardi retweeted
Musk invested $736 million in the second Trump administration and got back $16.3 billion, a return of 2,200 percent. trib.al/6vif7U8
Moshe Vardi retweeted
Republicans are likely to lose control of the House of Representatives. The Senate might also go. Under the old rules of US politics, that would turn Trump into a lame duck.
Yet, no one Ed Luce interviewed thought the lame duck status would fit him: ft.trib.al/410RvVZ
Moshe Vardi retweeted
My views on AI have radically shifted over the past few weeks, after spending way too much time reading about it and watching interviews of industry leaders and experts.
First, I really love the tools. I spend $200 on Claude every month and the product is worth every penny for me. Probably even more. I think the existing tools can deliver significant increase to future GDP and help us solve major global challenges faced by humanity.
However, I just cannot comprehend why the industry is not much more regulated, as its leaders and employees seem to request themselves. I meet a lot of people who have heard of the hugging face incident but don’t know the actual chain of events. If you don’t, you definitely should spend a least an hour reading about it.
I also do not know why we need to follow the path that frontier labs are following, to develop ever more powerful models. It seems to me that they are enormous gains that are readily available if we deploy the current technology in economic and scientific organizations without pursuing a super intelligence that they say might kill us and more likely wreak havoc in society. I know a lot of people think these warnings are marketing tricks, and that’s a reasonable assumption. But I don’t see the point of taking such risks.
My median scenario is that of many economists: AI will diffuse slowly and lift gdp growth by a percentage point or so, will cause some economic disruption on the way, but ultimately people will get new jobs and maybe work less.
However, I am deeply uncomfortable with the absolutely wild level of uncertainty around this prediction. And to be honest, even setting the doom scenarios aside, I find the utopia scenarios of some industry leaders actually dystopian. And I think a large majority of the public would agree if they paid attention to what they’re saying. To their credit, they themselves agree publicly that they should not be the ones making these choices. A large majority of the public is now very skeptical of AI as a source of human progress, in particular among younger adults who use it the most. They should have a say.
I don’t want to convince you of anything but to get informed about this topic, express yourself and vote accordingly.