@surmenok
Account based inUnited States
About this account
- Account based in
- United States
- Connected via
- United States App Store
Account-level information from X, not a live location or the device used for a specific post.
RL research
Redwood City, CA
Joined July 2009
- Tweets12K
- Following7K
- Followers3.7K
- Likes11K
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
Elevator operators.
The chances of:
human drivers overriding the autonomous stack and causing damage >> autonomous stack causing damage
Minneapolis is drafting a rule that every commercial driverless car in the city keeps a licensed, paid human within reach of the controls at all times, at minimum wage or better, with a city license before the first ride. The public hearing is September 22.
Waymo has been testing there since last November with people in the cars and has not carried a passenger. A state bill that would have kept cities from writing rules like this failed at the Legislature in March.
Waymo calls it a de facto ban. The sponsors call it Workers Drive Minneapolis. Both are reading the same sentence, one that lets the car drive itself as long as someone is paid to sit where the driver used to.
ALT Dusk on a snowy downtown Minneapolis street. A white autonomous car with a rooftop sensor dome drives past, with a person sitting in the driver's seat, hands resting near the wheel. Snow on the curbs, warm street lights, the skyline and a light rail train behind.
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
Amazing!
Residents of Effingham County, Georgia are having their property taxes cut by about 30%!
Why?
Because OpenAI is opening a data center, and it's going to pay the taxes instead!
Dario is right
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
To those claiming catastrophic negative outcomes are impossible science fiction, 5 yrs ago ~50% accuracy was sota for LLMs on math like the below (src: GSM8K). It then took a couple yrs to saturate that benchmark. We’re already living in science fiction, and it’s accelerating.
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
Anthropic’s Economics team is sharing a new model of how AI might affect economic growth, jobs, wages, and more by 2030.
Explore the scenarios, tell us what you think will happen, and see how your answers compare to more than 10,000 Americans. anthropic.com/institute/econ…
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
Yesterday, West Virginia put out a report on how data centers are affecting the state. How?
They're making it rich.
Data centers are allowing the state to cut income taxes, fund schools, rebuild sewers and water treatment facilities, curb electrical costs, and generate jobs!
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
Congestion pricing SAVES LIVES!
Emergency medical crews are able to respond about a minute faster thanks to the reduced traffic and increased speed that congestion pricing causes.
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
Latest insanity: going after autonomous vehicles *because* they use electricity.
This is the decel crowd that supports electrification right up to the moment it becomes practical, then oppose it.
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
1/3
SCMP: "China’s top economic planner has held meetings over two consecutive days on accelerating major construction projects, signalling urgency over bolstering fixed-asset investment as economic momentum slows."
scmp.com/economy/china-econo…
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
Today, we're releasing Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1. While the model is getting slightly better at a lot of things, I expect many users to appreciate that Fable 5.1 solves agentic coding tasks at roughly half the cost of Fable 5.
I personally also really like it's writing style, which imho sounds a lot more natural then our previous models did.
Some other personal highlights below!
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
It's really annoying that, practically speaking, AirBnB ratings range between 4.5 and 4.99 and anything below that is some sort of hell on earth.
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
A few notes on Anthropic's new Claude Fable 5.1 - with Max thinking level I got the best SVG pelican I've had from any Anthropic model (at a hefty cost of $3.30!), which I then had it animate simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1…
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure.
- Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it.
- Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality.
- The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use.
- Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled.
Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently.
New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. worksinprogress.co/issue/jus…
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
Residents of Effingham County, GA are going to see their property taxes go down by about ~$200/year per $100,000 of taxable home value.
Why?
Because OpenAI is coming to town and their data center is paying enough property tax that the town can afford to lower everyone's bills!
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
Because using light with a wavelength of 13.5 nm (EUV) or of 193 nm (ILT) to draw rectangles much smaller (>10 nm) means light acts like a wave, follows quantum physics laws and requires crazy mathematical modeling to figure out what pattern light will create when it hits the silicon wafer
So the mask (stencil) to make a plus sign pattern on a wafer now looks like the pattern on the right
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
cool tesla FSD:
was in the left lane and suddenly FSD started drifting left into the shoulder and slowing down some — wtf??
then car ahead of me in the right lane swerved halfway into my lane
FSD had seen debris ahead of the other car and anticipated it swerving at me
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
People still aren't quite pricing in how revolutionary FSD is going to be to human life, and how transport works now.
Anecdote: I go pick up the Bangalorean at the Marin ferry to be chivalrous, but really, I don't touch the wheel at all and just put on FSD and sit in the driver's seat the entire way listening to podcasts.
There's no reason for me to be in the car. If I could, I'd just punch in the round trip into the routing, and have the car go pick her up and drive her back. It's good enough at this point to do it, just the law and custom is in the way. Humans don't need to drive anymore.
Now imagine how much of your life would change if you could send, get picked up by, or send off somewhere a comfy box with wheels (and networked screens that run AI) at any point or place in your life.
Not Uber, with the wait and get on and share a space and maybe the car stinks. Your own personal mini-lounge and storage space that you can send off or make appear anywhere.
Kids now take themselves to and back from school. Parking no longer a hassle as you can dispatch the car to find itself a place to wait (or even do robotaxi work and make you some cash). You can run anything across town, or have anything sent to you in real-time. Friend flying in? Hey, will send you a car to the airport and have it drop you off at our dinner venue. Heck, you can take a nap or do a meeting inside your pod on wheels if you're in between places.
It'll be this new mobile third place that most everyone will have, while nobody thinks about the stress or time wasted of just staring at the car in front of you and keeping it in a lane (often in slow traffic). As a side benefit of FSD, you totally tune out all the surrounding cars and aggravation associated with dealing with erratic human drivers. Someone cuts you off? Eh, you did it to AI. Someone honks...you're yelling at a bot man. Who cares? Cortisol levels just plunge when FSD is running things since you're no longer the mediating consciousness.
It probably sounds like SF scifi hokum to those who still drive, but FSD knowers know how it just utterly changes everything about moving through the world. Going back to driving feels like having to giddy-up a horse....something nobody would do if they could avoid it. Things are about to get weird.
Pavel Surmenok retweeted
Columbia County, GA is in the final stages of agreeing to let Google come in, build a data center, and pay $40m in property tax
The cool part? They currently collect $25m total
The deal is being set up to let them get rid of property taxes for residents since the DC is enough!
