ChadNauseam

We can take a simpler example. Let's say someone conjectures that all linear maps are isomorphic if they have the same domain and codomain*. A counterexample is easy to find, but true insight would be to notice that all linear maps with the same domain and codomain that are not isomorphic map some non-zero elements to zero. That is much more interesting than just finding a counterexample. Although, that isn't to say that finding a counterexample is not very interesting.

*statements only apply to maps whose domain is finite-dimensional

Grace Hopper is the goat but I'm not sure she would have immediately come to mind for me. Actually, if someone asked me to name any hero of mine, irrespective of sex, I don't know if I could quickly name someone. Is it really a huge indictment?

Parakeet, probably the most popular model for handy-style transcription, doesn't include a "text-to-speech LLMs" or any other form of LLM

For homelessness, it's things like shelters, free meals, needle exchanges, etc. Make the life of the homeless easier without actually getting them into permanent housing. The actual solution to eliminate homelessness is to build more housing, along with financial arrangements to incentivize ownership and make it possible.

I love the idea of building more housing, but I think a lot of homeless people have an income of literally 0, so wouldn't they be homeless regardless of how cheap housing is?

For many construction projects (like say CAHSR), it's performing endless studies about how to build the project without actually building it. Some level of design is necessary for successful outcomes, but many agencies go around in circles with proposals and reports and environmental impact studies and voter referendums without actually having anyone actually pick up a shovel and start moving dirt.

Environmental impact studies are required by federal law for projects receiving federal funding. It's not CAHSR's fault that they have to be done. You then have to go through the process of acquiring land along the track, which you probably should do before people start moving dirt (it's going to be pretty embarrassing if your track has a hole in the middle where someone refused to sell their house).

there are better models that are state of the art now like Nemotron and Parakeet both by Nvidia

Is parakeet state of the art? It always transcribes speech fragments for me, like if I stutter and say "m-m-m-map" parakeet will dutifully transcribe "m m m map". Which I guess could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you want. Whisper does not do that however.

I do like cohere transcribe a lot.

As for offline, yeah, my Internet web page doesn't work offline.

That's really too bad honestly. What about your users who want to use your site when they're offline? Sympathy with those users is why I made sure that my site works well when offline.

Improving service is much better, but the relative scales here are crazy. She options are "completely eliminate cost" or "slightly improve service in one two-mile stretch". Granted, 10 million trips a year go through that two-mile stretch that was improved, but that's just a small fraction of all bus trips in SF.

If we had to stick to transportation-specific improvements, I would use the money to eliminate bus fare for a year. (muni generates about $100M in fare, so really it would be enough money to eliminate fare for ~3 years.)

Unlike subway fare, bus fare doesn't prevent n'er-do-wells from getting on the bus (they just ignore the fare and get on anyway), and it probably increases ridership and gets some people out of their cars, which reduces congestion (public benefit and therefore deserving of government subsidy).

We definitely need more metro, trams, bus routes, and bike paths. I especially want the latter because I bike to and from work every day. However, I have to wonder about the cost of these projects. In SF, we recently spent $346 million on the Van Ness Improvement Project, which added 2 miles of bus lanes. I just can't see how that's a good use of funds. If someone gave me $346 million and told me to improve society, I could think of many better options than adding two miles of bus lane. So a prerequisite to the whole idea seems to involve solving whatever is making these projects so expensive.

As a user I don't really appreciate sites that do this as they tend to have worse latency for UI interactions and less pleasant page transitions. And of course, they are unusable offline

Do you pick your databases based on how quickly they compile and how many dependencies they have? I normally chose based on factors like performance and reputation for reliability

There's an odd idea that increasing the number of educated people in the country makes it harder to find jobs. Where is it easiest to find software jobs? Probably san francisco. You'd think it'd be easiest in some small town in idaho where you'd be the only software developer, right? You'd have no competition! But instead it's the easiest where all the other software developers are. The causation is two-way. Software developers go to san francisco because that's where jobs are, and companies start in san francisco because that's where software developers are.

That's agglomeration effects, and it disproves the idea on its own. If america is the place where all the talented engineers and scientists go, that is a very very good thing for engineers and scientists in america. Or you are free to go try to be an engineer or scientist in estonia, and see if you make more money due to the lack of competition. (Most top engineering and science talent in estonia leaves for other countries, which by your logic should be amazing for the remaining domestic talent.)

No, the bar has risen to "people aren't literally starving (anymore)." Amazing.

It's easy to say that now, but it used to be that all mainstream typed languages had absolutely terrible type systems that got in your way as much as they helped

It just doesn't make that much sense to me. "And also the entire movie staff that chose floors with seven pointed stars for the bank" - so the entire movie staff is antisemitic? And what is the connection between a seven pointed star and Judaism / antisemitism anyway?

and cunning, greedy creatures with long, hooked noses that run the wizarding bank

I don't think they're portrayed as greedy? Although I'm willing to be proven wrong if anyone has textual evidence otherwise. They are also mistreated by wizards in the books, which I think portrayed them sympathetically. I remember scenes where Harry notices their mistreatment and thinks it's wrong

The banks are run by goblins with big noses.

I can believe that the origins of this trope are antisemetic, but I don't see very much reason to think that any antisemitic mindset was in JK Rowling's head when she wrote it.

I don’t. although I tried to get it to tell me how to take crack cocaine, and it wouldn’t. But when I was taking grey market peptides, claude walked me through reconstituting, dosing and administering them. I assumed it would behave similarly for other drugs, but it doesn’t seem to

I'd guess opus refusals are not an issue for 95%+ of people. Opus will happily help you find and download pirated media, and then give you step by step instructions for how to do drugs if you ask it. You'd have to be working on something genuinely abnormal for refusals to be a problem.

That doesn't make much sense to me. How can you blame someone for a problem they didn't cause?

That just pushes it back one level for me, because I never got why kinetic energy is the integral of momentum w.r.t. velocity

It might be miserable for you, but it sounds great for your customers. I am genuinely sympathetic though.

I would never want to compel someone else to buy services from me if they had a better option available. My goal is to make money by contributing to society, not force others to pay me for services they don't want from me. If AI makes it so programmers aren't needed anymore, well, I had a good run and made good money while it lasted. I'll find something else productive to do.

Yes it is far better to do nothing than to something that makes the situation worse

If everyone is deficient, then it must not be that important.

Most people are overweight. Does that make being a healthy weight not that important?

But the WASM is integrated into the file. So what scenario would happen where the decode fails? They wrote a file, wrote a wasm decoder, and didn't test the decoder against the file they just wrote? I think it would be a natural step as part of the publish pipeline to run the decoder against the file and compare the output against the source to ensure correctness.

The basic premise of "have a factory that produces reactors small enough to ship" always made sense to my uneducated mind. Is there a flaw in the idea? It seems like it should be much cheaper than if every reactor were bespoke

Can you point to an example of this happening in the past? Where a supply shortage leads to price increases and "record profits", and the price never goes back down?

That describes pretty much every server I've ever written lol.

Downloaded it and giving it a try. I love the aesthetics and how colorful it is! It is also pleasant to use and fast, although my personal preference is TUIs that don't break scrollback (claude code actually does a good job at this).