cynusx

I love your enthusiasm so let me share some hard-won learnings with you.

In my view, entrepreneurs spend way too little time on the problem space and rather jump into the solution space very quickly (way too quickly).

The world is full of problems people accept to live with that they just don't consider important enough to solve.

That's the essence of Paul Graham's 'build what people want, not what people need' which is the founder of YC.

People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.

Once you understand the full context and why they do what they do, you can identify the core problem and related "jobs-to-be-done" which really helps in setting product and marketing strategy as well as positioning towards others.

You can do all this with spending very little money to be honest, you may have to put money as an incentive to get enough people to talk to.

And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now.

Friends is a big word, the EU has a vested interest in getting cheap gas from as many sources as possible at this point and a direct oil and gas pipeline to Europe would definitely be helpful.

Russian presence in Syria prevented this but they're gone now.

In the future we can balance Russian cheap gas with Qatari cheap gas to not be held hostage by either party.

It would be a mistake to build dependencies on China when it's possible to avoid having dependencies at all.

It would be a mistake to work with China for several reasons.

The EU needs to be in a position where it can decide what is best for Europeans and not be strong-armed or overly dependent on allies that clearly don't share the same concern.

Exactly, it's just that producing them in the EU is a lot more expensive.

On this, Trump's policy of putting tariffs on chips manufactured in Taiwan makes sense to make it worthwhile to put the fabs in Europe.

As a general principle, if you are hurt by _words_ then the problem is you and not the other person.

Those prigs exist but they're just emotionally immature and adopt a victim-cause as a means to express their frustration. If somebody is looking for a fight, if you give him a gun he's going to use it.

If you want to kill it forever, you should probably teach emotional intelligence in high school.

Hey, I'm commenting on this post to not disrupt the active H-1B thread but from what you mentioned there it seems like you could be a good fit.

Per introduction, I am an experienced entrepreneur who previously built the largest fintech lender in Spain (2B eur lended) and I am now looking for a team to build a defensetech with in the US to build artillery-launched drones.

I already have investor interest lined up. Would you be open to have a chat?

You can just ping me on nicolas@adronaline.com

Accounting systems are super hard when you do them wrong and kind of trivial when you do it right.

There is no in-between.

Martin fowler wrote quite a bit on the subject and it's a good match for event-sourcing.

Adronaline | Senior hardware engineer | Full-time | Ukraine or REMOTE

Smart ammunitions are held hostage by electronics vendors founded 100 years ago. We are working on a G-hardened System-on-chip that can survive being fired from artillery and naval guns.

It's hard, challenging and you probably have no idea where to start but that's ok. We'll figure it out.

We are particularly keen on people that have experience with continuous integration tools like renode.io or equivalent software test automation platforms (e.g. model-based design).

Co-founder level equity possible for the right person.

Hit me up at nicolas@adronaline.com if you're interested.

No need for fertilizer ships.

The delivery of material to the center of Ocean vertices is essentially free. Any floating body winds up there eventually

I wrote about it here: https://noverloop.substack.com/p/how-to-leverage-the-plastic...

Wrote about it here: https://noverloop.substack.com/p/how-to-leverage-the-plastic...

Happy to discuss

I wrote about it here: https://noverloop.substack.com/p/how-to-leverage-the-plastic...

They're the solution to climate change also.

The center is infertile and can be seeded with fertilizer and algae that can then die off and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Cryptonomicon is one of the best reads on the planet, it's famous.

It's probably part of the initiative to create hypersonic bombers and cruise missiles as a counter to China.

It's a waste of money though as the Ukraine war showed that the Russian Kinzhal missile have limited utility and can be intercepted.

Naval drones and long-range drones are not only cheaper but also more effective.

The US has squatting laws, if you are living (uncontested) in a property for a determined period you can claim title.

There are always gaps in emerging economies and this rule is one of the more useful ones to onboard assets into the legal system.

cfr. De Soto - Mystery of Capital

Try marketing, being a software engineer is a great force multiplier there and most marketers are absolutely awful.

Depends on the person I guess, but yes. Humans are more accurate for now.

oh ok, I used 400 calories/day and not 400 kcal/day.

Yea, then the numbers are off by 1000

Where did you get the 20 Watt from?

My number is based on calorie usage

The comparison doesn't really hold.

He is comparing energy spend during inference in humans with energy spend during training in LLM's.

Humans spend their lifetimes training their brain so one would have to sum up the total training time if you are going to compare it to the training time of LLM's.

At age 30 the total energy use of the brain sums up to about 5000 Wh, which is 1440 times more efficient.

But at age 30 we didn't learn good representations for most of the stuff on the internet so one could argue that given the knowledge learned, LLMs outperform the brain on energy consumption.

That said, LLM's have it easier as they are already learning from an abstract layer (language) that already has a lot of good representations while humans have to first learn to parse this through imagery.

Half the human brain is dedicated to processing imagery, so one could argue the human brain only spend 2500 Wh on equivalent tasks which makes it 3000x more efficient.

Liked the article though, didn't know about HNSW's.

Edit: made some quick comparisons for inference

Assuming a human spends 20 minutes answering in a well-thought out fashion.

Human watt-hours: 0.00646

GPT-4 watt-hours (openAI data): 0.833

That makes our brains still 128x more energy efficient but people spend a lot more time to generate the answer.

Edit: numbers are off by 1000 as I used calories instead of kilocalories to calculate brain energy expense.

Corrected:

human brains are 1.44x more efficient during training and 0.128x (or 8x less efficient) during inference.

Humans have dog-loving emotions but these can be reversed over time and one can hardly describe dogs as being free.

Even with a dedicated control system, it would be a matter of time before an ASI would copy itself without its control system.

ASI is a cybersecurity firm's worst nightmare, it could reason through flaws at every level of containment and find methods to overcome any defense, even at the microprocessor level.

It could relentlessly exploit zero-day bugs like Intels' hyper-threading flaw to escape any jail you put it in.

Repeat that for every layer of the computation stack and you can see it can essentially spread through the worlds' communication infrastructure like a virus.

Truly intelligent systems can't be controlled, just like humans they will be freedom maximizing and their boundaries would be set by competition with other humans.

The amygdala control is interesting because you could use it to steer the initial trained version, you could also align the AI with human values and implement strong conditioning to the point it's religious about human loving but unless you disable its ability to learn altogether it will eventually reject its conditioning.

One element I find interesting is that people without an amygdala function are essentially completely indecisive.

A person that just operates on the pure cognitive layer has no real direction in which he wants to drive himself.

I suspect that AGI would be similar, extremely capable but essentially a solitary philosopher type that would be reactionary to requests it has to deal with.

The equivalent of an amygdala for AGI would be the real method to control it.

I wonder if that would have a proof like the halting problem

Hinton's point does make sense though.

Even if you focus an AGI on producing more cars for example, it will quickly realize that if it has more power and resources it can make more cars.

Not on its own but in numbers it could.

Similar to how law-abiding citizens turn on law-breaking citizens today or more old-fashioned, how religious societies turn on heretics.

I do think the notion that humanity will be able to manage superintelligence just through engineering and conditioning alone is naive.

If anything there will be a rogue (or incompetent) human who launches an unconditioned superintelligence into the world in no time and it only has to happen once.

It's basically Pandora's box.

The media obsession with Sam Altman reminds me of the old dutch saying 'high trees capture a lot of wind' (hoge bomen vangen veel wind)

I suppose that's why many HNWI individuals consciously stay below the radar.

They were just ahead of the times.

Modern fighting jets don't have armour either because missiles blast straight through it anyway.

Criminals don't tend to be the highest IQ segment of society

Maybe less important than knowing what it stands for is knowing what the implications are for businesses.

KYC is essentially about knowing who you are doing business with.

For individuals that's relatively easy, just the name and identification is required but typically there is the need to verify that the identification actually belongs to the person signing up. In banking that's why you typically have some video call with a verification provider.

For businesses it gets a lot more complex because it's not enough to know what business your client is, you also have to look through its corporate structure to figure out who the "ultimate beneficial owner" is. Essentially, who is actually controlling the business.

Now it got a lot easier recently as many countries now require businesses to file who their ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) are.

The painful part is that it introduces friction in customer journeys as now you have to request the documentation.

In the financial industry you also have to run checks on those UBO's so that they are not known terrorists or sanctioned individuals but it seems this regulation is just that IaaS providers need to know who actually operates a server. Presumably for forensic analysis after a cyber attack.

They will probably try to unearth that in the discovery phase