d_burfoot

A good puzzle for political philosophers: how do you build a decent system of government in a world where people to not listen to reasoned arguments?

It is going to be a big problem for humanity when the superintelligent AIs start telling us that our political philosophies, to which everyone is deeply and emotionally attached, are total garbage.

One obvious example is: we have a bizarre and anomalous belief that political union has a special moral status unlike other relationships (marital, financial, social, etc). In all other cases, relationships require consent from both parties, and it is monstrous to use force to compel a relationship. If we applied this logic to political relationships, we would immediately conclude that unilateral secession is a sacred right. But no one is ready to bite that bullet.

https://unifixion.substack.com/p/the-anomalous-ethics-of-pol...

What possible use could there be for doing this?

The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.

There's a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis of career advice that I wish PG took better notice of.

If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact will diffuse quickly throughout society, causing the path to become overcrowded, which pushes down the average performance. So at time T2 the path will no longer outperform. This is analogous to a stock becoming overpriced due to hype. I consider the founder path to be enormously overcrowded at this point.

The key to finding a good career is to play a kind of Money Ball - find paths that, for whatever reason, are mispriced and thus undercrowded.

The people of the town decided they'd rather have $10M and $3M/year instead of some random extra parkland. That money is significant for a small, non-wealthy Texas town.

Also, there is already a park right to the west of the residential section shown in the map, called Fannie Robinson park.

https://shorturl.at/jbWuw

39T is just the outstanding value of all the Treasury instruments (T-bills, etc). The entitlement programs (SSA and Medicare) have made commitments to certain levels of service and payments that are far in excess of the revenues they bring in, that's what is meant by "unfunded liabilities".

Firms in the broad Russell 3000 share index have a total market value of $79trn

I sometimes try to get people to worry about the catastrophic state of American public finances by pointing out that the net national debt, including unfunded liabilities, is estimated to be $175T [0]. The government could appropriate all the equity from the top 3000 largest companies, and also the entire real estate market, and it still would not be able to pay its debt (RE market is $55T).

[0] https://balajis.com/p/americas-175-trillion-problem

It's a poignant piece, but I feel that HN should have some stories of soaring enthusiasm, optimism, and visions of a spectacular future, to counterbalance the doom and gloom.

The buy/rent decision is quite complex for many reasons, but two overlooked factors are:

1) When a bank loans you $1e6 to buy a house, they are effectively deputizing you to act as a money manager: they allow you to make an investment that will hopefully appreciate more quickly than the interest rate. There are many other investments that have this property (e.g. the stock market), but banks won't loan to you to invest in them!

2) A mortgage acts as a forced savings rate: you pay the bank every month, and when you're done after 30 years, you have a large asset. So a large mortgage is (for some people) a good psychological commitment mechanism that imposes financial discipline.

Many commenters seem to be appealing to an almost religious defense of present political borders. That attitude is untenable: there is nothing sacred about national boundaries, they are mere political artifacts like rules, regulations, tax codes, etc. If the people want to change them, they absolutely have the right to do so.

https://unifixion.substack.com/p/political-boundaries-are-no...

Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that did.

I'll accept your first sentence for the sake of argument. You are still better off with a localist / federalist approach, because state governments are much less vulnerable to corruption and bribery. It is far more economically efficient for the bad guys (whoever they are in your view) to bribe a few DC legislators than dozens of state politicians in places like Montpelier and Hartford. Centralized, unaccountable power in DC means that when big rich corrupt companies bribe the right people, they can force the entire country to followed their preferred policies. A good example is how Purdue Pharma bribed the head of the FDA to approve OxyContin, leading directly to the opioid crisis.

America cannot, as a country, discover a reasonable approach to managing health care costs because Americans do not have a sufficient core set of shared political values. The solution is to end regulation at the federal level, and allow the states to determine what regulations they may deem appropriate. As a New Hampshire libertarian, I do not want Californian progressives telling me how our state must manage health care spending, and I am sure they feel the same way about me.

I'm not sure if this is the direction the OP is going, but I would love to see a world where local small-time investors can get a bank loan, rent a facility, set up a bunch of computers, and run open-source cloud software on them that provides 95% of the features that most businesses need.

Running a cloud data center could be a business like operating a self-storage facility or a car wash. Small investors love this kind of operation.

Many Americans do not realize how much money the US government spends. When you include all three levels, it comes to $32K/person/year [0]. This is much higher than countries that are considered "social democracies" such as Finland, France and Canada. If you look at wealthy blue cities like NYC or SF, the spending is on the order of $50K/p/y, comparable to Norway.

It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit. The extra money will just be squandered and stolen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

So just manual memory management with extra steps

This is actually the perfect situation: you are allowed to do it carefully and manually for 1% of code on the hot path, but you don't have to worry about it for the 99% of the code that's not.

I don't disagree with these principles, but if I wanted to compress all my programming wisdom into 5 rules, I wouldn't spend 3 out of the 5 slots on performance. Performance is just a component of correctness : if you have a good methodology to achieve correctness, you will get performance along the way.

My #1 programming principle would be phrased using a concept from John Boyd: make your OODA loops fast. In software this can often mean simple things like "make compile time fast" or "make sure you can detect errors quickly".

Gah, don't take advice about doing a PhD from the dude who had the best possible academic experience! The vast majority of people who've gone through the PhD grinder have had radically worse outcomes than Karpathy. It's like taking advice about starting a cult from Joseph Smith.

(This is not to say you shouldn't do it. Just get info and advice from a less biased source).

The business plan makes sense to me. They are a company that is focussed specifically on building AI data centers, which is a huge part of the economy at the moment. The big cloud players know about generic data centers, but there are likely big efficiency wins to be gained by specializing on AI. There is also the geopolitical angle: European countries (and others!) will likely trust a UK-based company more than one of the American BigCos. NVidia is a great partner and investor for them: NScale will buy billions worth of NVDA chips, and also send information and learnings about the unique needs of the market to the chipmaker.

That being said, financial engineering tricks like depreciation and tax sheltering are of course hugely important in the global economy. It's likely that NVDA has a lot of cash sitting in Europe that it doesn't want to repatriate because it would have to pay taxes on it.

Interesting historical anecdote: the Swiss became the world's best watchmakers because, in Protestant Geneva under the leadership of John Calvin, jewelry was banned as ostentation. But you were allowed to wear a watch - it was important to get to church and work on time - so people starting wearing expensive watches instead of jewelry.

It's a bad idea to phrase advice as "Don't Do X", for most values of X that are often undertaken:

- Don't move to Detroit

- Don't go into academia

- Don't use dating apps

- Don't buy Google stock

It's most obvious for the last one: you should buy Google (or any other) stock if you think it's underpriced and sell it if you think it's overpriced. But even for the other advice, a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis holds. If there were a massive exodus of people from academia, causing universities to increase salaries and reduce administrative burdens, going into academia might be great for the right people. For many people Detroit is a terrible city, but I know a guy who worked for the Tigers, and bought a large house for a small amount of money, and did a lovely job renovating it, so Detroit worked well for him.

Life is all about finding underpriced value: options that you will appreciate more than others, for whatever reason.

These kinds of stories may seem silly to some (certainly it would seem silly to my past self), but I think these narratives of personal journeys are going to become more and more important to humanity as AI and automation take over most jobs.

they mimic and amplify the inherent racism present in their own training data

LLMs turn out to be biased against white men:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/me7wFrkEtMbkzXGJt/race-and-g...

When present, the bias is always against white and male candidates across all tested models and scenarios. This happens even if we remove all text related to diversity.

I mean this seriously: we need more cults.

Cults have been viciously slandered by mainstream information sources, often because lurid cult stories generate clicks and headlines. Of course some cults are abusive, just like some marriages are abusive. But we still think marriage is good in general.

If you think all cults are bad, you're implicitly against all religion, since every mainstream religion was once a cult. Being anti-cult is also profoundly un-American. America was built by cultists. Freedom of religion is literally the first principle stated in the Bill of Rights.

A cult is really just a professionally managed social environment. If you trust professionals like lawyers, doctors, or teachers with their respective duties, there's no reason in principle you shouldn't trust a cult leader to manage your social environment for you. Of course you should vet them, ask about their reputation, etc.

Kolmogorov Complexity is only defined up to a constant, which represents Turing machine translation length.

Given SQLite's amazing battery of test code, it seems like it would be valuable, illuminating, and not too difficult to write a test implementation in Rust. Can you get the Rust implementation to pass the test suite? Either answer to that question would be interesting.

I really want to use Claude Code on the phone or tablet, with voice commands only, and perhaps a few simple approval thumb actions. I don't want to type out complex prompt information on a virtual keyboard. I tried setting this up with some of the iOS terminal emulators, and it almost worked, but there was some glitch where Claude would try to start using the first characters that arrived from the voice command.

Anyone have better results?

When I was a physics student, there were four forces: strong, weak, EM, and gravity. That picture seemed neat and clean. Strong kept the nucleus together, EM kept molecules and atoms together (or broke them apart), gravity kept astronomical bodies together, weak was some kind of momentum-accounting device.

Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force" (in the same way that the Van der Waals forces are after-effect of EM). Also, more and more questions about "dark matter" seem to be building up, suggesting that the standard Newton-Einstein story of gravity is far from the complete picture.

25 years ago it seemed like physics was mostly complete, and the only remaining work was exploring the corner cases and polishing out all the imperfections. It doesn't feel that way anymore! The confusing part is that modern physics is so unbelievably successful and useful for technology - if the underlying theory was way off, how could the tech work?

Second sentence of abstract:

Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades

The US has been completely dominant in technology innovation for the last several decades. So, the answer is no: the loss of 1/4 of the STEM scientists is not important.

Do quant traders use Mathematica? I would guess this would be a great use case for a tool that lots of people love. Pretty language, huge boatload of built-in tools, high powered mathematics, great visualization capabilities. Quant firms should be able to live with the price tag. I assume they have a compiler that can produce fast executables for HFT.