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fritzo

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I doubt you ever understood the solid state physics, semiconductor fabrication processes, supply chain logistics, monetary policy, shipping routes, mining engineering, etc. "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude.

Dependency bloat and dependency bitrot have made solutions less permanent, have increased the maintenance burden. My ancient projects with zero dependencies still stand. But projects I built on shifting dependencies are rotting and cracking.

Claude Opus 4.7 3 months ago

Looks to me like a mob of humans, angry they've been deceived by ambiguous communications, product nerfing, surprisingly low usage limits, and an appallingly sycophantic overconfident coding agent

Sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly is the distinction between hn and social media? Is it the personalization that distinguishes the two? Does "social" mean "feed depends on graph neighborhood"? So collaborative filtering + ranking algorithms + moderation is not social media until you add graph neighborhoods?

Day 1 of ARC-AGI-3 4 months ago

ELI5 what is a harness?

EDIT from https://arcprize.org/media/ARC_AGI_3_Technical_Report.pdf:

We seek to fight two forms of overfitting that would muddy public sensefinding:

Task-specific overfitting. This includes any agent that is created with knowledge of public ARC-AGI-3 environments, subsequently being evaluated on the same environments. It could be either directly trained on these environments, or using a harness that is handcrafted or specifically configured by someone with knowledge of the public environments.

They're private, that's the beauty. Code is so cheap now, we can ween ourselves off massive dependency chains.

200 years ago text was much more expensive, and more people memorized sayings and poems and quotations. Now text is cheap, and we rarely quote.

optimum properties for estimating a posterior distribution

Circular reasoning: that's true only if the posterior is normal, or if your "optimal" is defined by second moments. In infinite variance cases, the best estimator can be median or an alpha moment for alpha < 2, but yikes the math is much more difficult.

-- A mathematician who has indeed fallen into the beauty trap

Heavy tails are everywhere. Normal distributions have absurdly light tails. Levy alpha stable distributions have power law tails. Power law tails are everywhere.

Some things with heavy tails:

  token occurrences
  comment thread upvotes
  startup IPOs
  social follower counts
  network latency
  github stars
  git diffs
  power station size
  weather events

Hot take: bell curves are everywhere exactly because the math is simple.

The causal chain is: the math is simple -> teachers teach simple things -> students learn what they're taught -> we see the world in terms of concepts we've learned.

The central limit theorem generalizes beyond simple math to hard math: Levy alpha stable distributions when variance is not finite, the Fisher-Tippett-Gnedenko theorem and Gumbel/Fréchet/Weibull distributions regarding extreme values. Those curves are also everwhere, but we don't see them because we weren't taught them because the math is tough.