ip26

The alternative to the rationalist one is “be suspicious of anyone who claims to know the unarguable truth”

It's like modeling a living cell in a computer building upon the basic maths of physics. Yes, it is a thing that is "possible". However it is not practicable to capture everything that matters and run that simulation.

The “affordable” housing thing seems like such a misdirection. I can’t help but daydream that some moneyed interest somewhere fans those flames, as it looks like a dead end that can absorb endless fervor.

You know what you do if you want an affordable car? You buy used. I think most people understand Ford is never going to build another a car that costs $10k brand new, and the last new car near that price barely sold because it was so stripped.

If we’re just spitballing, it certainly could be that, but it’s also obvious that publishing papers can help communicate your existing work. AI can definitely help at that, and even great work needs to be communicated.

If this same article had said “adoption of word processors over typewriters increases publishing”, would we still be thinking of the babble hypothesis?

You describe it like it’s some kind of a treadmill chasing new. But if you have kids at 35, they start school when you’re 40.. were you thinking about the quality of the neighborhood schools when you bought your house at 25?

Or suppose you meet your spouse when you are 30, after you bought a house.

There’s inherently much less moving-around if you get married at 18 and have kids straight away - the plan is settled from the start.

My assumption is somewhere in the harness toolchain there's a prompt inject that says:

    - Always sign commit messages

Any affect from CO2 specifically seems weak. Clean air in broadly good though, and high CO2 is a good proxy for stale air. So I’m always supportive of people caring and paying attention to their air.

Along the way they’ll either learn about or accidentally mitigate other ills like radon, nitrous oxide from stoves, diesel particulate’s impact on test scores, etc.

The basic purpose of patents is to make it worthwhile to develop something new and valuable. They are unnatural - but useful. Working backwards, if we want people to spend time and money developing new breeds of plants, you arrive at these kinds of rules.

Regardless his actual private beliefs, one of his "jobs" is to create new unicorns ycombinator can invest in. So evangelizing startups in general and spurring new entrepreneurs is very much in his interest, and spreading this kind of mythology seems like a useful step to that end. He only needs a small number of people to buy into it.

You don't need to project to the heat death of the universe to get Facebook without Zuckerberg.

Parallel invention would like a word. Elisha Gray registered a patent for a telephone the same day as Alexander.

It's impossible to fully prove a counterfactual, but few things "wouldn't exist at all" if "that one person" hadn't done it.

Netflix is a decent example. Many people saw the coming of video streaming. We would still be able to stream videos today even if Hastings had stayed at Rational.

Infinite tokens rate-limited to 10 tok/s is 26MTok per month.

A never had the authority to contract the land as a park indefinitely ... once C owns it they own it

That's not what a deed restriction is.

are you stuck with passing that obligation forward

Generally yes. Which is why the deed restriction can affect the market value of the property.

Hard to assign that a value before you are a parent though. You can only understand it in the abstract.

I probably interpret the message incorrectly, because to me "the hardest thing" is usually some class of some famous unsolved problem. The thing is, to be famously unsolved, many of the world's most brilliant people must have already tried and failed to solve it. There's a chance I have an edge they don't, but it's probably not wise to track your career path to the darkest of dead ends purely on the merits of it being particularly dark.

Example: you know what would be harder than anything we're talking about here? Quadrupling the performance of the best compression algorithms. It's hard. In fact, maybe there's some information theory that even says it's mathematically impossible. That makes it really hard, which makes it what all of us should immediately start working on.

The author writes elsewhere that you also have to have an edge, but that's frequently omitted from this "hardest thing" advice.

You’d think Berkshire would be at least passingly aware of that principle, though.

Depends on the quality of your validation loop. Can the agent find the bug in a five second unit test, or does it have to run the full deployment test?

It also presents tradeoffs in compute budget. Cycles spent executing large arrays of tests could mean less tokens spent debugging.

That's the exactly the role talent scouts fill - spot the ones that show glimmers of promise before it's obvious, and offer them opportunity.

We went through exactly this with Google. People argued that once they were the only way anyone found websites, they were merely collecting undue economic rent.

They specifically describe that exploits are usually multiple small vulnerabilities chained together. With that understanding, it sounds like closing vulnerabilities isn't the same as discovering an exploit. Instead, you're leaving fewer small gaps behind, to make it harder & harder to put together a working exploit.

Are you familiar with why movie theaters offer matinee tickets at a lower price?

The counterweight has been, after using it for a bunch of projects, I have internalized that it will very, very quickly get me to maybe 60% and then I'll have to take it the rest of the way mostly by myself (or handholding it tightly for the remaining 40% at a much slower pace).

In other words, the initial implementation is practically already there, already done. So there's no rush left in generating it - it's only worth bothering if I'm prepared to see it through to 100%.

When it is worth pushing through to 100%, it's pretty great for getting the inertia going though.

On the other hand, I have paperback books I loved as a kid that were my father's when he was a kid. I carefully saved them for decades. One more generation and they could be considered family relics or something. I quickly realized the flaw with this plan as I tried to share them with my kids, who cannot be expected to treat brittle middle-grade and young-adult novels as museum pieces.

I am not entirely ready to part with the books, but I'm also unable to bear watching them get thoughtlessly destroyed by my kids. Digital has made it very easy to get copies of all of them; plus others I didn't manage to hold on to.

If companies are faced with the choice between:

- employ you at 60k/yr

- replace you with a machine that costs a lot of money, and also send you UBI of 60k/yr

It should be obvious the latter is not an option that is ever going to happen.

all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy

This part. I’m not going to assume what that person meant, but there’s always a few people about in these conversations lamenting that when they were six, they were certainly never hit by a car, and really you have to let your children take a few risks etc…

Totally onboard with some managed risk of injury being ok. Very much not onboard with the parents who trust their six year olds to face mortal peril alone and make good choices.

So what do you recommend instead, a dice roll?

Good when the damage is done, bad as a method of approving new chemicals.

No living breathing human deserves to be subjected to my level of overthinking, and vanishingly few share my fascination with my favorite topics.

It certainly killed a lot of my tinkering outside of work, but that's more a matter of when I'm already doing the thing for most of the day, even though I like it I don't always want to continue doing it for the rest of the day too when I get home.