jagraff

What about classes that weren't interesting to you, but you had to pass anyway? Personally I was the same as you for classes that I found interesting, but for other required classes I went for the shallow understanding, memorize for the test approach.

Very interesting, thank you for posting! I'm curious - roughly how many tokens do you think you used during the initial port and subsequent bug hunting and fixes?

at some point in the human civilization journey we'll have to be content with something instead of chasing clouds all the time.

Surely we're not even close to this point though? I can think of a lot of things that would be incredibly good for humanity to have, and which are achievable with enough economic growth, but which we are currently very far from because our economy does not have the necessary productive capacity (for example, enough solar/wind/nuclear/renewable power to completely eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels)

I think right now, the vast majority of oil use is not because of corrupt officials using oil energy despite the fact that cheaper energy sources are available. Maybe that problem will eventually be a sticking point in removing all carbon-emitting energy sources, but right now the barrier is mostly production capacity and the scale of capital investment required to roll out renewables at scale. But if (as seems to be the case now) rolling out renewables is more profitable than rolling out additional fossil fuel use, the capital should become increasingly available. That's why I'm optimistic, even though of course there are a lot of challenges ahead in terms of creating a truly sustainable future.

Large vehicles are safer for the occupants of the vehicle, however they do increase danger for pedestrians and drivers of other vehicles in a collision. There is a reasonable argument that reducing vehicle size would save lives overall

Agreed - the good news is, in many circumstances renewable energy is cheaper for new energy capacity. As long as regulations move in the right direction, we are likely to see the global energy mix move towards renewable sources over time

What's curious to me is, why does this not happen to all youtubers? For example, vlogbrothers, 3b1b, numberphile, etc, all seem to continue putting out great educational content and care about producing good wholesome content despite the strong incentives to do otherwise - how does that happen?

Setting aside whether the payment with my data is worth it - I don't understand why youtube would be in the category of "things that should be actually free". They have server costs, and employee costs, and they pay out to creators - somebody has to pay those bills.

Would it be better if youtube removed the free, ad supported version entirely, and only allowed paid users?

This is a good point - having your code broken up into standalone units that can fit into working memory has real benefits to the coder. I think especially with the rise of coding agents (which, like it or not, are here to stay and are likely going to increase in use over time), sections of code that can fit in a context window cleanly will be much more amenable to manipulation by LLMs and require less human oversight to modify, which may be super useful for companies that want to move faster than the speed of human programming will allow.

Interesting, it seems that the actual surface material of walls and/or furniture makes a large difference in how long VOCs stick around, due to differences in surface area at the microscopic scale.

I have a couple HEPA filters in my house that hopefully keep particulate exposure down. Does this mean that I have to run them longer? That I need more of them continuously running to keep exposure to VOCs low?

Polymarket gives a >50% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal, not that they would be refunded - the market only gives a ~8% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal AND and order to refund: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-court-force-trump-to-r...

I think, all things being equal, higher home prices should lead to higher rents, since at the margin people on the verge of buying a home would be more likely to choose to keep renting when prices are higher, thus increasing demand for rental units.

Groceries regularly do price discrimination (and have for a long time) via coupons. People mostly seem to be fine with it.

I think the median country GDP is something like $100 Billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

Models are expensive, but they're not that expensive.

I think there is perhaps a different conclusion that I come to - email is not the right tool for long discussions with multiple points of disagreement, because it is, generally, a linear medium, which makes it difficult to maintain different threads without careful formatting by every author in the email chain.

I am not sure if there exists a good tool for threaded discussions with multiple different focus areas - something like git but for conversations?

Very interesting. From my read, it appears that the authors claim that this attack is successful because LLMs are trained (by RLHF) to reject malicious _inputs_:

Existing large language models (LLMs) rely on shallow safety alignment to reject malicious inputs

which allows them to defeat alignment by first providing an input with semantically opposite tokens for specific tokens that get noticed as harmful by the LLM, and then providing the actual desired input, which seems to bypass the RLHF.

What I don't understand is why _input_ is so important for RLHF - wouldn't the actual output be what you want to train against to prevent undesirable behavior?

Moving, ever expanding circle: https://tixy.land/?code=%28x-10*t%2521%29**2%2B%28y-10*t%252...

Are products allowed to have labels? Am I allowed to tell my friends I like a product? What if I put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it?

I think the solution for this would be for companies to proactively raise wages in order to keep up with the market.

Banks are not required to file a SAR just because you withdraw (or even deposit) over 10k. They are required to report it, but the report is not a SAR - having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you.

Contrarily, library development is about abstractions. Spend time hunting for an algebra

This line piqued my interest - what does an algebra mean in this context? Does anyone know of any good resources for further exploration?

I don't know about enzymes, but bacteriophages (viruses that target bacteria) are species specific, and have been used successfully as antibacterial treatments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

Abandoning Ukraine risks emboldening Russia to continue their conquest of Eastern Europe - which, ultimately, increases the risk of nuclear war anyway, only with a stronger Russia with even more leverage. Being nuclear armed should not give a country license to seize any territory they wish.

Why is it impossible to make an ICE for current processors? Just because they're too complex and/or data exfiltration at speed is too hard?

Those numbers are assuming someone who skips a day of eating doesn’t increase their calorie consumption on other days to compensate

Every dead body you've ever seen is teeming with life. Now, it's probably impossible for a novel life form to arise in a dead body, because the existing life (bacteria) that takes over has been optimized by billions of years of evolution to consume the resources around it better than any novel self-replicator possibly could. But that's not really evidence that a self-replicator couldn't get going if there weren't much better ones already around.

Gorillas don't sit at a desk 8 hours a day

What’s the difference?

He takes every Friday off