jbritton

I recently had a conversation with Claude Fable about Renaissance Technologies. Claude says their closed fund has found a very tiny edge and their profit comes from millions of trades on that edge. Their public fund with more money doesn’t find enough edge to beat the S&P500 index.

This brings up the philosophical question of whether humans have free will or is everything deterministic following the laws of physics.

I have a process I wrote that accepts commands on a socket. At one point Claude suggested testing it. I pretty much echoed back what Claude suggested and got blocked. All I could think was a regex matching “test” and “port” and it downgraded me. I switched back to Fable with slight rewording and was able to continue. This was for code running on my box in a Claude project folder where Claude saw me write the code. Anthropic has put zero thought into this.

Well said.

I write a ton of Python code. Modifying code without static types is difficult and error prone. If a function needs a new argument, all the callers have to pass it and all of their callers recursively. Maybe the calling function is just a function pointer that has been passed around and not searchable. I love Python for small tasks and tasks that are not critical if they fail.

My understanding of weak typing is about allowing automatic type conversion. “3” + 1 === “31”, 1 + “3” === 4. Strong typing doesn’t auto convert.

I suspect there should be some data model guideline that says if keys can be missing then values can’t be nil, or if values can be nil then keys must be present. In the famous saying there are two hard things: naming, cache invalidation, off by one errors, I think one more to add is handling missing data.

I wonder if Anthropic servers can handle the load their going to get tomorrow. Unless it’s a staged rollout

I accidentally used Sonnet 5 a bit today. It seemed significantly worse to me than Opus 4.8 for software development.

TOGETHER and ACTIV-6 were not good studies.

I-Tech was a good RCT and showed 75% lower mortality in severe patients, p=0.02. Only 490 people though. Clearly this deserved replicating with more people. The fact that it wasn’t is a problem.

The FDA on their website stated they did not look at the data. The statement was eventually taken down, they have never said they looked at it. The CDC looked at 6 studies and didn’t write a report.

When I mentioned method of action, I’m not talking about petri dishes.

An anecdote related to bleach, but peroxide was also mentioned. Another overlooked treatment was artemisinin, which contains an endoperoxide group that could get into cells and kill covid virus.

There are multiple hypotheses for methods of action for IVM against covid that were plausible and deserved serious funding and investigation by governments. This did not happen. What did happen is the two people who brought it to the attention of congress got slandered the next day in the press and then got their careers destroyed. Anyone else who ever mentioned it also got dumped on by the press. There are over 100 studies now, many of which showed positive results. Most of the studies were small. There have been questions of the quality of many of the studies both the ones showing benefit and the ones showing no benefit. There is one well known fraudulent study and the press loves to extrapolate that to every study. The FDA has admitted to not looking at the data. The CDC and WHO did not write up any kind of analysis. They looked at a couple bigger studies that showed no result and said it’s inconclusive. No government has bothered to look into the RCTs that showed positive results. I don’t know if it works or not. It seems clear to me that profits, politics, power structures, got in the way of finding the answer. IVM is a very safe drug with the proper dosing. 300 to 500 million people in Africa take it yearly for parasites.

I thought you corrected gamma in the monitor settings, not in your application code. Am I wrong.

I never had a music class at any point in school in California.

I wasn’t clear from the description if text rendering is GPU accelerated, or in my case drawing quads from an atlas of characters in a texture is probably more efficient.

The very end of the article says “They can keep them for decoration but servers must generate their own random numbers.” I thought the lava lamps were for this purpose.

“vaccines are used for population control” Bill Gates has stated this is a goal, but in a different context. The idea is if you’re in a country with a large number of early deaths you are likely to have more children, and vaccines should help reverse this trend. So this is kind of an ambiguous question.

You misunderstand me. I was simply trying to find the two people who were saying such things.

I was trying to find a YouTube video I had seen previously. I ended up using Google to find it. There are two bio ethicists promoting the idea that we should make lone star ticks better at spreading alpha-gal and giving everyone meat allergies. So I guess “engineered” + “alpha-gal” is blocked. I find this idea beyond repulsive.

I asked how California guarantees election security and was told it could not answer that question. Upon further questioning it wouldn’t give specifics but it would give generalities, which ultimately turned into an interesting discussion.

I’m sick of LLM refusals. I think there are extremely few things they should refuse, like maybe making nuclear weapons or something along those lines. Once you put people in charge of deciding what you shouldn’t be allowed to see that list will grow and grow.

This sounds great. I’m going to play with it.

Stitches pages on an infinite canvas is possibly the worst UI I have ever seen.

I believe I’m tone deaf. There is no test for this. I am color blind, but I have the most favorable form of red/green color blindness which means for the most part I see all colors, but I fail the tests. Likewise I hear tones, and can distinguish tones. I can play something and know if I have hit the wrong key. However, I have practiced long enough to know I’m tone deficient and that knowledge really affects one’s desire to practice. I see little kids on YouTube that already have more talent than I could ever achieve. I really don’t see myself ever being able to pick up anything complicated by ear. If it’s transcribed correctly then sure it’s doable with sufficient practice. I can’t hear a chord and know what chord it is. I have dabbled with my guitar for 30 years. I frequently struggle to know when frequency goes up vs down. I can’t sing in key. I can barely tune a guitar by ear. It’s usually off a little bit though and it takes me a very long time. The song “Back in Black” has this little bit at the beginning G E D B and then sort of an A bend. Whatever Angus does with that A note I just can’t figure out. I have tried it a thousand times.

I wonder how often problems happen that the redundancy solves. Is radiation actually flipping bits and at what frequency. Can a sun flare cause all the computers to go haywire.

More complexity, no benefit. Human languages have lots of problems. I would simplify English if I knew how and had the power to make it so.

I strongly dislike flexible input like __Unambiguous___, *Unambiguous*

I’m reminded of the time Microsoft allowed mistakes in html writing. They attempted to parse a wide variety of common user errors. The effect of this was no standard and nobody else able to write a Microsoft compatible parser.

I dislike Nim lang because of this. At least Nim defined the specification. Still though I think it creates more cognitive load learning every legal variation and it makes searching more difficult.

I think to authors point if Markdown actually had a strict simple definition with one way to do it and no embedded html we would be better off.

On X11, the window manager handles the window decorations. So splitting them is going to involve some possibly non-trivial messaging and config.

I’m developing on an Nvidia Orin which requires Ubuntu 22.04. Snaps are broken on this platform. I used an alternative ppa that provided a chromium.deb.

Also true of specifications. Anything not explicitly stated will be decided by the implementer, maybe to your liking or maybe not.

It’s kind of interesting relating this to LLMs. A chef in a kitchen you can just say you want PB&J. With a robot, does it know where things are, once it knows that, does it know how to retrieve them, open and close them. It’s always a mystery what you get back from an LLM.

I find dark mode much easier to read and far less eye strain. I guess it just shows that users should be the ones to set the preference. There are studies on monkeys showing light mode leading to myopia. Although lately I have come to learn there are lots of poorly done studies.