jeffhwang

Is anyone else confounded by this naming scheme? I can see from the article's first two footnotes that Mythos is supposed to be a tier above the standard Haiku/Sonnet/Opus sequence. Ok that's fine since we learned about Mythos and Project Glasswing earlier this year.

But now there is Fable--and why "Fable 5" even though this is a first launch? How is it related to Opus 4.8, Sonnet 4.6, Haiku 4.5, etc??

Did anyone else think of LoRA [0] at first?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRA_(machine_learning)

Agreed. As someone who has been in charge of business websites of for both Mag7 websites and for Silicon Valley startups, there can be a productive disagreement about what exactly user needs are. As well as how to balance business conversion / sales metrics vs the larger ability to communicate brand identity.

Meanwhile, my personal website pretty much only serves my own idiosyncratic interests!

On the Mac vs Lisa team, I generally agree but wasn't there a strong tension on budget vs revenue on Mac vs Apple II? And that Apple II had even more constrained budget per machine sold which led to the conflict between Mac and Apple II teams. (Apple II team: "We bring in all the revenue+profit, we offer color monitors, we serve businesses and schools at scale. Meanwhile, Steve's Mac pirate ship is a money pit that also mocks us as the boring Navy establishment when we are all one company!")

By the logic of constraints (on a unit basis), Apple II should have continued to dominate Mac sales through the early 90s but the opposite happened.

Thank you! I zoomed in on the photo looking for sanded corners on the MacBook and saw none. Took me a sec to finally see the amorphous edge nr the trackpad...

I might have to visit this exhibit next time I'm in NY. I hope their materials will answer the question of how he dealt with new construction, remodels, and demolitions over his 20 years!

Halo Cortana AI: Copilot for Combat 2026

I'm glad I clicked through bc I thought the article was about Mamba, the package manager I associate with Python (similar to conda).

https://github.com/mamba-org/mamba

Julian Togelius is a full professor of computer science at NYU and I was fascinated by his blog post about succeeding in academic CS while not being able to solve undergraduate math problems.

It's probably user error on my part. But as a somewhat technical user, I've been locked out of Mastodon account for months for no discernible reason. I had my standard first name and last name and I'm on one of the biggest Mastodon servers (mastodon.social).

I suppose I could just create a brand new account or move to another server but it hasn't seemed worth the effort so far

+1 graphemica has the right mix of completeness and simplicity for my tastes.

I remember being confused by that tagline and also by Sun's later pitch: "We put the dot in dotcom"!

Let me try.

In US schools during K-12, we generally learn functions in two ways:

1. 2-d line chart with an x-axis and y-axis, like temperature over time, history of stock price, etc. Classic independent variable is on the horizontal axis, dependent variable is on the vertical axis. And even people who forgotten almost all math can instantly understand the graphics displayed when they're watching CNBC or a TV weather report.

2. We also think of functions like little machines that do things for us. E.g., y = f(x) means that f() is like a black box. We give the black box input 'x'; then the black box f() returns output 'y'. (Obviously very relevant to the life of programmers.)

But one of 3blue-1brown's excellent videos finally showed me at least a few more ways of thinking of functions. This is where a function acts as a map from what "thing" to another thing (technically from Domain X to Co-Domain Y).

So if we think of NVIDIA stock price over time (Interpretation 1) as a graph, it's not just a picture that goes up and to the right. It's mapping each point in time on the x-axis to a price on the y-axis, sure! Let's use the example, x=November 21, 2025 maps to y=$178/share. Of course, interpretation 2 might say that the black box of the function takes in "November 21, 2025" as input and returns "$178" as output.

But what what I call Interpretation 3 does is that it maps from the domain of Time to the output Co-domain of NVDA Stock Price.

3. This is a 1D to 1D mapping. aka, both x and y are scalar values. In the language that jamespropp used, we send the value "November 21, 2025" to the value "$178".

But we need not restrict ourselves to a 1-dimensional input domain (time) and a 1-dimensional output domain (price).

We could map from a 2-d Domain X to another 2-d Co-Domain Y. For example X could be 2-d geographical coordinates. And Y could be 2-d wind vector.

So we would feed input of say location (5,4) as input. and our 2Dto2D function would output wind vector (North by 2mph, East by 7mph).

So we are "sending" input (5,4) in the first 2d plane to output (+2,+7) in the second 2d plane.

Just to be clear, when you Khan "killed our remaining low cost airline carrier", are you referring to when the DOJ blocked the JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger? Not arguing, I just want to understand.

Used to be "Facebook AI Research" before company changed name from FB to Meta

Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.

Didn't Einstein himself literally come from east of the Atlantic Ocean? ;)

I personally have moved almost all my Stack Overflow usage to LLMs. Just wondering if other folks have done the same…

Ballmer was hard-working, smart, and incredibly lucky in many ways. (Fairly or unfairly, I always have a soft spot for someone who survives Math 55 freshman year at Harvard—which Steve did!)

But he was also enthusiastic about weird non-tech marketing initiatives like trying to partner with big paper companies to launch “MS Office” branded paper for higher margin paper sales. I think this was a few years before the US version of The Office. But it sounds pretty Dunder-Mifflin to me! Whatever his flaws, I don’t see Satya going in this direction.

Source: I spoke directly with someone who worked with Ballmer on this.

I thought there was grumbling about Ballmer adopting GE’s stack ranking employee evaluation system where every team has to grade at least some people as below par. So that led to weird incentives like not collaborating across teams, sabotage, etc.

Is this hyperbole or do Americans actually drive rather than walk to toilets? Not being hostile, genuinely curious.

I’ve had 5 personal Mac laptops over the last 25 years. And all of them overlapped their service lives bc I usually had 2 active laptops at a time. None were the Pro, just iBooks and MacBook Airs.

The one I just retired was my portable workhorse from 2014-2024. I got annoyed towards the end bc the latest OS wasn’t supported (but still got security updates for my old macOS version at least).

Overall, I never needed to replaced battery, hard drive, cpus, screens or really any of the hardware on any of them over 2 decades. And I got at least 6 yrs out of each one.

There's significant evidence contradicting this hypothesis. See industry analysts like Gartner, IDC, etc. who all ask tech firms to "pay to play" for better rankings in their reports. As well as the ratings agencies like Moody's, S&P's, and Fitch during the 2008 financial crisis. These ratings agencies were paid by the banks selling CDOs, MBS, and other debt derivatives that were especially tied to the US housing market. The agencies were incentivized to not downgrade those products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...

I appreciate the vulnerability of the OP in researching and writing that article. It can be pretty hard to reconnect with friends you’ve lost touch with or actually broken up with. And to do this publicly!

Haha, I was doubly confused! You’re right, I should have said National Institutes of Health.

And here I thought I was going to read a novel defense of the British healthcare system.

When I was restudying biology a few years ago, it was making me a little crazy trying to understand the structural geometry that gives rise to the major and minor grooves of DNA. I looked through several of the standard textbooks and relevant papers. I certainly didn't find any good diagrams or animations.

So out of my own frustration, I drew this. It's a cross-section of a single base pair, as if you are looking straight down the double helix.

Aka, picture a double-strand of DNA as an earthworm. If one of the earthworms segments is a base-pair, and you cut the earthworm in half, and turn it 90 degrees, and look into the body of the worm, you'd see this cross-sectional perspective.

Apologies for overly detailed explanation; it's for non-bio and non-chem people. :)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CWSH5qslm27/

Anyway, I think the way base pairs bond forces this major and minor grove structure observed in B-DNA.

If only I could +1 this more than once! I have learned valuable things occasionally from people in the rationalist community but this overall lack of humility —and strangely blinkered view of humanities and important topics like say history of science relevant to “STEM”—ultimately turned me off to the movement as a whole. And I love science and math! It just shouldn’t belong to people with this (imo) childish model of people, IQ, etc.

Thanks for the interest! Here are my other aromatic posts, and beyond benzene, I have posts on these PAHs:

* 1,3,5-tris(biphenyl)benzenei -- https://www.instagram.com/p/CxZgDpWLk2b/

* hexa-cata-hexabenzocoronenei -- https://www.instagram.com/p/CxW0-PkRbK4/

* rubrene -- https://www.instagram.com/p/CUdK6MhPw9p/

* coronene -- https://www.instagram.com/p/CxRfv6yx0VL/

* tetracene -- https://www.instagram.com/p/CxHuVt2uKBk/

* dibenz[a,j]anthracene -- https://www.instagram.com/p/CxKLUXTOq2o

* benzene -- https://www.instagram.com/p/CxCtSEWOEuu/

* summary of 10 molecules in pen and ink -- https://www.instagram.com/p/CxbtJZHPGGL/

Hope it’s ok to share my chemistry Instagram with a plastic model of Hexabenzocoronene (HBC) that was mentioned in the article.[1]

I posted similar photos of other polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) including napthalene, which are also mentioned in the article. [2]

In all, I had about 10 posts on PAH’s for laypeople and chemists who want to admire the structure of these fascinating saturated planar hydrocarbons.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/CxUs8YzO28Y/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...

[2] https://www.instagram.com/p/CxFCSueOrA2/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...