jerkstate

Don't pay too much attention to the naysayers if they don't have constructive advice to offer (but do try to collect what signal you can from the noise). There are a lot of people who viscerally hate AI for a ton of different reasons, or maybe are perfectionists about the subject matter. Even if these AI technologies are currently imperfect, they solve Bloom's Two Sigma problem - students tutored to mastery one-on-one perform two standard deviations better than students taught in traditional classroom settings. Imagine a world where everyone is 30 IQ points smarter just from better education technology!

Personally, I just used chatgpt the other day to _finally_ understand why a dot product of vectors is equivalent to cosine similarity. Mathacademy's lesson is very good but the explanation wasn't enlightening for me, it took chatgpt breaking it down into tiny bite-sized chunks, patiently re-explaining what a cosine actually is and where it disappears to in the dot product, making little animations of vectors with sliders that I could move myself to try stuff with differently shaped and rotated triangles, for me to _actually and viscerally understand it_ and after spending probably 2 hours on this simple concept, now I _actually_ feel like I understand it rather than having just memorized it. So I feel much more confident that I can build deeper understanding on top of that.

it interleaves the end note in the text at the point where the endnote is referenced (by number), reads the endnote, and then sounds a bell to indicate that we've returned to the main text.

Sometimes endnotes reference other endnotes and you have to wait until the point in the text, e.g. endnote 304 is referenced from earlier endnotes than it occurs in the text (rather late in the book) and you just have to wait until endnote 304 is read to find out what it is. that's a bit of a disadvantage, but infinite jest is the kind of book that you really need to read multiple times in order to get it anyways.

if you're interested in completing it, check out the 30th anniversary audiobook, it just came out a few months ago, very accessible

I visited this and several other Gaudi buildings about 15 years ago in Barcelona, and many of them are truly breathtaking, or at least dramatically original and unique. I went to the Gaudi museum as well and found it fascinating that the architect himself was not a professional mathematician - he did not use hyperbolic cosine to calculate the dimensions of the catenary curves, he traced the outline of hanging chains. Really interesting to hear about how he also heavily used ratios and symmetry. I love how artistic taste can be partially derived from math (but the math itself isn't sufficient to develop artistic taste)

It’s definitely got AI tells, and I understand the objection - it’s hard to tell the difference between slop (written without review or direction, meant to fill space or present a simulacra of information) and actual informational content. With this article, it was clear that the author wanted to describe what problems they had and how they overcame those problems, and it was concise and I could tell it was reviewed so the content seemed trustworthy to me. I understand that some people have pretty high standards - if you don’t have the time to type out all of the code yourself one character at a time, then write stylish, interesting prose about it one letter at a time, if all you want to do is solve interesting problems and communicate how you solved them, you should shut up until you get good. Me, I am also imperfect and lazy, so I don’t care to demand style points or demonstrations of perspicacity from others.

Thanks for posting this, OP, I thought it was interesting.

In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people.

This is pretty much the exact argument that Hayek makes - socialism leads to fascism through political gridlock.

It’s time for people who understand how to use AI to stop trying to convince people who don’t. Let them churn their own butter, weave their own clothes, and type out their programs one character at a time. It’s what they want.

How do you know those aren’t the same thing?

Their cohort studies are across three completely different populations. I would be willing to listen to an argument that for some specific population there’s a firearm ownership level above which there are diminishing safety returns, but I find the idea that this same level would hold across wildly different populations absurd

Try the audiobook, although I’m sure purists would consider it cheating. You can zone out and it keeps going and something will pull your attention and you can rewind to get the context.

How do you know what volitions and abilities it doesn’t have? My agent teams continually improve the process and tooling they use for teamwork

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

Get a sleep study done to find out how serious it is

Do you consider it humanitarian to further weaken a nation where the average gdp per capita is less than $3000 and who are in no way a threat to us? In what way do the immigrants arriving from there improve America? Can you give a coherent argument? I can easily argue the opposite from statistics:

From Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) and Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey (ASEC CPS):

Of Haitian immigrants ages 25 to 64, 17.1 percent have not graduated from high school, 30.3 percent have only a high school degree, 30 percent have some college, and 22.6 percent have at least a college degree. This compares to 6.6 percent, 25.4 percent, 30.4 percent, and 37.6 percent for U.S.-born Americans. (2022 ACS)

Of households headed by Haitian immigrants, 52.7 percent use at least one major welfare program. For households headed by native-born Americans it is 28.4 percent.5 (2023 ASEC CPS)

So it’s clear that the previous immigration regime that allowed this was optimizing for something other than improving America or intentionally weakening rival countries.

Are you implying that we should be trying to weaken Haiti?

What about the immigrant groups that don’t dramatically out-earn American-born citizens?

So what prevents the incompetent and lazy from immigrating?

so in order to increase our median intelligence, we should make the process super easy?

It’s a shame they were so anti-nuclear. Best song on that album was Ohm Sweet Ohm.

oh, believe me, I can just tell from the way they're talking about stuff, just like a webapp/psychology double major is well-versed in evaluating data systems

What credentials does this author have to cite social science research in their determination of the competency of other people? Their only other article is about eschewing native apps - why am I supposed to take their opinion about measuring competency seriously if they are a software engineer, not a psychologist? They are clearly outside of their domain of expertise and therefore incapable of producing work with any value whatsoever, according to their own arguments.

why indeed

This means the patient makes up their own strategy and the doctor says “we are checking”

This is really cool. I vibe coded almost exactly the same app, mine also tracks saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, and fiber (I'm getting older so these macros are pretty important to me). One of the really cool things you can do if you have tool calling hooked up is to have the LLM analyze your diet and tell you what you can do better to hit your targets - swap pizza for pasta, decrease the amount of cheese you put on your sandwich, if you're gonna have fast food don't get the fries and eat low fat/low sodium the rest of the day, etc. What model are you using? I have found Qwen Flash to be really good for my app - smart enough, tool calling works really well, and very cheap.

Nice. I vibe coded a similar kind of system, you can dump a recipe into the chat window and it will use tool-calling to lookup macros for any foods it doesn't have in the DB and put them in, estimate raw -> cooked changes in nutrition and weight (if needed), estimate total weight of the cooked product, and macros per gram (e.g. writes a 100 gram serving to the db, you can scale it up and down and it scales the macros linearly). Similar to you I have used this app to alter my macro mix from high-fat to high-carb (for workout performance) and cut my sodium from ~4g/day to ~2.4g/day by interrogating the DB about what foods I should eat more and less of. Found some surprising wins in my habitual diet that were easy to change to hit my health targets, and looking up and logging these things by hand without LLM assistance would have been too tedious and time-consuming for me to continue to do it for as long as I have been (maybe 3 months now)

Curious, what model are you using? I have found Qwen Flash to be really great for this - tool calling works well, it's smart enough, and very cheap.

Maybe people who choose blue do so because they assume there’s some kind of monkey paw involved in the choosing the red option, like your wife and kids die or something like that

If your goal is to reduce the number of dead, is red really the one to campaign for?

I wonder if red choosers really don’t understand that they are choosing to live in a world where half of all people, the more selfless half, are dead. It’s like living through a nuclear war except all of the nice people are gone, not just a random sample

The means of production are for sale, they can own them if they want!

Thats fine, the cost for me to re-implement your code is nearly zero now, I don’t have to cajole you into fixing problems anymore.