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jonahbenton

3,339 karma

Senior super consultant. jonah@jonah.com and jonah@indata.dev.

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encompass.alum.mit.edu 9mo ago

MIT Response to the "Compact"

jonahbenton
2pts1
academic.oup.com 1y ago

The Economic Limits of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains

jonahbenton
1pts0
linkinghub.elsevier.com 1y ago

Quantum physics, general relativity, Riemannian geometry, Planck scale formalism

jonahbenton
5pts0
www.nbcnews.com 2y ago

Neuralink announces first human implant

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2pts1
marginalrevolution.com 2y ago

The Relentless Rise of Stablecoins

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2pts0
www.lesswrong.com 3y ago

Pay for literature/book reviews using bounties and dominant assurance contracts

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1pts0
www.cell.com 3y ago

Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging

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2pts1
twitter.com 3y ago

DoNotPay wants to pay lawyers to be human proxies in court for its robots

jonahbenton
9pts6
medium.com 3y ago

Update Your Course Syllabus for ChatGPT

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4pts0
www.nytimes.com 3y ago

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction

jonahbenton
158pts106
twitter.com 3y ago

Preprint: Endonuclease fingerprint indicates synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2

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3pts0
www.euronews.com 4y ago

Penises are shrinking because of pollution (2021)

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5pts1
www.dfs.ny.gov 4y ago

New NY DFS Guidance on US Dollar-Backed Stablecoins

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1pts0
www.morningbrew.com 4y ago

Before layoffs hit Looker, workers trained their replacements

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18pts0
til.simonwillison.net 4y ago

Annotated explanation of David Beazley's dataklasses

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108pts16
twitter.com 4y ago

Jet stream dynamics changing from N/S to E/W

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11pts1
www.newyorker.com 4y ago

The Day the Dinosaurs Died (2019)

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2pts3
www.cnn.com 5y ago

Snowflake is the biggest software IPO

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25pts1
github.com 5y ago

Iranian law prohibits merge of PR from Israeli?

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290pts224
berthub.eu 6y ago

Covid-19: The T Cell Story

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3pts0
project-evidence.github.io 6y ago

Evidence SARS-CoV-2 Emerged from a Biological Laboratory in Wuhan, China

jonahbenton
9pts2

OpenCode is a "harness" that manages conversations/interactions with LLMs. It does not run a model itself. An extended interaction can include- many turns of conversation, providing files for the LLM to process, having the LLM direct the running of programs called tools by the harness. The privacy aspect is determined by which LLM you configure OpenCode to use. If you configure it to use an LLM you host yourself, then you maintain your privacy. If you have it use an LLM provider you do not host yourself then your conversation and file and tool results and whatever else is sent to the provider and your privacy is dependent on the provider. There have been no reports of OpenCode communicating out of band with user data to any servers- it does do things like check for version updates and can download plugins and the like. But in that sense OpenCode is reasonably configurable for privacy. The default however is to use an external provider for LLM, not a local model, so you have to change that and not use it oob.

To have your own LLM provider, you have to run different software. Ollama is one option (though it also by default uses external provider) and llama.cpp is another. Jan and LMStudio are other options for actually running a model on your own hardware, to which you can direct OpenCode.

Tyler is an academic economist. He is accustomed to thinking about the magic of the markets. No consciousness there. Sure.

But the "market" is a human invention around which there also exists governance / regulation / accountability / responsibility. That these structures exist- even when people try to evade them- is the existence proof of the thing that the word intent refers to, and that there is a feedback loop incorporating the modeling of intent in human behavior is what consciousness refers to.

The existence proofs are there no matter how poorly Tyler argues against them.

I thought this reference was to skill files, which do rapidly become technical debt- so what was the rotting inventory metaphor? But no this is in reference to human skill acquisition around each of the different agentic platforms.

1971 2 months ago

All (or most) of them are second order effects following ending of dollar convertibility to gold. Not an argument to go back on but the game changed.

This misunderstands the power of monetization, or mistakes "dollars" having some kind of fixed "value." They do not. Whether one agrees with that or not, thinking of this as a "debt" problem where a hypothetical move is to appropriate equity- setting aside the fact that equity ALSO is not in a fixed unit of measure- anyway, thinking of appropriating equity to solve a public debt problem is a category error. That is how accounting works for business structures that exist within a monetary system but NOT for government and currency printers that define the monetary system. The MMT people are right about this. Public debt is a measure of private sector wealth. That is how the machine works.

This is not an HN worthy post but since it is here I really hope he executes on this plan, thus ensuring the instantiation of the "Markwayne Mullin effect" in the chronicles of pop culture. What exactly that will be- can only speculate. But it will be something. Airport owners do not eff around.

Never had it, the concept of "God" always ridiculous and authoritarian to me. I really like the narrative in the book Sapiens, identifying the "Cognitive Revolution" as the main distinguishing characteristic of this particular collection of ape species, which then lead to the competition of narratives, of which religions are one kind, taking place within that cognitive capability.

That said, have really enjoyed most of the humanist aspects of the Pope Leo AI Encyclical and also enjoyed Francis' AI essay, and I am coming to understand the perspective of those who value religious-sourced narrative for its philosophical posture. These narratives are evolving as human understanding evolves, still with lots of ridiculous contradictions (prohibition of abortion among the most blatant), but there is depth of thought around valuing humans and human work and so forth that is a pleasant contrast to the predatory power hungry totalitarian selfish nihilism of most AI/tech and political leadership.

(Lenovo) Thinkpads, specifically many of the X, T and P products, are best in class. All the Linux things just work at this point, and have for the last 5-10 years. Some products ship with Fedora or Ubuntu. Those lines have the highest end individual products with the best build quality, and user-serviceable/replaceable components. Other Lenovo laptops are either less good or much less good/absolute crap.

I have several Framework laptops, to be supportive of alternative supply chains. They are great with Linux compatibility, all the things work, but in terms of build, they are much less mature from a long term maturity and tolerances perspective. The new 13 Pro is probably a pretty solid machine, though.

I occasionally have to work on Dells or HPs for clients, and just don't like the keyboards or the fit/finish. I had a couple of earlier system 76 machines, they did not last and the keyboards also were not comparable to a Thinkpad.

There are many markets. Qwen 3.6 27b at a high enough quant is good enough for many use cases. But enterprise-consumed tokens come with legal/data protection agreements. They have just gotten comfortable with BYOD- there is no BYOD equivalent set of practices and protections for local LLMs (BYOLLM). So some enterprises are getting back into prem GPU capacity.

Declining America 2 months ago

No, not this story.

This story is that of Netflix' Chaos Monkey attacking the state most rhetorically aligned/proud of The Rule Of Law and showing in myriad ways how absolutely hollow that pride was and how vulnerable The Law is.

Are these bugs that get fixed or...if that was The Last Election, maybe not.

Declining America 2 months ago

Can't believe this is flagged. As a USer, it is the letter I would advise anyone outside the US to write. It is the only rational response.

THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR.

Meta making claims like "private" and "even Meta can't see." lol. Has the credibility debt of an org around a specific issue ever been higher? It's like a goldfish trying to gaslight.

For sure, the same way that agentic abilities to read and write don't obviate devoting human cognitive attention to those skills, in fact, as study after study show, the cognitive offloading/debt incurred by over reliance on agentic cognitive processing is as bad for the brain as sedentary lifestyle is for the body. Programming is yet again different cognitive work than human language reading/writing- the sequential/logical precision and the abstraction creation AND the interactive functionality are unique and valuable. Use of prompt-> code techniques for code or asset authoring AND use of LLMs to provide non-deterministic interactive elements widen the creative landscape. They have to be properly scaffolded, of course, to require requisite cognitive input to get useful output- giving people cannons they can light with a match is wrong and inhumane. But within those to-be-developed regulatory guardrails, the activity of interactive system creation including stroke by stroke visual creation and line by line code creation is still super cool, fun, and useful for kids to experience.

Also I don't see professional software becoming "black-boxed" the way compiler produced machine language is or the way ML models are. Certain isolated components whose characteristics and behaviors can be sufficiently and more efficiently specified and verified with human language sources will be black boxes but in many circumstances the code is the most efficient and precise and correct rendition and that will be the material in which human work occurs. Cheers.