jvanderbot

It's crazy how he suggests simplifications over and over and gets led through the finding. Absolutely bonkers how you can use AI to understand something and map it to your own mental map so efficiently, and of course he's most interested in generalizing or finding a simpler sub-result that would explain it.

Just awesome to see new knowledge hit an incredible mind like this. Having these "what if" discussions is what I miss most from JPL and academia.

I found _many_ of my side projects just evaporated. Total disinterest. But some were now front and center. I think the distinction was some of them were for learning or technically complex accomplishments, and some were genuinely things I wanted to have/use. That second category is getting ground down by LLMs now, and I enjoy that. The first category has only a few very slow/analog learning projects left.

Does a machinist who uses CNC qualify as a machinist?

Is his required knowledge of metals, assembly complexity, tolerances, just waved away because he doesn't turn the dials or change the tools any more?

I call this "symbol drawing". Beginning artists do this. They think "This is a head, a head is round. This is where eyes go, eyes are shaped like this", and the whole thing ends up being a collage of symbols vs a representation of the space and experience of viewing a face. When I used to be OK at drawing, it was because I forced myself to use touch instead of sight to compose images. So weird to explain, but I'd feel the 3d to get the lighting and such better.

A lot of art that someone smarter than me told me to appreciate seems to follow the pattern of hitting the space and/or experience while minimizing the use of symbols. Impressionistic paintings esp avoid symbols IMHO, while bizzaro picassos abuse symbols outright and still hit the experience they are going for.

Hand-made comfort food will be as much a luxury as hand-made menus.

We're closed loop systems, and happiness (momentary, long-term, + variants) are guidance signals from evolution. You don't have to optimize for it, but it's worth understanding the dozen or so real signals that "happiness" as a concept masks.

Yes, that would be a new metric, though, wouldn't it?

What's the goal - defend A vs B?

Yes, we're not talking about reality, we're talking about the measures of it. A metric would fall down on corner cases, so identifying the corner cases is how you determine if a metric is a good one.

"% people owning homes" is maximized by joint ownership, as well, but the corner cases are interesting: It is lower with big families living together or when anyone rents.

On the other hand, the "% homes lived in by owner" metric falls down in a much more realistic way: When there are fewer homes and they are lived in by owners, you can still have 90% of your people renting apartments while this metric hits 100%

A key difference is illustrated in TFA. To maximize fraction of people owning a home, you dislike people renting or living with a homeowner. A spouse that marries a homeowner, for example. It would be "better" if they broke up and owned their own separate homes. Or perhaps they could buy two homes, one for each. Or they could by two homes and rent a third to actually live in - same metric value.

To maximize fraction of homes with their owner living inside, you focus on the ownership _and_ the lifestyle choice. A family living together is the best use of land in this case. A family renting a side room to a college kid is still the best use of land. If every home were lived in by its owner, you could still have 90% of your population renting and not building generational wealth.

Thank you for sharing your take.

The issue, from my perspective, is that you're mixing predictions with strategy with truth.

Policy/advice does not need to be true to be useful, many just wish it were. "You can do it" is almost certainly false, but by god if people don't love to hear it and it helps them accomplish more. "America is in decline relative to the world" might be true, but is it helping anyone to focus on that?

There are definitely some crazy sentiments about foreign competition, but IMHO those are part of the game. they are the "You can do it" statements that are made to motivate not share factual truth all the time (because who can factually state the future or the motivations of an entire country).

So, there's no functional competition or great power struggle or corporate race here? Just racism against chinese people for being chinese? That is your claim specifically?

I _evaluate_ open weight models all the time. Does this mean I _use_ them? That's a very suspicious statistic.

If you believe in some kind of competition-free objective set of market morals, then yes, this is a strange contradiction.

If you believe that humans are locked in a productive struggle against each other at the organizational level, and that the knife-edge balance is a feature, not a bug, then it's not so weird to think about.

It is simultaneously true that it is in my best interest for prices to sink (as a consumer), for US companies to succeed (as a US citizen), and for my company to win over competitors regardless of whether those competitors are from US, EU, China, or Antarctica.

That's inevitable, but also, it's probably the point. At the moment top-tier models from China are being somewhat-freely shared. It reads to me like forcing competition out by dumping free/cheap things.

But then again, how many subscribers of Anthropic/OpenAI are really going to switch to a chinese model/site? I suspect few.

There's a pretty fair staging argument of AI for work, Gaming for play, that would keep north american data centers with north american customers running 2/3 of the day.

Furthermore, it will log in and unlock your host pc. If you're across town at a coffee shop and your 4 year old kids are near the host pc and see it unlock and start playing a game, you better believe they're gonna wreck your save file.

Not to mention greater security concerns.

I can write a program right now that will print your password. It will just take a while.

The study doesn't say "fatal" it says "toxic". Not toxic like lead, toxic like cigarettes. The actual effects discussed are subtler than "all life dies in 50 years".

Yeah, back to the gold-in-gold out use of LLMs.

You're advocating for one solution that has two problems:

* It is precisely what TFA goes in for: a one-stop shop (somewhat application dependent)

* It is antithetical to the "embarassment of riches" approach that Rust tried for when they delegated almost all functionality to crates - the ecosystem has proven fruitful

Oh and a third:

https://xkcd.com/927/

It seems to me that advocacy, writing good applications, or human-readable guides will do more for convergence on crate bundles than a more technical solution. I reach for the crates I know, not yet-another-framework.

One interesting thing in the paper that I didn't think of, is that our breathing mechanism is tied to CO2 levels. And therefore, higher CO2 levels (not atmospheric high, but artificially high during studies), can trigger panic attacks and general stress. A slow suffocation hallucination, kind of. Even when there's still sufficient oxygen, your body doesn't "measure" oxygen!

I didn't know that!

A kilometer scale telescope contract would exercise all the right pipelines for massive orbital buildout like in-situ assembly, multi-lift cadences, and big-old infra. And it'd look cool as hell in the night sky during assembly.

I immediately went down the preorder track, but found that I had an existing pre-order for May (purchased Jan), which I never got a single update about.

On one hand, super glad they caught that, but otoh, why not let me know it was delayed so severely?

Including by extension all programs, operating systems, or eventually hardware, I suppose.

You'll never have an objective measure of good/bad. You only have your feelings on the matter.

One way is to define what you view as good (or better: define what you view as "better") and just be that as much as you can. Because "trying to actually be better" puts you above the median person immediately, IMHO

Brother(i think), I feel you. Some days the rumination is awful, and it's good you have someone that reminds you of the good stuff.

My kids are like that - total blank slate joy machines at this age. And I assure you - fundamental optimism is ok everyone can improve their outlook and/or lot in life.

Right, it's very easy to dismiss the general therapy talk. I'm not a fan myself.

Exercise, cultivating positive fear responses, self-challenge are all important.

What you're pinning as "therapy talk" is just that last one - you need to think critically about how you approach life problems, not just accept the most negative interpretation of events and your inner monologue.

I think any stoic would agree with that statement.

You're all correct. I'm just not convinced that the person wouldn't have those if they were relieved of the burdens holding them down.

It can be simultaneously true that they are struggling and unlikely to succeed now, and that their natural aptitude is not being realized due to non-work factors.

Hell, one time my friend died suddenly, and I failed out of every project I was on and developed a ton of health problems. Since then, I've gone back to my natural state, but it was hard. Anyone looking at me during that time would have seen a distracted fuckup. I probably would have been given an ADHD diagnosis and drugged heavily, were it not for the acute signal from the proximity of a good friends sudden murder.

Yes - you are identifying a non-depressed engineer. A depressed engineer can become one of those by removing the depression.

You're right, but framed generally like this, it's easy to skip this advice.

OP/reader, more specifically, examine that post. It is an avalanche of negative self-talk. It's a person telling themeselves and the world that they cannot do something. You can take a perfectly healthy person, turn on this cycle, and watch it destroy their lives.

Depression has many causes, but its roots that make it stick are cycles like these. Antidepressants are a parachute, but you have to rebuild the engine and an important part of that is to learn to reframe events and identify and challenge your negative assumptions.