shalmanese

I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.

No sign of datacenter activity at the local 4-H club either. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the commie brainwashed American citizens who are wrong.

ICE was a reshuffle of the INS and a few ancillary departments but the core functions are continuous. It's like saying Meta has only been around for 5 years, most of the engineers were doing their previous job unchanged by the rebrand.

Why not submit with ?utm_source=hn instead which is far better understood by indexers etc. and is generally supported inside of CRMs to allow for paywall free access.

"Survival", as conceptualized as an industry, is that you're holed up in a secure location with adequate food, ammunition and other essentials to last months to years. Plenty of preppers who diligently prepared bunkers for the end of the world emerged from those bunkers, not because they ran out of food or ammo, but because their hair got too annoying to deal with and cosplaying survival did not extend to actually learning how to cut their own hair vs giving up the pretense and having a professional do it..

The Youtuber AwakeWithJP has constantly shifted his apparent political beliefs over time in a cynical attempt to find new audiences. He started off as a crunchy granola hippy, then an "anti-woke" activist before going full Trumper during COVID. Now he's moving away from Trumpism and becoming a privacy/civil liberties activist persona.

I think it's impossible to grapple with this without fully reckoning with the impact of porn.

One thing I like to ask people is if they can name me an openly straight female pornstar. That is, a female porn star that has never appeared in scenes where they have sex with both men and women and have stated or it can be inferred from a long enough career that they refuse to be booked for those scenes. Then I ask them if they can name me an openly bisexual male porn star That is, one that has opened appeared in scenes where they have sex with both men and women.

The disparity of how hard it is to name either category reflects back onto our social beliefs of the acceptability and commonness of each.

One test I now use on survival related material, especially ones written pre-COVID, is how long does it take them before they start talking about how to cut hair.

One thing we learned during COVID was a significant limitation in people's willingness to stay isolated was their hair was getting out of control. It's the exact, boring, unsexy topic that you omit if you're selling the fantasy of survival and you include if you want to cover the boring, day to day logistics.

The entire survival industry is not acquitted well in being revealed as how much the industry is an aesthetic movement.

No, by far the most parsimonious explanation is they got slapped by a capricious US government so they went overboard on caution in an attempt not to generate any more controversy. A predictable response of chaotic government regulation.

Whatever else it is, it definitely isn’t AI written.

Software owner learns that posting blog posts about their support woes also doesn't lead to an outpouring of love.

Why can't my password be a 5KB long

Because that opens you up to an entirely new class of attack. You have to set the limit somewhere and if you set it at INT_MAX, then a malicious user could find a O(n^2) path in your password validator and input a 4GB password that locks up the machine. Or they could create 1000 users in a row with 4GB passwords and fill up your storage.

The purpose of a system is what it does. You're never going to have success optimizing a system towards goals that are not the goals of the system. You need to first assess what the system is optimizing towards in the first place and now to change the incentives, otherwise you're going to misdiagnose competence as incompetence.

I think the most important thing to be aware of is that your own personal estimation in how willing some group of people is to help is regularly off by several orders of magnitude.

I've had people assume that person X must be asked several times a day for help when they're really asked once every few years. Alternatively, I know people who assume they are sending some totally unique request to someone who gets a dozen of the same inquiry every single day.

Until you get a good baseline figure of how competitive your request for help is, everything else is pre-mature optimization. The best thing is to just be lightweight about it and dash something off as soon as you think of it and to not be too emotionally invested in whether you get a response or not. Only when you gather evidence that the response rate is below what you expected should you try to optimize how you ask.

What I'm curious about is why all AI written articles try to hide they were written with AI vs being open about it. I'd actually be far more willing to engage with an AI written article if the author shares the chat transcripts that lead them to the finished piece and I could load that context into my own session and ask additional questions/interrogate my own ideas branching from it.

Instead, people always try and pull the illusion as if the AI didn't exist.

The more parsimonious explanation is that commercial jet engine production is downstream of commercial airbody production and China's currently limited by COMAC's scaling woes. All the money and talent in the world can't replicate real users generating real data that you can use to improve.

I'd argue the opposite that jet engines have a market structure that's uniquely terrible for traditional free market societies. There's a few industries where structurally, companies can only exit the market but it's almost impossible for a new company to enter. Airframes, jet engines, CPU manufacturing, lithography etc.

What this dynamic doesn't make any company immune from though is corporate rot. You've seen the rot take down Boeing and Intel from the inside as a slow moving car wreck. There's no reason the rot can't take down ASML, TSMC or Airbus as well. The free market fundamentally doesn't have a good response to this problem, excess capital is taken out of these companies during good times and then they run to governments seeking bailouts during bad times but governments don't know how to mandate good corporate governance.

I think a lot of the jet engine manufacturers are seeing this same corporate rot process, the number of high profile scandals across the industry and reports of insiders on how the number crunchers are taking over the business are strangely reminiscent of what we heard out of Boeing and Intel.

It's a shallow article.

Yeah, because it was generated by AI.

As soon as I got to "That is the pattern worth naming. Most rewrites answer to the engineer - ", I stopped reading.

This is a counter intuitive result around surveying. Best way I’ve found to explain it is if you want to test if a soup is too salty, it’s about the size of the spoon, not the size of the pot.

Be warned though, the equity you are granted will be exceedingly illiquid.

"The three effects are not separable knobs. You cannot dial in one without moving the other two.

The browning claim is the contested one, so it is worth pinning down. "

Is classic Claude-speak.

The paradox is that we love reading our own AI generated writing and hate reading anyone else's AI generated writing.

On a recent weeklong trip to the Philippines, I generated over a 500 page novel's worth of content from AI around various aspects of Filipino history, culture, social dynamics etc. and actually went over it at least 3 times to fully absorb the material.

But if someone handed me even a 3000 word essay on the Philippines clearly written by AI, I would not be able to get to the end of it.

The entire "blame" paradigm is unproductive. Does Lyft "blame" Uber for it's lowered market share?

The entire system (including nurses and technicians) are just agents making semi-rational decisions in their own self interest. Is it important to judge people within an existing system or is it important to look at locus points that, when pressure is applied, can make durable changes to the system?

Americans when describing their ideal car interior: "Imagine a burger ordering button".

But, for scientists, I find that these tools address the problem of the exploding complexity barrier in the frontier. Every day, it grows harder and harder to contain a mental map of recent relevant progress by simple virtue of the amount being produced.

AI is going to both help and hinder this process though. At the end of the day, mathematics is mostly a social process at this point. The goal is not raw number of theorems proven, it’s how proving theorems affects the working operational models of mathematicians. Only a rare few new theorems in mathematics nowadays have direct real world applicability.

If AI produced legitimate theoretical breakthroughs at a pace mathematicians are unable to absorb, then the impact will be neutral to negative.

That’s not an analyst, that’s a pundit. An analyst can have a clear point of view that is different from yours and, very far off the consensus in any direction. But the value of an analyst is they have a consistent point of view that they apply to any situation and flag as their point of view evolves.

A pundit starts from a pre-declared conclusion and works backwards to generate the argument. An analyst lets the conclusion be dictated by the analysis.

I fully support the government reading my odometer during every single emissions check of my EV ;).

This is the wrong level of analysis. Disney owns ABC, ABC owned 538. The relevant decisions were made by ABC’s leadership.

And the firing of the staff happened years ago and people broadly understood even if they did not agree with it.

The recent decision was to take down an archive that cost $8 in server resources and was still bringing in page views and ad revenue.

Apple's problem might be they were right too early which is sometimes worse than being wrong. The original vision of Siri was substantively correct in how AI would supercharge our phones but huge parts of the vision got forgotten when Siri was acquired by Apple and the original founders left. The original technical choices around Siri constrained it from evolving into something useful.

A funny story that happened the other day: A friend knew he had to be at dinner at a place across town but he forgot why he had to be at that dinner. While we were waiting for his rideshare to come, he was flipping through every kind of app trying to reconstruct the original context for his appointment.

In theory, this is where AI should shine. He should have been able to say "Hey Siri, pull up all of the info that references tonight's dinner appointment" and AI should be the unified interface into a bunch of app-specific data pools.

But of course he's never in 1 million years would have thought about using Siri to do that because of how bad Siri is.

I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software.

This was substantially predicted by Fred Brooks in 1986 in the classic No Silver Bullets [1] essay under the sections "Expert Systems" and "Automatic Programming".

In it, he lays out the core features of vibe coding and exactly the experience we are having now with it: Initial success in a few carefully chosen domains and then a reasonable but not ground breaking increase in productivity as it expands outside of those domains.

[1] https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.p...

This is all substantially correct and gives us hints as to where to focus for AI to make the processes go faster.

Eg: I had a product manager say to me that he envisions a future where any meeting with stakeholders that does not result in an interactive prototype by the end of the meeting would be considered a failure. This feels directionally correct to me.

The other thing I expect to see is Vibecoding being the "Excel 2.0" where it allows significant self-serve of building interactive apps that's engaged in a continual war with IT to turn them into something with better security guarantees, proper access control & logging, scalability, change management etc.

But the larger historical point here is that every revolutionary transition produces, in the early stages, "Steam Horses". The invention of the steam engine had people imagining that the future of transportation would involve horse shaped objects, powered by steam, pulling along conventional carts. It wasn't until later developments that we understood the function of transportation as divorced from the form.

I started talking about Steam Horses originally in the context of MOOCs, which was a classic Steam Horse idea.

FYI: the author of this piece is the eugenicist Cremieux who was responsible for using hacked data to attack Zohran Mamdani for checking Black and Asian on his college application.

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