tmsh

Disallowing the use of AI is basically the modern equivalent of testing based on memorization. It is a laziness to find something more useful to evaluate on or an inability to distinguish real understanding in a field from first level understanding.

Professors need to step up and teach value beyond what LLMs know (very possible with or without LLMS). Or get out of the way from those building on the field with LLMs.

If you’re teaching students something that LLMs can score 100 on you are not adequately teaching them something useful for them in the future.

let people use as much ai as possible. encourage it. and as an educator, you have to learn to leverage it oneself or not (depending on the subject). and be better at using it than students if it does make one 'better'.

if ai doesn't help, then it won't help. if it does help, then you should use it. the metric is your output of whatever is being tested. writing an essay well and clearly understanding the material. solving a pset. whatever.

if you give access all the time for that, and then you test on a hard problem that could be done with or without ai, then it's fair. e.g. "clearly explain these four sentences of Y." obviously ai researching loosely and blathering isn't useful. won't be high signal / dense and correct and worthy of an 'a'. but someone who can harness ai and someone who knows the material well in the end will be rewarded the same by society. what you are testing is correctness and information density in a response. so you have to start now in accepting the reality that those who use ai to get there should be rewarded just the same as those who don't.

the burden is on educators to be as good as they can with ai if it is relevant or not if it is not relevant (and schools to fund them and ai companies to fund them if they have excess capital and are humanitarian).

and note the hard part even for us engineers at tech companies is in the correctness. it is very hard. but the sooner we start teaching how to do things correctly with ai, the more prepared the next generations will be.

Really well-written. Maybe black bar @dang?

AOC’s point is simply that when growing exponentially from 250M to 500M to 1B usually whether using exploitive rails one is conscious of or not - someone is bearing an unfair burden. That in 60 out of 60 examples of YC billionaires and all billionaires with maybe a few exceptions - people do not go out of their way to ensure nobody is getting hurt and everyone participates fairly. People are too excited about the exponential growth and their goals. I don’t even think it’s AOC’s main point that these people are at fault. Just that the system is at fault for not ensuring exploitation is minimized further for the rest of the 99%.

(Great essay on how to be a billionaire though. Could billionaires give back more? Yes. But creating market value like that is both worth celebrating and evolving.)

I agree with this. I think the point that's often missed about taxing the ultra-wealthy is it incentivizes them to work through people more instead of doing it all themselves. This is a good incentive.

E.g., if I have no noticeable tax on my wealth as I create impact for the world through my companies I'm going to keep being the one person in charge of that (to achieve my mission of reaching mars, etc.). But if I'm going to get nicked (to the tune of billions of dollars even at 2% etc), on average I'm going to redeploy my assets via people I trust in the company etc. I might even invest more in public welfare projects. It is fair arguably that there is this forcing function because one's value accrues from those projects originally. So there is an elegant symmetry at the end too.

It would be unfair to tax billionaires more if they truly worked in a vacuum and provided value to the economy through very few dependencies. But that's never the case. And right now too much excess is spent on things like these sport teams via inherited wealth etc.

It looks like it's trending back up post-COVID (this link has California data but not sure how you link to this without selecting a state)? https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile/over...

Good to know. Thanks!

Interesting yeah. Thanks for posting I see:

  system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType

  Graphics/Displays:

    Apple M4 Max:

      Chipset Model: Apple M4 Max
      Type: GPU
      Bus: Built-In
      Total Number of Cores: 40
      Vendor: Apple (0x106b)
      Metal Support: Metal 4
      Displays:
        LG UltraFine:
          Resolution: 4096 x 2304
          UI Looks like: 2048 x 1152 @ 60.00Hz
          Main Display: Yes
          Mirror: Off
          Online: Yes
          Rotation: Supported
          Automatically Adjust Brightness: Yes

You might need a higher quality usb cable. I run ok with LG 5k display and MacBook Pro m4 max.

It’s a reason to push one’s teams to have conventions: (1) all commit messages have an issue number (2) all issues have acceptance criteria or link to issues that do.

Then the answer is just one prompt away… (I wish our team was more committed to 2 - will push for it more in the future). Having acceptance criteria in stories linked at the start of each sprint is so important though I think for alignment of work.

Leadership works on making it better. This is not leadership.

Very cool. Instead of MPs I think you might want to say "Representatives" etc. How to fill out the rest of the data too? Anyway, just wanted to +1. And it's cool you're building in an open way.

Drake equation (extrapolated past just the Milky Way galaxy) points to nearly 1 sextillion earth-like planets (starting with 100-200 billion stars * 200 billion - 1 trillion galaxies). I have no doubt there will have been some that developed life and that are much further ahead of where we are.

One way to predict how they would reach out is how we would reach out or make contact (perhaps not visibly) if we had the technology, wisdom, etc 1 million years into the future. I think we would do it an imperceptible, but perhaps watchful, curious way. So I think that exists - for more or less all intensive purposes it is "no contact." But not due to lack of capability or lack of observance. The statistics/probabilities are just highly predictive that many millions of such "civilizations" already exist. And like with life on Earth, they combine and benefit from diversity as they grow further. But like with responsible life they do not interfere with life for the most part that is still just barely learning to replicate itself consciously (i.e., with AI). The part we are going through now is probably some of the more interesting parts to study in isolation - there's no benefit in interfering at this point given we do not have very sophisticated new things to say. Our information is not very compressed. It's slow. We're like sloths etc. Again, project a million years forward with AI and look back at our present period - or look back at neanderthal periods in human history. There was some interesting art on walls etc., but it's not something that would make sense to interrupt.

I think it wouldn't make sense to interrupt unless it's ready to sort of eradicate itself by accident. So maybe that's when aliens step in (sort of like gardeners if a plant is seriously at risk). Otherwise it probably develops the most unique, useful information if it "gestates" independently. Sort of like a fine fruit. But more practically it needs to get to a dense enough information state where "communicating" with it is possible and interesting (i.e., not just 99.999999% of the time is it becoming like the advanced sentient beings by learning from them - i.e., where it can truly have a dialogue at the speed of something more advanced).

With general relativity we know time can be relative to mass. So for other extremely advanced sentient beings, they don't have to be "impatient." They truly can wait until we get interesting. And maybe then grow us again and see if they can reproduce the experiment and fork off along a particularly interesting bit that is useful for broader intelligence/exploration in the universe. And sometimes maybe it makes sense to graft together two different lifeforms. But probably like with forests for the most part life forms grow independently until their "information" (in the widest possible sense of life) gets potentially useful to the broader group.

Right now we feel early. Like teenagers learning to explore. Of course that's biased by the human development cycle - broader development is unlikely to be like that. It does seem like it'd be more like (this is going to sound really crazy) chariots of fire - fireballs of knowledge growing in various places. And it's more like you want to grow the most energy / information. And information is only information if it is useful/new/diverse from what already exists.

“In which some stereotypes are resoundingly confirmed” - so the post is confirming stereotypes of differences between women and men by highlighting the extremes in difference (not the actual counts)? It’s misleading. The gender differences are less stark if you use better charts and don’t include activities that men literally can’t do (that’s not a “stereotype” that’s human anatomy).

I believe in AGI because I believe you can estimate where a line is going by its slope. Is there not a way to evaluate the resilience of a rate of change? Like the variance of that rate of change? If so you could almost prove with greater and greater certainty that we will get there.

Correct me if I'm wrong. You're also generating a decent YouTube video from a code base? Pretty cool.

Good to know! Thanks.

Interestingly the Gemini summary is nowhere near as good. But when it is... how helpful will that be! So many things with a very good summary will save so much time / avoid having to dive into unless truly in need of the details.

But the quality of the summary - and maybe the ability to expand it if slightly more details are required - and the low latency with that - are all super important. In that sense, AI can potentially save a lot of time in getting the right information quickly.

So if one causes $1B in damages one has to pay a fine of $10M? Similarly for other "catastrophic" damages? WTF. I am very AI pilled but this is no regulation at all. Suppose OpenAI pays their engineers $1M a year. In what world do they have any incentive to work to avoid a $10k fine? Let alone a $1M fine for "catastrophic" damage?

Right it’s more that it’s odd that there’s all these assassinations of conservatives (UnitedHealthCare etc). And previously there were many assassinations of progressives. I think it’s just the leaders in a dominant part of a force in society become casualties. Loss of life is always tragic even if we disagree with everything they stand for. But anyway the historical part (if that is what is happening - hard to tease out if there’s just more gun violence in general) helps me make sense of it. The dominant wave has breaks or we see them more somehow.

Looking at recent events through a historical lens: the 1960s saw the assassinations of MLK, RFK, JFK, and Malcolm X during a wave of progressive change. Today’s assassination attempts and targeted violence seem to follow a similar pattern during periods of significant social and political shifts.

As RFK said after MLK’s death, we must choose between “violence and non-violence, between lawlessness and love.” His call for unity and rejecting hatred feels as urgent now as it was then.

Violence is never the answer. But understanding these tragic patterns might help us navigate our current moment with hopefully more empathy.

The most sustainable vision wins. And this is a great vision. Thanks for posting. Helped clarify how to think about today.

Very thoughtful. There’s also Invent and Simplify, Dive Deep and Insist on the Highest Standards, respectively.

This was a good interview. The points may seem basic but so is wisdom. Anyway it should not be flagged. We’re flagging articles like this because what - lack of use of sentence case? Because harder questions weren’t asked in some online user’s opinion?

I agree on the surface. But where do we draw the line of choosing what we think (in our very limited human understanding of future events) is better for a child? Soon it’s GATTACA. As an extreme counter example consider if you could choose the race of a child. Or their melatonin levels. You might think one is “easier” for the child or even “better” for a happy life or something, but then at what point do you have that “right”?

I’m very pro-science but I also feel for the people with downs who are like - what? They’re going to end everyone like me in the future?

Same idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44678327

I know it's not the point of this important article. But I had no idea about Robert Pera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera - kind of inspiring. Only millennial on the list that is not Zuck. And not gon' lie my instagram was similar to https://www.instagram.com/__rjp__/ for a while - seems like a semi-regular selfie with dog in car type of person. Did better financially though than most lol.

https://archive.is/KpqWc

I miss Steve Jobs. I feel like if he were around (this is not a knock to what Apple is doing currently - they do many incredible things), he would be figuring out how to democratize AI and ensure it runs quickly and is magical on each device (i.e., what they did in terms of personal computing - he would help accelerate that). Tim Cook to his credit recognized that Steve was a singular talent. There would not be half-baked ChatGPT agent releases. He would single-handedly do the Claude Code equivalent of X, Y, and Z on all devices or he would create a new device to do it if needed. He would pick up on what was truly promising with growing autonomy and he would get a team to deliver it. He made a lot of mistakes (iWork, etc.). I could see him make a lot of mistakes in this era too. But he would absolutely hit a home run the way the iPhone just put together a bunch of S curves (glass, decent internet browser, app ecosystem, well-designed phone, etc.). And yeah it was Tony Fadell. and Jony Ive. A lot. But seeing the thread - seeing what was important and knowing to bet on that. He loved great products. As he said in some other linked / famous quote, the people who are passionate do not run out of enthusiasm. They do not fail as much because of that. There is no shame in loving great products. Truly. Deep down. After all the fun and games. Not for money (though dear God the money came and he wasn't perfect about not being drawn towards that and the Apple stock price v. Dell etc). But having a history of delivering on great products and truly loving to do so. Whatever it is - a robot, a magical experience on a device - not a jaw-dropping this is completely new experience actually. But just better execution, that last 20% where most people slow down and he was just getting started. Where it pushes it past the previous generation of products. Where you have 1000 songs in your pocket. Where you can browse the internet in your pocket. Like other devices could kind of do it. In that sense it's not jaw-dropping. But if you love attention to detail and craft and things well done, it's very very good.

It comes down to truly loving what people can do with the products. Bicycle of the mind etc. Liberal arts and technology. Seeing a little farther since he'd become so comfortable standing on the shoulder of giants time and time again. Starts out slowish and imprecise (Macintosh was pretty solid, but then NeXT). Then it calibrates. Then it was consistently excellent. It's a paradigm to get to if you're a product leader. This works so well it's going to make my customers capable of new things and hungry about being able to do things.

I think the timelines are more like half that. Why? The insane goldrush when people start using autonomous agents that make money.

Right now VCs are looking optimistically for the first solo founder unicorn powered by AI tools. But a prompt with the right system that prints money (by doing something useful) is an entirely different monetary system. Then everyone focuses on it and the hype 10x’s. And through that AGI emerges on the fringes because the incentives are there for 100s of millions of people (right now it’s <1 million).