veunes

Elegance may not remain exclusively human forever but usefulness probably requires more than correctness

Yes, especially when the counterexample is formally verified. It converts years of speculative effort into a definite answer almost immediately

I think the asymmetry depends on the representation

This is probably part of why machines are doing so well at counterexamples. They have no aesthetic commitment to the conjecture and no embarrassment about producing something ugly

Most of the cost is keeping crews, vehicles and equipment available for the call that may or may not come

Thin operating margins don't really settle the greed question when the ownership structure is complicated

This is exactly the part that makes "you can always refuse" feel a bit theoretical

I think your department is probably closer to what people imagine ambulance billing looks like

Yet "the payment model is broken" and "some prices are absurd" can both be true

Kids don't just get sick, they seem to turn the whole house into a slow-motion relay race of viruses

I guess it depends a lot on what they count as sick. I definitely don't spend 3 weeks a year in bed, but if you add up all the random sore throats, congestion, coughs that linger for a week and "not really sick but clearly fighting something" days, it may be less crazy than it sounds

It's strange how much we've normalized everyone being sick for weeks every year, even though the total cost is enormous

This is the kind of thing people miss when they say "it's just a cold". I really hope this work goes somewhere.

The tricky part is that the benefit is invisible. If it works, nothing happens: people just get sick less often. That is a hard thing to sell to building owners and employers unless the evidence and standards are really solid

Sending someone a dumb meme can also be a form of affection

I don't think the point of the strawberry example is that industrialization failed to make strawberries cheaper or more available. It obviously did the opposite in many places. The point is more about what gets selected for when the whole system optimizes for scale, consistency, shelf life, lowest acceptable cost

When housing, healthcare, work, social life all feel unstable, the predictable option starts looking less like boring conformity and more like one less decision that can go wrong

Yeah, I think cities are probably the clearest physical-world version of this

This feels related to Goodhart's law, but applied to pleasure and culture

The uncomfortable part is that each step is usually justified by a real use case

The funny part is that "put your browser profile on a ramdisk" used to sound like an obsessive performance tweak, and now it starts to look like a privacy mitigation

What stood out to me is how little of this is really new to Silicon Valley

If a model like that exists behind closed doors, we're unlikely to know from press releases

The interesting failure mode here is that the defensive side needs access before the offensive side starts using the capability

The wholesale spread makes batteries look obvious, but I'd be careful about extrapolating from today's arbitrage. If enough batteries get built, the spread they rely on compresses

This sounds less like a dispute about "the mission" and more like a dispute about who should have controlled the mission. The nonprofit/for-profit structure is messy, but so is the idea that putting OpenAI under Tesla would somehow have preserved its independence

This is a good reminder that encrypted and end-to-end encrypted are very different promises

This is a lot less strange if you think of the robot as participating in ritual rather than "having faith"

45 is painfully young

The manipulation risk is real, but it usually comes from pretending there is a painless answer