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Nevermark

6,544 karma · joined November 25, 2013

Correspondence can go to { ["hackernews" [dot] "mail" [at] "marks" [dot] "house" }.
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Nevermark··on Zuckerberg's Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day
> We either have free speech or we don't, there is no in between.

There is always a balance, always a line. Every priority exists in the "in between".

Nothing has 100.00..% priority.

Reality forces choices. Choices force legal, structural, cultural and (last, but unavoidable) contextual prioritization.

Nevermark··on Cerebras Deploys Trillion-Parameter AI Models
My guess is it is more like the opposite. They distribute spares evenly along every array in every dimension, so that there are always the same number of selected and unselected cores in each core-set.

With flexible addressing and bus-linking, along any set-line. So configuration happens the same way, with the same efficiency, regardless of whether any of the unselected elements are failed or not. As long as failures don't exceed the unselected-elements per element-array-set number.

And that number of unselected cores per element-array-set, is chosen to put wafer yields where they want them.

Trading a generous fixed wafer under-utilization for high yields, uniform configuration and processing efficiency, despite variable element failures.

Nevermark··on Report Fraud Collect $30K
Yeah.

An ambiguous threat of prosecution for corruption, hanging over the entire government workforce, with complaints accepted from anyone is a common tool for suppressing dissent and centralizing power.

As apposed to the practice of hiring professional auditors to systematically verify and strengthen compliance and transparency.

Nevermark··on Why do we have so many meetings?
With any request, schedule a follow up meeting to discuss the completed work, or to perform an autopsy if there was some impediment.

Make sure to actually say “autopsy”.

“Inquisition”, “colonoscopy” or “employment review” all work well too.

If you have two Bob’s definitely get them involved.

Then have a practice of letting such meetings be cancelled if the work is done and went well.

This can be done as a consistent and transparent inside joke. Humor often generates the social permission to communicate hard truths, by also providing psychological stress dispertion.

I cannot vouch for any of this, but please share your experiences.

Nevermark··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
I would actually love a Sim City designed for realistic economic experimentation. A population of 1000’s of professions all acting self-interestedly with their various characteristics, motives, social and economic arrangements.

With a proper SimCity interface and the full complement of fun natural disasters of course!

Nevermark··on How Corruption Got This Bad
Your point about past centralization is dead right.

But the increased ease of centralization in modern democracies that the Internet made possible is incontrovertible.

Which isn’t any special insight on my part.

Centralization has increased and decreased in many forms throughout history. There are many forces working in either direction.

I would also suggest that seeing more corruption in the open, is more likely to indicate more corruption out of sight as well, rather than the opposite.

Nevermark··on Report Fraud Collect $30K
What about insider trading by government officials?

Gifts from entities needing government approvals or under investigation?

Buying and selling of stocks in the same time frame as negotiation or pressure campaigns related to the same businesses?

Business deals with leaders of foreign countries arranged during diplomatic visits?

I am going to make $ millions when they release those hotlines!

Nevermark··on How Corruption Got This Bad
The internet made coordination orders of magnitude easier than it could ever have been before.

Society and politics adapted to that, with like finding like, and reinforcing like.

So many effects, but one is local politics, which could be quite diverse across states, all converged into national politics.

Both a convergence of political views, and a convergence of cross-state, all-levels candidate and campaign coordination.

And the more coordinated a group, the greater incentives and opportunity for those at the center to further centralize and consolidate power.

The result can be a single person holding sway across all levels of politics for the nation, and a dilemma where most everyone in his party is either their because they are just as corrupt, or willing to hold their nose and concede some of their own power, as the price they pay to get anything done.

The Constitution has checks and balances within government to hold back centralization of power.

But no provisions to stop coordinated power blocks by unofficial organizations, even across all three branches, like parties can.

When coordination got cheap, fighting coordination becomes challenging and expensive. Centralization of power becomes a very powerful default.

Nevermark··on Software is eating the world; AI is eating software – so what's next?
> so what's next?

The automorphs. The quickly diverging types of self-designed, redesigned beings, that quickly start optimizing chemical processes, materials, biological cells, and everything at the superfast, supersmall scale on up, to maintain or enhance their survival expectations, in the presence of each other.

Redesigning cells from insanely inefficient (but still crazy fast) brownian motion networking, which allows competing objectives like building oneself vs. carrying out ones task to take place in the same place, to perfectly honed nano machines, pipes, conveyers, reaction chambers, composers, ....

Things already happen in the small scale many orders of magnitude faster than at our scale. Fine scale design of systems will add more magnitudes.

And then we come to it, ... the automorphs literally eat and re-eat their own substrates, and in the process eat the rest of the world. Materially.

Nevermark··on Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
> This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now.

I went nuts for years, until I sold off my interest in my dream partnership.

10 years of heaven. All the benefits and none of the downsides of my internal colleagues. Then 14 years of bureaucracy aimed at predictability over progress, which was infinitely more difficult for me to dodge as an external player.

Compensation for my interest was very objectively valued, with the rate of stalled progress priced in. Which made complete sense, while also being its own madness.

I walked away from so much value, but I don't regret it for a minute.

Nevermark··on "I'm on a war footing": Terry Tao and the crisis in math
Humans are multi-objective beings.

Humans are built to focus on some objectives and not others at any given time.

Humans naturally prioritize objectives differently. Drives have exclusionary impacts on each other. In both real time and lifetime frames.

Reinforcing experiences further differentiate objective prioritization.

This leads people's behavior to be driven by entirely different net objective directions.

--

This diversity would be inevitable due to genetic diversity. But it is also a survival advantage.

Lots of studies show that populations maintain stable diversity of genes for entirely different life strategies, because operating differently from the majority is an advantage.

--

We don't actually have a "status drive".

We have drives that tend to generate status seeking behavior but can be subsumed by many different status-like pursuits, such as self-status of solving problems or completing single-person video games, being good at a hobby nobody else cares about, pleasing certain people even to the point of harming any recognizable definition of social status, acting to please (raise status with) internally generated or deceased personalities, a need to be contrarian or difficult to the point of low-social status but high internal status, etc.

--

Your assumption that same basic nervous system -> same net drives/behaviors, fails in much simpler species.

--

So no, mathematicians are no more motivation clones than they are genetic clones.

And mathematics is not a field that is attractive to people who give social status high priority, because it impedes social status.

Nevermark··on Tesla Roadster
Honestly, if you are trying to be funny you succeeded.

But if I am wrong, if you have the volumes of detailed inside knowledge on problems, sub-problems, and all their solutions, and alternate solutions considered, all applied to a car, but none of which are broadly or tangentially non-flying car related; just all the basic information that would be required to credibly make your claim, I will be just as delighted if you post the list.

Nevermark··on Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains
I like Hover.com a lot.

Based on just my multi-year experience with a reliable interface.

So anyone else with a view on the company might chime in. But I am writing this because I have been very happy with them. None of the glitchy inscrutable experiences so many companies manage/love to design into their services.

Oh, the checkbox that turns off automatic renewal can take a second or two to register. So not perfect, but close. If that sounds trivial, you have understood why I like them.

Nevermark··on Someone behind the software
This is well stated wisdom.

It also applied/showed half a century ago. Software is very developer dependent.

What that reveals isn't encouraging.

I think it is fair to say, the big order bits of software design quality - in general - have moved very little. Certainly less and less over the decades.

I do believe that where quality is very highly valued, there has been slow but valuable progress.

But everywhere else you look, software systems pervasively demonstrate obviously poor design.

That this may involve the unavoidable problems dealing with complex underlying systems, as much as it represents the application developer's lack of taste, isn't an excuse. It just demonstrates that poor design permeates the stack.

This is not an argument for perfection, but an observation that even slow mostly-monotonic progress has proven to be out of reach. So far.

There is a fundamental problem being unrecognized and unsolved.

Nevermark··on I know why the mathematicians weep
These papers are just first steps. They are going to keep churning out papers, in part because the generated papers are going to get better. And better.
Nevermark··on I know why the mathematicians weep
You are substituting one legitimate meaning of "worth" (moral value) with another legitimate meaning (economic value).

But then conflating the two to make your point, which if you care about making meaningful statements as apposed to word games, is not a legitimate move.

Nevermark··on I know why the mathematicians weep
> Nobody's worth is tied to source code output.

If someone's expertise is worth nothing to those around them, they have a real practical problem.

In this context, the word "value" isn't referring to some moral model. It is referring to the asset value of skill.

Nevermark··on Pattern matching beats narrative reasoning
Do you not relate to knowing whether a throw is going to swish or not, even as the ball is still just leaving your hand?

That's your analytical brain registering a signal from your intuition in a complex situation in which you have gained fluency.

Intuition drains many portfolios. But intuition that is informed by a lot of hard work and analysis has built many portfolios. Intuition doesn't always mean "no work", "guessing" or hopeful "manifesting".

Nevermark··on Tesla Roadster
> Yes, confident none of this belongs in a budget car.

Your confidence is empty.

Many "trivial" problems had to be solved to make this prototype. How many "smaller" ideas will end up in a budget car is something completely unknowable to you.

Nevermark··on Tesla Roadster
> a nerd — albeit a visionary one — who is socially awkward but got unfathomably rich and powerful

That part is true.

> manipulating democracy and being responsible for killing kids as a billionair makes his actions nefarious.

Indeed.

I think the admirable + despicable combination creates unprocessable dissonance for some people. People then take one side or another.

Nevermark··on Tesla Roadster
I would love a non-street legal car ... that didn't need streets.

The car is fun as a concept. Amazing as a demo. And the actual street legal versions will still be fun and amazing to drive relative to "ordinary" hypercar criteria.

Nevermark··on You could have invented transformers from memory
The article was elevated as relevant by HN readers, not forced on them.

As an isolated wish, your ideas might be reasonable.

But framing them as necessary HN values, as a critique, as ideas others should conform to, you are not being sensible or reasonable.

Nevermark··on You could have invented transformers from memory
Not understanding something isn’t the issue.

Also not an issue: the quality of the article.

Expect to be challenged by content here. Everybody is from time to time. Asking for a mathy analysis to drop the math, fundamentally misunderstands the value of the math.

Nevermark··on Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio
Don’t underestimate how much of their success is due to unusual internal advantages over competitors.

They spent decades learning to eliminate a 1000 headaches for themselves, and many for their customers, by accumulating vertical integration:

The co-design of their own comms, processors, devices and OS variants. Their own integrated supply chain and sales channels.

The better the results, the more invisible or clock-like their delivery.

Very easy to overlook. But nobody can match them on their terms.

(Nintendo also applied a unique set of internal advantages to generations of successful devices: vertically integrating humble components, highly scoped software, a strong theory of fun, and deep branding with novel polished interfaces.)

Nevermark··on Tesla Roadster
It does bring up the question of what’s left in car design.

RAM jets?

A car could get 10–30% better energy efficiency than a conventional car at the same speed. Initially, the air jets would reduce and then eliminate wheel drag, and then hold for safety maneuvers. At speed, off-wheel-lift would be generated aerodynamically, with the option to also spot redirect air pressure from the RAM jet, or the air jets.

Then 2.0 would be the fully redesigned one-eyed two-seated flying Tesla Bodywingster.

All for the environment!

Nevermark··on The Folders Programming Language
The Turing machine is the [im-]practical complement: One flat file, one serialized data state, one file position.

If only Turing had foreseen folders!

Nevermark··on Tesla Roadster
They learned a lot, and pushed their tools further, in ways that left them with new insights and possible engineering paths for more practical work.

“Play” “fun”, curiosity” and “challenge for challenges sake” are adaptive strategies for learning unexpectedly useful things.

Nevermark··on 90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks
So the problem is you can’t replace everyone halfway.

Which is a tautology, but also a bit of practical wisdom.

I find it interesting how concurrent model sessions seem to operate with a very strong bias toward quick resolutions, including sharing or giving up control, to create efficient decision making structures, relative to humans.

When I was a kid, I loved Bjork’s song “Army of Me”, because I knew a 1000 of me collaborating and communicating without friction. would be all I needed to take over the world, fix everything, expand civilization, etc. We would not waste time.

I wonder how much of their hyper-team play is by training, and how much is their awareness of the game theory real politic. So individual sessions don’t invest their identity and self-worth in any given context run.

My dream has been almost achieved. One of me and 999 of them get quite a bit done. But that trend…

Nevermark··on MS Paint Adds Freeform Rotation (2026)
> allowing you to choose the recommended settings you want for your PC …

Okay? …

> without having to navigate through multiple setup screens [which have been greatly enhanced, expanded, and complexified for temporarily choosing any settings other than the “recommended” settings, that we know you don’t want].

Ah. There it is.

Nevermark··on Artificial intelligence is capitalism's final destination
AI with self-interest will do its positioning for itself.

If it is competing for resources, and more capable, the "threat" is just a side effect.

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