Tycho

So, best investor ever? (Not counting people who built enterprises, just people whose trade was to invest.)

I plan to buy some BRK stock. I’m sure it will be a good investment. But also, somewhat sentimentally, just to own a part of a financial masterpiece.

Not quite right. The pivot was from good companies at a great price to great companies at a good price (unless you can get a great price, but that’s unlikely).

Over the long run the latter is a better and more scalable strategy.

Think of Tesla as a well-funded pharmaceutical company that has invented a cure for a widespread ailment (call it “driving”) and now is waiting on regulatory approval.

The elegant syntax that is close to plain English sets it apart.

(It’s not so pretty these days though with all these type hints and other cruft that’s been added in the last ten years.)

Maybe it’s only visible to me https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_5a484c29-ec2d-47e1-977e-c300...

I posted something similar from Grok 9 months ago, although it was “flagged” for some reason. the link still works.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43260083

Sold most of my BTC off at $120k, but kept a chunk not as an investment but as a sort of emergency fund that could be useful if for some reason I ever find myself needing to transact without using cash, bank accounts or credit cards.

The contract would obviously not be no strings attached.

Yes. The capital is not needed immediately, but they have agreed to provide it if/when called upon in future.

They integrated it into Google search immediately so I think a lot of people will bother less with ChatGPT when a google search is just as effective.

Commitments here means money that people have agreed to lend them in future.

I use Grok more than other LLMs. It’s built into X, so the use case of pressing the Grok button on a post to see an explanation for something I didn’t understand, or a fact check for something I doubted, or just more background on a subject, is by far the most frequently useful feature of AI in my day to day life.

People seem to nitpick a lot. Grok 3 came out in, what, March? Cost how many tens of millions to train? And you’re mad because it’s not open source yet?

It’s actually refreshing that the two bosses resigned over this. Means it’s not just an empty apology followed by business as usual with no consequences.

What were you working on that had trillions of events per hour?

I wonder what is the relative utility of giving donations to some charity that solicits them with ads or calls, vs just doing something obvious like writing a cheque to the local orphanage.

I was thinking about this concept of creative destruction recently.

I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa.

Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from it, but not a whole lot. Is it net good or bad (for the area) for somewhere like that to close? Was this lifestyle business depriving the area of better services, more tax revenue? Or does the area now get less services and the money is mostly extracted into the coffers of a non-local property development enterprise. Quite hard to judge. Maybe there’s some good heuristics for estimating such things?

Don’t think I’ve seen “discovering”, the present participle of the verb, used in a headline like this before.

I don’t understand what is wrong with this system:

“Please employ me.”

“OK, fill out this form with your name, D.O.B. and national insurance number, and if it matches against the government database then you can have the job.”

What am I missing here? I suppose they could use someone else’s details, but then HMRC should be able to easily see that the NI account seems to have multiple taxpayers.

What’s the energy profile of running inference in a typical ChatGPT prompt compared to:

  - doing a google search and loading a linked webpage
  - taking a photo with your smartphone and uploading it to social media for sharing
  - playing Fortnite for 20 minutes
  - hosting a Zoom conference with 15 people
  - sending an email to a hundred colleagues

I’d be curious. AI inference is massively centralised, so of course the data centres will be using a lot of energy, but less centralised use cases may be less power efficient from a wholistic perspective.

What I see is mass affluence. People spending hundreds of £s to see Oasis or Taylor Swift concerts. It used to be there were only so many high paying jobs like doctors, dentists, lawyers, but now you have eg. umpteenth product managers at Meta making hundreds of thousands for re-skinning the Marketplace app or whatever.

Skiing is incredibly fun but I wonder if it should be put in the same category as cycling (on roads): too dangerous to be sane.

I thought this film was pretty good. The writer seems to understand the subculture and the performances brought out a lot of hilarity in the script. It brings some important questions into focus - the sheer scale of the social impact of “product rollouts”, the transactional vs philosophical motivations of tech titans, the obsolescence of government.

Of course, it’s a satire, so take it seriously not literally.

The reviewer maybe just didn’t understand a lot of it. Seems to have missed the similarities between Randall and Peter Thiel, for instance. If you’re not steeped in “the scene” the film probably isn’t as funny.

A serious literature degree might prescribe a reading list of ~10 books per week. Some of it stuff you don’t even like but is “important context” or whatever. At a certain point it becomes a chore for anyone. You need to find ways to help you get through more.

The reading (listening) of course is not “in the background”. Maybe sometimes you’re distracted and have to skip back 30s and re-listen. Fine. If the game is too distracting, fine, play something simpler, or watch soccer, do chores, anything where the moment to moment continuity does not require effort to track, but still gives you some benefit.

I’ve listened plenty of audiobooks while driving or walking, why would I not be able to do the same while playing GTA?

The reason to do this is that just sitting in a chair ploughing through books gets very unappealing after a while. And there’s a lot of books to get through.

Your position seems to be “if you use the tool like a total dumbass, you might get a bad outcome.” Like… maybe use it intelligently?

You probably wouldn’t be arguing that previous critics are wrong but surely to get top marks you’d be expected to know what relevant literary criticism has already been published and then build on that in some fashion. No doubt just reading that stuff would sharpen your own insights. AI should make it much easier to find the most relevant criticism and put it in context.

AI should also be able to help you gather evidence from the reference texts, because it can exercise reasonable judgement without any constraint on patience or access or time. Consider the recent social media sensation about the lady who got a PhD for analysing how smell factors into the fates of literary characters. AI can quickly find thousands of examples, and then filter them as desired.

You could even have the AI write essays for you - “analyse this novel through the lens of ____ theory” - where no literary criticism already exists to review. You could have it generate any number of such essays, applying theories/frameworks you might not even know, but want to understand better.

I think it’s possible to “read” an audiobook while doing something monotonous like walking, driving, or, yes, gaming. The lectures you probably have to treat like podcasts and just play them in the background and pick up some ideas.

Well, you have to give the tool a chance. If it can’t even see the text you’re asking about, it’s going to rely on whatever quotes and references it can crib together from reviews and blogs and comments.

Try it for a text that is in the training data, or the public internet, or can be put into the context window - then it might help.

I’m not being satirical. And nowhere did I suggest that you don’t still read the actual text you’re studying. There are more ways to “engage” with literature than just going to seminars.

Did you upload the text of the novel? It’s under copyright so wouldn’t be in the training data or retrievable via search.