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astrangeon GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

Productivity improvements tend to increase employment. AI will not reduce employment.

(Also, the US budget deficit is way too high to afford a UBI.)

astrangeon GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

Economic growth doesn't mean using up resources faster, it means trading things faster.

astrangeon The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

Managers often still have code and team-lead responsibilities IME. First-line managers, that is.

And then sometimes you report a memory leak and it gets fixed by a VP and you wonder if he doesn't have something better to do.

astrangeon Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

On occasion I meet one of the creators of that professionally. And then I always think of asking him about it. And then I don't do it.

astrangeon Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)

Trazodone is also not addictive and doesn't have bad side effects afaik.

astrangeon Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)

Bulletproof has 0.3mg capsules, but it's a pricier brand. On the other hand, I'm not sure which other brands actually have the dose they say they do.

astrangeon Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

Therapists have specific techniques and programs that work. Well, some of them do anyway. If you have a real serious issue like PTSD or BPD it can be mostly fixed with the right sort of therapy.

It's like saying you only work with a personal trainer at the gym because you don't have a friend to go with. Sort of true sort of not.

astrangeon Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

I'm trying ADHD therapy now, but the thing about ADHD is that you can still do complex tasks like programming yet can't do simple things.

So the therapy is partly focused on emotional management, and partly about skills to do seemingly simple things like cook and put away laundry.

I haven't seen coaching for ADHD software engineers, but I'd be interested in it. (I'd rather take more cooking classes though.)

astrangeon Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

Their bio does say they are, but they certainly forgot some things.

(Some people presenting with depression should not be on antidepressants because they actually have bipolar disorder.)

astrangeon Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

> Atomoxetine's effect size is surprisingly similar to methylphenidate, though in my experience it treats different aspects of ADHD than stimulants. Some doctors (mine) are open to combining it with a long-acting stimulant, which actually can be a really nice setup, especially if you're sensitive to stimulants.

I tried this for several years and only afterwards realized it was bad for me - one because of personality changes, two because of high blood pressure.

It will give you a lot of stamina and ability to continue on the life path you're on, but I got metaphorical tunnel vision and basically wasn't able to do anything after the stimulant crash around dinnertime.

astrangeon Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

If you feel you're getting tolerance to amphetamines, the first thing to try is magnesium glycinate/threonate supplements, and then hydration and diet and sleep.

astrangeon Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

> Intuniv gets a bad reputation because the patient has to be titrated up to the final dose and it takes a long time to see the full effects.

I went up, but then backed down because even 2mg was seriously affecting my sleep quality. I'm feeling much better at 1mg.

nb I think if I wasn't employed than I'd be best off with just this, but employment is best with stimulants. Unfortunately stimulants have side effects.

astrangeon Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

Well, you see, all things are empty of independent origination.

(You "have ADHD" if a psychiatrist was willing to say you have it, gave you medication, and it improved your life quality both at work and at home.)

astrangeon Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

> Me as well, which is a really "fun" time when my specific blend of neurodivergence also causes me to immediately resent said authority and external structure and view it as removing my agency.

I was never very bad at that, but it can happen in ADHD because you lose interest in everything you're "supposed" to do and get stuck on random other things like commenting here. Especially if the "supposed" tasks are hard or give you anxiety.

So I was quite surprised when going on Intuniv made that basically disappear.

My advice is that there are interventions for things like this, but they're never the obvious ones and you'll be surprised what might work. And it's worth trying meds.

astrangeon Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

> I'm still trying to understand this new reality as I'm not used to it at all.

I'm having a similar issue with ADHD meds, which is that we randomly settled on one that made me feel incredibly "normal" (ie not nerdy) but now my lifestyle totally doesn't match that so I need to redo everything.

Still in progress, I've always had winter depression and likely need to be on something for that as well.

astrangeon Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

> Also very important, try to sleep the best you can and do exercise... I remember reading here about exercise in some cases exceeding the benefits of ADHD medications...

Exercise is very true. I used to take walks but it didn't help; pushing myself at the gym (inc using a trainer) is a lot more effective.

Also, ADHD meds interact with sleep, both making it better and worse. I was on Intuniv 2mg and it absolutely ruined my sleep, but 1mg plus a sleep medication (25mg trazodone) are working very well.

astrangeon A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese

I opened it and the TTS mispronounced the first sentence on screen. (ie it ignored the furigana and misread the first word)

astrangeon A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese

The train has probably already hit them and they need to be cleaned off it because you don't want to give your train employees PTSD or you run out of employees.

astrangeon Wealthy AI workers send San Francisco house prices soaring

I thought the point of an LVT was to force land sales for more productive uses.

astrangeon Wealthy AI workers send San Francisco house prices soaring

I doubt deleting income tax is a popular view among economists.

Income and payroll taxes have the feature that you always have the money when it's time to pay the tax. That also means they're disinflationary. Whereas property taxes can be inflationary because they may require you to sell assets.

astrangeon Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

A VP is not a designer, and doesn't have a standard anything.

astrangeon Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

You'd be stuck on how to update "the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel". Was never sure if that meant a starry sky or a bright blue one.

astrangeon GPT-5.6

> LLMs seem particularly bad at writing prompts for other LLMs for this reason

Claude is terrible at this! Probably for the same reason that its writing style in prose is so annoying and full of claudisms.

astrangeon GPT-5.6

It might need the longer answer to think about the question, so one approach would be to ask it normally and then ask it to repeat itself shorter.

astrangeon GPT-5.6

If that was the case in a non-trivial way you'd see mode collapse, but you don't, they come out differently.

astrangeon OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

https://www.the-scientist.com/chatgpt-and-alphafold-help-des...

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15204

> They already fold proteins with simulations.

I like how you're trying to argue with the Nobel committee here.

astrangeon Claude Fable 5

Bad pelicans are in the training set because it's read his blog post. Including a good pelican in midtraining wouldn't help the problem because you'd just produce that every time.

astrangeon AWS Bedrock to require sharing data with Anthropic for Mythos and future models

Query streams aren't really useful data in any sense. Just like nobody else is actually profiting from "selling your data".

astrangeon What it feels like to work with Mythos

It is not a sponsored article and he writes one of these every time a new model releases. Why would a professor at Wharton need to write sponsored Substack articles.

astrangeon Claude Fable 5

> Super catchy names like Opus, Mythos and Fable trying to get you to think that these software products are actually super-human life changing experiences.

They're originally named after the blends at a nearby coffee shop.

https://postscript.co/pages/brew-guide

I've noticed nobody at HN knows what "marketing" is or how to do it. It's not just naming things and being evil and cynical is not the most successful method.

…also frontier models are a superhuman life changing experience. If they aren't, what possibly could be?