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ethn

455 karma · joined March 28, 2016

https://aethn.com

Interested in: - epistemology - social/financial structures. - startups

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ethn··on I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors
Good work, there are plenty of businesses like this for the pickings exactly because they are not VC investable.
ethn··on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution
Thanks for the constructive feedback. I'll work on it.
ethn··on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution
I disagree here, being the founding engineer of a unicorn is quite a different experience than being a core contributor to a mid-size startup.
ethn··on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution
I don't think it can ultimately be escaped but the cited Vegh et al exactly proposes that, the bioinspiration, as a means to surpass those limitations.

However, in this article I contend that those limitations have posed little adversity in the field given the success of the latest models. As a result, it may be a bit premature to be concerned about it.

ethn··on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution
Great feedback, it's my first blog.

I wanted to avoid my experience but I worked at FAANG and helped create a multi-billion dollar corporation (from a handful of people to 1,500 people).

ethn··on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution
For some industries such as chemistry and biotech there is little change to be expected.

The self-employed is now able to rapidly develop their ideas while employed reducing their risk and cost.

Per VC, that's right and secondarily it's more difficult to justify earlier funding when one no longer needs to hire a substantial team. I expect the current major VC firms to get even bigger.

ethn··on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution
Good idea. Again, I'm sure you can ask a GPT or use one of those services designed to detect that usage.
ethn··on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution
I try to address this in the article. I think the same could have been expected of plumbing, electricians, landscaping, etc but through a different means, standardization, the corporations simply don't have a good position.

In this world the neurodivergent is empowered, they no longer are charged with persuasion of their ideas to a team or corporation. They can build their ideas themselves and form a limited partnership with someone with the talents they lack.

Though I make it a point to describe the new economic order without regard to its desirability. However, other authors on the subject (e.g. Lysander Spooner, Rothbard, etc) would be pleased by the development in terms of its social welfare.

ethn··on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution
If so, that's a mistake of mine, I wrote the whole text in one go.
ethn··on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution
Again this piece is not written with GPT, feel free to ask any GPT. Ironically, maybe I should have to increase the appeal of my ideas. I chose my words carefully to communicate my ideas precisely.
ethn··on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution
The article is not written by claude code...only the website. And the article is not praising AI.
ethn··on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution
We would see neither squirrels nor crows since these criticisms miss the forest for the trees. But we can address them.

> This is irrelevant for AI, because people throw more hardware at bigger problems

GAI is a fixed problem which is Solomonoff Induction. Further Amdahl's law is a limitation on neither software nor a super computer.

Both inference and training rely on parallelization, LLM inference has multiple serialization points per layer. Vegh et al 2019 quantifies how Amdahl's law limits success in neural networks[1]. He further states:

"A general misconception (introduced by successors of Amdahl) is to assume that Amdahl’s law is valid for software only". It would apply to a neural network as it does equally to the problem of self-driving cars.

> These two sentences contradict each other

There is no contradiction only a misunderstanding of what "eviscerates" means and even with that incorrect definition resulting in your threshold test, it still remains applicable.

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6458202/

Further reading on Amdahl's law w.r.t LLM:

2. https://medium.com/@TitanML/harmonizing-multi-gpus-efficient...

3. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~sinclair/papers/spati-iiswc23-tot...

ethn··on FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices
A welcomed development in these consumer subscription services.
ethn··on 'Students who use AI as a crutch don't learn anything'
‪ZIZEK: that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want‬
ethn··on HIV drug could be made for just $40 a year for every patient
Sure however the vast majority of costs come from the government regulation in the first place. Consumers of course bear the cost, however this doesn't necessarily mean we should remove these expensive regulations, one can argue they are beneficial.

If we assume they are beneficial, this also doesn't mean the government should subsidize it less but instead more to continue to allow the production of drugs. If we artificially require a price, many of these drugs would simply not be developed.

I'm under the persuasion that the future of healthcare is a voucher system to allow the competitive bidding of drugs/insurance to remain as well as the maintenance of the quality and quantity of medical research. Many countries purport to have better medical systems however we find that the American payers subsidize the rest of the world––with the USA producing more medical research than the rest of the world combined.

In a single healthcare system, the prices of drugs deemed essential will skyrocket while others will simply be excluded by the bureau. This then creates a cost on the tax payers through the inflation/excess tax required by the national budget to afford it. While at the same time the single healthcare system has little incentive to improve its efficiency of administration until it's fully deteriorated and governmental intervention promises a revamp which may still be ineffective.

The voucher system allows many insurance companies to exist, allowing the quality of insurance provided treatments to remain through that competition on their varied administrative strategies. While at the same time consumers with varying degrees of medicinal concerns can choose the right programme for themselves––opting to even pay beyond the sum provided by the voucher. This way it's no longer only affordable through a corporate benefit and the buyer group is available instead through a national benefit.

ethn··on Will we ever get fusion power?
I agree, however the author is convinced about current popular solar panel technology.

Indeed even theoretically we can do 86% multi and 99% with quantum dots——in the current state of technology these remain science fiction considering the commercial manufacturing processes available.

ethn··on Will we ever get fusion power?
Sure there are many novel solar technologies that subvert the SQ assumptions thereby avoiding the conclusion. However, the author of the parent post believes that existing technology today is sufficient.
ethn··on Will we ever get fusion power?
Schockley-Quiesser limit
ethn··on Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests
Fatty cell infiltration occurs when the stem cell niches don't fully convert into its end cell both Glia and Neuron. This would then indicate that TZDs can be effective in promoting the correct differentiation
ethn··on The computational power of the human brain
Yes Walter Pitt's proposal, which he disproved. But we know the prefrontal cortex is capable of simulating a turing machine, or any machine for that matter.
ethn··on Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
They made a synthetic a priori prediction proven by experiment. In science, that's the strongest type of claim.
ethn··on A physicist who bets that gravity can’t be quantized
It's not relational. There's several rigorous proofs against Spinoza's relational theory. Namely that of Kant and Einstein:

"even if space is composed of nothing but relations between observers and events, it would be conceptually possible for all observers to agree on their measurements, whereas relativity implies they will disagree" [0]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_space

ethn··on Sea Change (2022)
Why?
ethn··on Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
Searle's Chinese Room
ethn··on I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
Generally you either use Latent Dirichlet Allocation, exact tags, or a mixture of both. I structure the metric space to weigh exact tags greater than LDA—-whereas you can then create two more classes in that LDA space, of the heavier similar tags and then the description.
ethn··on Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster
Jevon’s paradox: “…occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its demand, negating reductions in resource use.”

Developers will therefore always maximize resource usage as more becomes available.

ethn··on Ask HN: How to deal with a co-founder who has wasteful spending habits
Immediately, without any context other than what you've provided, I would no longer trust him--you should be included in the loop for any major decision like this. If he has no particularly rare redeeming qualities (or if he does, if you can survive without him), discuss it with the board directly. In my experience it is better to not take chances and to aggressively confront this otherwise later you will regret ignoring duplicitous behavior.
ethn··on TSMC to begin 3nm chip production next month
It's a term meant for transistor manufacturers which refers to the gate length, the defining feature of the field effect transistor. It affords multiple advantages additional to more transistors per mm^2 which is merely a design choice, such as power usage.
ethn··on Ask HN: Will Coinbase Last (from an oncoming intern)?
Yes but the business will pivot to focus on USDC redemption, exchange, and KYC. DEX offers better prices for exchanges/yields and non-custodial wallets are preferable.
ethn··on A mystery of the ketogenic diet: benevolent pseudo-diabetes in mice (2019)
Yes fiber doesn’t take you off of ketosis however it does increase carbohydrate absorption.
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