geertj

To add a factoid without expressing an opinion: women with Down syndrome are often fertile while men typically are not. The odds of the offspring of a female with trisomy 21 having the same trisomy are 50% theoretically, and between 33-40% in practice due to trisomy embryos having a higher rate of spontaneous miscarriage.

And what is that problem? Make your case.

The way all these billionaires have built up their wealth is by retaining a certain percentage of stock in the companies they built, and then the market cap of these company got into the billions and sometimes trillions.

Let’s assume a founder has 10%. There are two options to prevent them from becoming a billionaire. Either that company cannot grow past a 10 billion market cap. That would destroy retirement for most normal Americans. The other option is to force the founder to liquidate to pay taxes. If so, then yes, they would stop further building out these companies at a certain market cap once they have no real stake or say in them anymore. Why would they work for free once they are at the limit. I wouldn’t and I think almost nobody would.

Aiming to reduce the number of billionaires is not sound economic policy. You are taking away the incentives that have generated so much progress and job creation in America. Mostly when people complain about billionaires it’s either sour grapes, or a certain type of billionaire they disagree with politically.

I imagine this works just like with electricity. You have generation capacity, with commercial entities buying or owning generation capacity and selling the resource to consumers through community owned last mile infrastructure. The sellers need to tally up and reconcile/settle their generated capacity at some frequency (not sure if daily, monthly, yearly).

This will be an unpopular opinion here and will get downvoted. But this is a total hit piece on Kushner. Vanity Fair is super political and you cannot trust anything they write.

In a few years, Claude Mythos will be remembered as the moment C++ died. I am serious, very senior people are really scared of LLM found vulnerabilities and are pushing strongly for Rust.

Yes! Literal copy paste from my session with Opus 5.5 this morning:

> You gave me a long answer but it didn’t answer my question: can we safely remove $X

> Like what deep questions?

Is intelligence purely computational?

Is consciousness purely computational or at least an emergent property of it? If so do natural numbers have consciousness?

> So you have to believe one of three things

I think your first option doesn’t necessarily have to distinguish between humans and non humans as a binary. Maybe at some level of complexity, neurons alone are not enough and the physical substrate comes into play. Penrose wrote a book where he makes the case that human intelligence cannot be purely computational and where he identifies the quantum nature of the brains’s microtubules as a possible mechanism.

Consciousness is itself is on a whole other level than just intelligence. I personally feel there has to be something metaphysical about it. Otherwise I think the only alternatives are super determinism and consciousness doesn’t actually exist, or numbers have consciousness.

My thoughts on this are a bit sloppy still, but here’s my view. I can’t rhyme the first alternative with ‘cogito ergo sum’ as to me it seems my thoughts have to exist somewhere. On the second alternative, this would imply nothing could actually exist but somehow there’s a principle that every possible decoding of an integer that represents something actually turns that something into existence. Where does that principle then come from and does that decoding not need something to run on?

You are pointing out a few parallels but I think the trends behind them are of vastly different consequence. Unlike social media and remote work, AI is truly a once in a civilization event. It raises deep questions about the nature of humanity that have historically been the exclusive domain of philosophy and religion.

There is no credible path towards stopping progress on AI. Nobody knows exactly how this will play out. But whichever way it turns out, being an skilled AI practitioner will give you strictly more options than not being one.

> It's asking an author to suddenly become an editor.

I think that’s right, and what is needed. It still gives a significant speed up for coding, while still keeping the output human maintainable.

There is the idea that the agent will just produce binary code directly at some point. I don’t know if it ever comes to that but for now I’m in the ‘I’ve become an editor’ camp.

This does pass the smell test. What is your evidence that DOGE has caused even one weather forecast to be less accurate?

Let me share a hot take. I am deliberately taking this somewhat to the extreme, so please attack the idea not the person. Looking for thoughtful replies and good counterpoints, rather than language zeal.

Let's assume that you need to write a program with a given set of requirements, and that you have a magic wand that can instantiate a high quality implementation of the program in any programming language instantaneously and for free. My hot take is that you would not want to choose Go, and you would likely want to choose Rust.

The Go implementation will have higher memory and CPU consumption due to garbage collection, while still being subject to memory bugs. The Rust implementation would be as efficient as possible on the given hardware with minimum memory/CPU, and it would be immune to memory bugs.

In my view, the biggest challenge with Rust, and where Go wins, is the relative difficulty of writing in Rust as the language is significantly more complex. With LLMs this is becoming a non-issue, and we are getting ever closer to having this magic wand (I'd argue that for smaller programs the wand already exists today). The article advocates that Go has excellent readability. I agree that Go has trivial syntax, but given that it's so verbose, I actually find it easier to read Rust code. Its higher expressivity allows you to see the higher level intention of a piece of code more easily.

Many of the other benefits the article mentions for Go are equally applicable to Rust: compiler error messages are super detailed and a great help to coding agents, auto-formatting, a great language server, and a package ecosystem.

I would imagine this would be trained on actual historical weather data instead?

> But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.

I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel, sometimes, almost superhuman.

Do you take emotional ownership in the shape output artifact itself, or merely that it works?

> So we're going to skip becoming carbon neutral and go straight to carbon negative

Yes, when the effects on the environments are so bad that there can be no denying anymore because they affect everyday life of almost all people.

I am not saying this is a good option. I am saying that I don't see an alternative to get a world wide mobilization. Do you see China and the US becoming carbon neutral in the next 10 year?

The annoying "magic" dig was unnecessary. With (clean) energy abundance you can indeed capture enough CO2 to make a world wide impact.

Sadly I think the only solution is to invest to build more energy infrastructure and more AI, so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively.

In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. This is one of those problems where the train is already running down the hill, and we need to engineer a way to catch it. We cannot stop it anymore.

The last thing the EU needs is a higher budget. Unelected bureaucrats that control a trillion dollar budget and have the ability to introduce legislation that supersedes national laws, what could possibly go wrong?

> But so is launching satellites

Starship is trying to get launch cost down to $10 per kilogram to low earth orbit. At that cost it is not clear to me that cables are better except for short distance point to point backbones. One other issue with cables is regulation or monopoly.

The Falcon launch business is profitable on its own, which may be what GP meant. Once you include the ~$3 billion in Starship yearly R&D the space segment goes into the red.

The word ‘crank’ is a dismissive insult. Wolfram is definitely eccentric, probably hard to work with, but also undoubtedly smart. What good does it do to dismiss him? He’s doing nothing wrong spending his own money the way he wants to. And who knows something will come out of this. Similar to GP I’d like to see more of this.

There does appear to be a limited walk back for dual intent visa holders (H1B and L1)

“A spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, however, told Semafor that H1-B visa holders and high-skilled workers might not be affected in the near term.”

Source: https://www.semafor.com/article/05/22/2026/trump-orders-gree...

To be clear, I was asking from a personal perspective, unrelated to my role at Google.

Speaking of zoned SSDs (ZNS or FDP), are any of these available today without having to ‘call sales’? I wanted to experiment with this maybe 2 years back and there was nothing.

Yes they are crowded. There are engineering solutions to that, including formation flying based on absolute positioning and space tethers. It is a great time to be an engineer.

You are creating 20 other engineering problems but not 20 other physics problems. You cannot put those in the same bucket.

It remains to be seen how efficiently those engineering problems can be solved, but none of the commentators here have any real insight about that (myself included). My money is on the ingenuity of the engineers that are working these problems.

The plan is to launch a constellation of smaller AI sats not a monolithic large data center. The calculations I have seen actually have a smaller radiator area than solar panels. Scott Manley’s has a video on this where he goes into some numbers.

I don’t think people are confused between the two. What’s happening is that drive by objections have no real way to assess viability. That calculation you ask for has line items in it that greatly depend on engineering optimizations that, unless you work in the field, are hard to estimate accurately.