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ip26on A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis

such as helping you create a network that's good at playing go

This is really what’s happening right now… LLMs are excellent computer users. Which makes one of the frontiers “amazing things computers always could have done, but we lacked the programmers to do”.

If basically anyone can train a high quality CNN for just about any purpose now, what new opportunities appear that computers can help with?

ip26on Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]

Agreed, I keep thinking to myself that there's a huge mathematical question right in front of us today that is in exactly this vein - all the various nuances of why LLM's work so well is a mathematical question. As far as I know, it's not really understood beyond "we do this basic thing (that makes sense) to predict that a noun is followed by a verb, and then we scale it up a bazillion fold and it can contribute to mathematics research".

As a comparison, classical computing has been scaled up a bazillion fold too, and can do things which are absolutely miraculous, but every layer of abstraction is discretely understandable.

ip26on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices

Take garbage hauling. You have five haulers running the exact same routes through town, stopping at different houses. Government is unhappy with the tremendous added wear on the roads from the redundant trucks, and the extra traffic, so it strikes a deal and grants exclusivity to one hauler.

This is a granted monopoly. It has real positives, such as the same service at 5x less road wear. It should also be obvious that to be positive overall the deal needs to prevent abuse of the public.

ip26on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices

Regulation is usually what you accept in exchange for a monopoly. I would argue a granted monopoly without any regulation is evidence of regulatory capture.

If you want to argue from first principles, and we accept for a moment that granted monopoly is the system we are working in (whether or not you feel it's the optimal regime) then I'd argue there's a clear gap in regulation, as flagrant abuse of the consumer has not been prevented.

ip26on The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities

I question whether that's the dominant assumption. I know there's hoarders, but there's also loads of "stuff" associated with day-to-day life. Live in one place and you'll have boxes of bandages and aspirin, tools for fixing the lawn mower, a small compressor for blowing out your sprinklers, board games, extra coffee mugs, shoes that are ok but you don't like very much, on and on. None of that "junk", even if you might use it rarely and certainly won't perish without it.

There's little nobility in throwing out your fourth set of perfectly serviceable bed sheets or the nicked pair of nail clippers in the guest bathroom. Which leads to accumulation, like moss on a tree.

ip26on Let's make quality the norm again

We can dream that every human should be self reliant enough to personally inspect a used car, test knife steel for ductility and carbon content, inspect the stitching in a pair of pants, on and on.

But if you need vast expertise and extensive product testing just to make a trip to the grocery store, that’s not a fluid market. You are requiring a system with a heavy reliance on unpaid labors by all parties.

There’s always a place for expertise, but trusted brands support market efficiency. The simplest is “I bought one of these before and I liked it; I trust that the brand & vendor will sell me an identical copy” without needing to interrogate their supply chain to confirm it’s the same good. Another is “if I buy this and the product has a defect, they will help set it straight”.

Trust in the seller is not far away in importance from transparent pricing, and arguably if the product hides a flaw (like a knockoff) the pricing is ipso facto not transparent.

ip26on Let's make quality the norm again

The dark part is you, as a consumer who is willing to pay to not watch ads, are worth considerably more than a few cents to advertise to. In fact, the more you are willing to pay to have no ads, the more valuable showing ads to you is…

ip26on The Inference Hardware Revolution of 2026

A large fraction of the innovation in CPUs is driven by working around the memory wall. I anticipate AI inference will follow the same trend, and innovations that work around the autoregressive nature will be enormously impactful.

Speculative decoding is an example. An accurate draft model can reduce the number of times you stream through memory by a factor of 4x.

ip26on America's Driver's License Breach Is a National Security Disaster

I've got bad news for you jsrozner, John down in accounting at <your employer> did something very unethical last week. So you, jsrozner, a first level manager in customer support who has never even met John, are going to jail for a decade and all lifetime compensation will be clawed back.

ip26on The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution

You can't give all citizens effective veto power and then expect it will only be used for good in cases where the law is behind.

ip26on Getting your hands dirty is good for you

It sounds more like a joke or a lampoon of always-connected culture.

ip26on Kids These Days

you need to be able to experiment

With what? It’s not prima facie bad to have limits or bounds. I’d agree it’s good to be able to be goofy, but there’s plenty of actually-illegal activities teenagers used to “experiment” with (and skate by under the radar) that doesn't feel like a loss if it’s gone.

ip26on Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022

Clearly the point of this paper was not to flag a specific lake as being a specific problem. It seems pretty clear it's a case study meant to provide generalizable information and principals for remediation, and while they didn't predict the exact glacial lake that would collapse first, they were flagging danger in exactly the right region.

ip26on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

I'm always suspicious we read far too much into most works, as if they were all live examples of The DaVinci Code. It feels inevitable that one day, centuries from now, someone will "realize" that JK Rowling embedded a map of hyperspace into her phonemes or that Banksy was actually issuing incisive commentary on the contrast between ancient Sumerian government and veganism all along.

ip26on Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

An intelligent person can convince themselves of anything

Not to mention via shortcuts, reductionism, and other (ironically) lazy thinking. After all, they're too smart to take a shortcuts that lead them to the wrong answer, so if they took a shortcut it saved them effort and was also right!

ip26on Being ambitious and being a dad

Seriously, aside from the folks with the “2hrs of sleep is enough” gene, it’s not. It’s an actively harmful myth that is sold hard. Start gathering your own evidence, with a critical fact-finding eye. Don’t just accept the narrative. It’s one of those legitimizing stories that serves the teller.

Try watching The Dawn Wall or Free Solo, keep notes, and fill in the blanks on how long they were gone from family. It’s a canned example of how it gets glossed over.

The same attitude as towards gear in weightlifting is appropriate. They tell you it’s natty all day long, but you know delts don’t get that round without gear.

ip26on Being ambitious and being a dad

I've started peering behind the curtains when I get the chance, and I've not yet found someone wildly successful who is also a model parent. Time after time, their spouse is quietly shouldering an enormous load, or their children spin their wheels and wind up rudderless, etc.

You can certainly be successful and be a good parent, but one of the first steps is recognizing and picking out the false prophets. You can't hold yourself to a superhuman standard, which is what a parent maximizing career while letting family malinger will present. They will say, Look at me, a captain of industry with vaults of gold, who has the physique of a twenty-five year old and is also an all-star parent. And you have to figure out that it's a lie.

One little clue - start to notice: of your professional idols who are good parents and seem to have it all, how many have a spouse working a demanding full time job as well? I realized for me it was zero.

ip26on Being ambitious and being a dad

I had roughly the same realization about the pillars of math & science years ago. Many terrible, terrible parents whose children suffered mightily. While I had aspired to intellectual impact all my life, I had an unexpected realization. I could not bear the thought of being famous and intellectually successful yet having totally failed my children. It reversed my longstanding priorities, and I realized I wanted to be a parent more than I had thought.

I still believe that having passionate and driven parents is good for kids.

ip26on The Case Against Formal Verification, 50 Years Later

Exactly, it feels dishonest that this point is so rarely brought up in essays on formal methods. You can do things like prove that all possible faults are always caught, or any memory that is accessed has first been malloc’d, or that the API endpoint will always respond (liveness). These are often both easy to specify and difficult to guarantee with conventional testing.

ip26on A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

What exactly does a bespoke ISA buy you? What will justify hundreds of engineers writing a new good one & working through the compiler support?

I bet it would be pretty easy for a user to interoperate between 67 different drafts of the HTTP spec once they were all written, validated, and library implementations coded. But what would that Cambrian explosion of API revs actually get you?

ip26on AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain

Have done a lot of “parallel invention” where I invent something genuinely novel & new-to-me, only to later discover it was first developed eighty years ago.

The part that’s really disheartening is there’s so much knowledge out there, I wonder if this is actually efficient - maybe you can’t reasonably search the state of the art across all of human knowledge and so you have to invent it again. But that’s such a sad outcome.

ip26on RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better

They even loudly declared how they were going to clean up all the messy corners and warts.

The underlying truth seems to be that a “clean” ISA doesn’t by nature make the beer taste better, and many of the warts probably have a reason for existing.

ip26on Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb

It's usually a pretty clear case of reaching for statements that both sound impressive while also being broad and vague enough they are less likely to be factually wrong. In this regime, being difficult to parse is actually part of the performance, because it prevents the user from being able to spot a clear error.

ip26on “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

It’s getting everyone to understand the problems, working together (etc)…

There are manuals for this too, and interestingly enough this has been studied since the Romans at least! Is it then really the hard part?

ip26on Anthropic CEO reportedly worried new hires only care about money

There’s an ego element though. Being mission driven and choosing to work for Anthropic is implicitly validating of the “peril” and of the leadership team as the ones to steer through it, so they are indirectly asking for this validation.

ip26on The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder

Certainly room for such discussion. However if the parent waits to first save a large sum before moving there (instead of moving there straight out of high school), their revealed preferences suggest even they do not feel the tiny village is great for young people.

ip26on The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder

If you have dependents that are children, I feel there is a moral consideration. If you have earned $1M and then take the family to live who-knows-where slowly drawing on that $1M.. will your children be able to replicate your success? Will they be able to earn their own $1M? Or will leading this new life significantly impair their prospects?

To me this is the most critical problem with the "move somewhere crazy cheap" plan. I feel a parent owes their children at least somewhat similar opportunities as they themselves had. If you got to work as "high flying white collar tech worker", but the only option your children have is "subsistence fisherman", you have wronged them.

ip26on The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder

If it's just sitting there in your kitchen beckoning you, I think that's called beer pressure?

ip26on YC founder asks desperate job seekers to tattoo themselves for an interview

There seems to be a line of thinking that past unicorn startups had bad risk-reward profiles, and therefore a good founder should be taking lots of bad risks. If they take good risks, they will never succeed and become a unicorn. Very "tres commas".

So, demonstrating there's no risk too outlandish for you becomes a form of social signaling to investors.

ip26on How to Exist

I’m not sure where this idea came from that farming was idle and only industry required constant work. Every hundred-year old book I’ve ever read that features farming includes themes of how the farmer’s work never ends and runs from dawn to dusk.