kaashif

Why does being a compressed corpus of knowledge mean it can't discover things? What if it has knowledge of techniques to discover proofs?

It does and that's what's happening.

Damn, looks like we have lower productivity than cavemen!

(1) Yes.

(2) Are you saying that you think we're at the limits of computing in general, or that specific technology?

We know, for example, that a human brain level intelligence is possible to run on a human brain. We are nowhere near that. And actually that's not even a physical limit necessarily.

But that is...not a low hanging fruit.

What if you forget to use that and just use let or const? It is better than plain try-finally or defer because you don't have to remember how to dispose of the resources but in terms of remember to dispose of the resource at all, I don't think that is all that different from Python's with or Java's try-with-resources. You can just forget to use using, with, try-with-resources.

There isn't any way to forget to drop a resource if you have RAII.

If the idea of computers is that they remember stuff for you and do stuff for you, then both try/finally and defer seem like hacks to work around not having RAII like e.g. Rust or C++ where resources are closed/disposed of/deallocated automatically.

Try X finally dispose of all resources. X, defer clean up X. Or how about just X and cleanup is done automatically, with the author of the resources deciding what is needed to clean X up.

"The race condition snapped like a steel spring."

I like the idea of the story, and cool ideas can be engrossing on their own.

But well written this ain't.

Right, and if you come up with an efficiency gain that makes scaling better, e.g. a 50% reduction in required compute. Or even asymptotic improvements e.g. moving from quadratic to linear. Then you're much much better off.

There is nothing about the bitter lesson that says just be dumb and pour money into a hole, you still have to invent the methods to scale well, and being under immense pressure with constraints seems likely to produce that research.

Someone is drowning and calls for help.

I throw a bucket of chum into the water and walk away, putting my headphones on.

Well I did take the time to help, better than nothing, right?

I always have my phone with me so I can take a note in that. But when I'm meeting with someone I prefer taking notes in a little notebook I carry, I don't want the other person to feel like I'm...on my phone while speaking to them.

Indeed. I guess we're talking about it, which is the point of marketing blog posts like this.

If it weren't claudeslop, it would still have to be marketing corposlop.

I only even heard about Jennifer Pahlka from Tyler Cowen's podcast, I think there are still some podcasts worth listening to.

Your point is well taken and very reasonable though.

Asking this question only a handful of years after a global pandemic...

If the next pandemic is 50% deadly, not being able to make gloves is surely the canary in the coal mine proving we wouldn't be able to make any other PPE.

And no country can rely on another if it's do or die. Other blocs will keep to themselves.

I think it's great someone is working on a fun little project such as a smart fan but let's not kid ourselves, it's not supposed to be practical! I don't think anyone would claim that.

It's a demo of how easy it is to make even an ESP32 device available globally with iroh.

I like how every time a new technology is invented and becomes big, people start to think it explains everything. Like how in the 16th/17th centuries some people thought the universe was a big clock. Or how in the 19th centuries people thought the universe was like a big steam engine. Or now we think the universe is a big computer.

Not saying this is wrong or that I've watched all of the lectures above or anything, but it's just funny to imagine that aliens might look at us the same way we could look at a monkey society saying that the universe is like a big one of those rocks they use to smash nuts open.

Computation and information really does seem universal though, so this is just a funny thought and not serious commentary.

Why?

Are people actually using AI to do programmatic refactors over million line codebases directly? That is far more insane.

Using AI to write ruff rules or clang-tidy rules with fixes is literally the same thing and obviously best practice over running AI in a pre-commit hook to do those checks and refactors...

No, they are talking about refactoring, not adding new functionality to code.

So it would be something like:

Rewrite this Python code to use match/case instead of if/elif/else chains, write a script using the ast module to rewrite the code, do not edit it yourself, also write some tests with clear inputs and outputs I can inspect.

Or something.

It does mean that the milk industry is a low value add commodity business where suppliers compete primarily on price and only survive due to protectionism and subsidies.

Food is important for national security so we should subsidize it, but it's a cost center. It'll never drive growth.

If that's what Mistral is aiming for, it would probably be better to give up now.

You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.

If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal?

You'll get fewer bad employees, but you also discard many capable people who haven't had the opportunity to even try for your signal.

It still is a signal, albeit a weak and highly inequitably distributed one.

Some earnest, light feedback: to my ears, "kick butt" sounds about the same as one of those euphemistic substitutions for swears like "gosh we darn well try our darndest".

It's just very funny to lead with that is all.

That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use.

Not necessarily true, more rehearsal isn't the key to fluent oratory.

Many people can speak off the cuff fluently and confidently, avoiding "like", "um", and other filler words. And even if you're not speaking fluently, leaving silences as punctuation is more effective, IMO.

Many impressive speakers I've met actually cite Toastmasters! So their obsessive zeal actually does work.

More rehearsal does work too sometimes, but it does sometimes lead to speeches "sounding too rehearsed".

That's the reality China already lives in. Their weapon against US companies is commoditizing them, eliminating their moats and their profits by going open weights.

Same thing Meta was doing before they fell behind.

It would be extremely funny if putting things in space is cheaper and faster than dealing with zoning and local politics.

It implies that China, which can cut through much red tape and has great (and improving) utilities and infrastructure, lots of energy, can just build normal datacenters and save the cost of dozens of space flights.

Doing that kind of thing over Zoom just always felt fake and not fun to me.

Maybe some people are wired differently where that works, and I'm stuck having to meet people in person to connect with them for real. Which could be a disadvantage for me.

> The number of times I was asked to lunch with "the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team"

The fact that you read a comment saying that people have lunch with each other and respond saying you've never been asked to have lunch with anyone is interesting.

I guess it varies by company and what the culture is, but it's surely totally normal to just have a friend in sales or something and hear about something going on.

I really doubt the person you're replying to orders people to have lunch.

So maybe we do have it, and it is underwhelming? Or it's not underwhelming and we just got used to it.

Using that as an argument to say we don't have AGI doesn't really make sense.

Regardless of whether we do or don't have AGI, until I actually see the economy-ending job losses, I won't believe it.

Time isn't the constraint here, but ability. Someone complaining about how hard Rust is to write is probably not capable of reviewing Rust code very well.

The usual reaction or opinion from e.g. good C++ programmers switching to Rust is that the added guardrails and expressivity are great and make things easier.

Indeed. And someone accused me of being hostile and thought my initial comment was me making a mean joke:

> This reads like someone with ADHD took Adderall and accidentally focused hard for a day on the wrong thing. It has happened to me.

It is very far away from being a joke.

Actually, if you do something bad enough, your citizenship can be removed. This is true in the US, UK, India, and maybe others. The exact procedures and criteria vary.

It's not astonishingly rare. The comment you're replying to contains examples, here are some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli