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mlsu

5,944 karma · joined July 2, 2022

i write tiny programs

mlsu.io

msutherland (at) fast mail dot com

meet.hn/city/32.7174202,-117.162772/San-Diego

Socials: - mlsu.at.hn

Interests: Robotics, Hardware

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mlsu··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
With the power of AI, soon all of us can be doing outstanding CRM tasks instead of wasting time enjoying nature. Imagine the time savings we could recover by removing all quiet contemplative moments!
mlsu··on The recently proposed o(n log n) integer multiplication algorithm [pdf]
Does math already exist and is discovered? Or is it a thing invented by people?
mlsu··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
What big city in the USA has not had redlining or had highways blasted over disadvantaged racial minority communities? I'll wait while you look that one up.
mlsu··on DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017
When they surpass us, they will surpass us hard, in a way that is nearly impossible for us to compete with them.

Training and serving LLM's is massively parallel. Your bottleneck is either in energy or chips. China will catch up on chips fully decades before we catch up on energy. Arguably, this is already happening: here in the USA, we have lots of chips, but we are seeing our electricity bills skyrocket as more datacenters come online. We are powering those datacenters with natural gas turbines, not solar, wind and nuclear. Right now, to purchase one of those, you are on a 5-year waitlist. There's your timeline!

China is invested, from a regulatory, cultural, workforce, strategic, and technological standpoint, in an energy abundant future. We are not invested -- and in fact, actively sabotaging ourselves -- on all of those fronts.

Once they acquire chips, we lose, basically permanently. Look at what Huawei is doing recently and what is on their roadmap to understand how fast this catching-up is taking place. I'm sure that David Sacks would say that our innovation motor is pulling their copycat caboose along, as our monopolist tech companies steam ahead towards the frontier. I am not so sure. They are already ahead of us in many technologies. Speaking of technologies, they're building natural gas turbines in house, starting in 2025.

mlsu··on Microsoft Teams is a red flag
There are plenty of serious businesses doing serious things, complex things, that use microsoft teams for chat. My work uses it, it kinda sucks, but honestly there's way more things to bikeshed than chat apps. You can send text messages and make video calls and do presentations in microsoft teams.
mlsu··on Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio
You can't really compare API prices though. The cards that they are running frontier models on in the datacenter can service hundreds of simultaneous requests and are at nearly 100% utilization. This thing would sit on your desk and be used to service a single user for a couple hours per day.
mlsu··on Tesla Roadster
It’s about Elon’s control over these companies. Creating a valuable company with durable revenue that produces products that the market actually wants, with stable governance by a board representing the shareholders of the company? Bah! What am I, a sucker?

He wants control, so that he can use investor’s cash to do epic stuff like humanoid robots, cyber trucks, an AI that tells you that apartheid was actually cool, rocket cars, real life brain controlled robot bacon chungus, etc.

mlsu··on Tesla Roadster
Yeup. In 2025–

“Other shareholder meetings are snoozefests but ours are bangers. Look at this. This is sick.”

Elon’s pay package: he gets 400 million Tesla shares if he raises the market cap of tesla(xspacextwitterxAIx) to $8.5 trillion (nominal). He spent a cool 250 mil on making friends with the republicans, so as to ensure that his incoming epic awesome merger is not blocked.

A merger, plus the amount of inflation this government has already produced over the next decade, will probably see X co hitting Elon’s salary goals.

mlsu··on Why are we even doing all this?
I love the dissipative structure framing. It's the only logical explanation for all of this.

Datacenters in space are visionary -- they are maximally energy rate dense and they expand the area of energy absorption. Might be 100 years too early but that is where we are headed, after we turn all of the available biosphere of earth into computronium, that is.

The only superior technology left would be von Neumann probes.

mlsu··on Felix Rieseberg Homepage
It's pretty bleak that this guy chose to display rainy/dark/VHS/analogue/nihilistic penguin as the central motif here. There's certainly a lot to unpack.

Oh well, at least the site itself is technically excellent.

mlsu··on Sharing AI progress in mathematics
It's done in jest but I think I am accurately pointing out the interesting parallels between what these companies say they are doing (aligning models) and what they are not doing (aligning themselves).

If you listen to them, and you don't have to listen very hard to hear it, basically everyone at these labs is telling us that this technology is extremely dangerous and should be slowed down or paused entirely. Yet, they, the only entities with the power to actually do anything about it, are not acting AT ALL as if that's the case. They are all barrelling forward as quickly as possible. RSI, THE number one risk according to these guys, is being adopted at breakneck pace up and down the stack, from designing silicon, to training, to inference.

It's ridiculous and insane and I believe can be accurately summed up as, they are being assholes, because if they are actually right about this we are all gonna die. At the very least, and far more likely, every fun creative expressive human thing that is machine legible will be replaced by a torrent of machine slop. It's not "benefiting humanity." These mathematicians are telling you it's not benefiting humanity. It sucks.

Alignment problem.

mlsu··on Forever junior: Skills AI can't develop for you
Nobody would pay you to do something like this today. You'd be expected to punch that ticket in a couple days and move on.

You would not have time because you'd be fired before you finished. That's what's stopping people from doing projects like this today.

mlsu··on Sharing AI progress in mathematics
Classic alignment problem.

Despite nobody at openAI thinking of themselves as an asshole; despite society urging openAI not to be an asshole; despite the fact that being an asshole is entirely unnecessary even to accomplish whatever objective they are setting out to accomplish; despite everyone at openAI loudly declaring: we are not assholes!

They are still assholes.

mlsu··on Denying Insulin and Meds: Disturbing Pictures of Neglect in ICE Mortality Report
Speaking to lack of insulin here.

When you don't have any insulin, your body goes into a state of diabetic keto-acidosis (DKA). While in this state, sugar builds up in your blood, but does not enter your cells. Your liver dumps glucose into the bloodstream which causes dehydration, as the kidneys work overtime to clean the blood. The body eventually uses an alternate metabolic pathway to produce energy which dumps byproducts into the blood which cause it to turn acidic among other things.

Speaking from experience, severe DKA is extremely uncomfortable. The problem is in your blood, so you feel a constant and extreme discomfort everywhere in the body, there's no body part that you can focus on where it isn't happening. You become extremely tired and lethargic and also irritable. You get angry and panicked and cognition slows down so you don't feel like yourself. You are very hungry and very thirsty but nothing you eat or drink alleviates the sensation. You also feel as though you cannot breathe enough to sate your body, so your breathing becomes faster and shallower.

It's difficult for me to imagine anything worse than dying of DKA. Maybe being lit on fire? That's short though, a death by DKA happens over hours or days. The cruelty here is spectacular.

Insulin is on the WHO essential medication list. The type of insulin that could alleviate these symptoms is cheap and widely available. There is absolutely no excuse here. Every doctor and nurse knows how to treat this and stop this kind of suffering.

mlsu··on Dots: Always-on agents
It’s really remarkable isn’t it? These are the very same people who are cosplaying Oppenheimer and comparing these products to the bomb.
mlsu··on Fool's Expertise
Unfortunately, we all know the answer to this question.
mlsu··on Cloud Agents Are Inevitable AI Prisons
Same as any organism, you need an immune system. There's an explosion of bacteria just beginning out there. None of us are immunized.
mlsu··on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices
I visited the veterinarian recently for a routine exam of my dog. The vet gave the exam and at the end of it, a technician handed us what looked like an invoice. The invoice had like 12 different items on it and totaled $1,400. No explanation, and no differentiation between items.

We were flabbergasted. Asked the tech what was optional or what was required as part of our visit and he said, oh, just the top line item for the exam. $95.

It has to be illegal to do that. I feel like next time I go in there they are going to give me the ol' Clark Stanley runaround.

mlsu··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
I love this comment.

What's interesting to me is that this can be completely true (I believe it is), but why can seemingly nobody see the value and prioritize saving it. Opera is beautiful, it's one of the many things that make life worth living.

More efficiently allocating capital ought to be just a way to generate more resources for producing opera. And yet...

mlsu··on For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype
You're right. That's why I'm doing my best to give the oil companies more power and influence. They are, after all, in the best position to stop climate change!
mlsu··on For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype
If you actually believe that your invention will lead to the extinction of humanity, you would be acting very very differently. Namely, you would not be inventing the thing that you think is going to kill all of humanity, and probably you would be doing everything in your power to prevent it from being invented, up to and including sabotage of the company that YOU work for, which is currently trying to invent that thing. And yet, here's Fable 6, more capable than ever before, oh BTW we are IPOing, oh, BTW, I have stock options...
mlsu··on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash
Definition of Life:

Metabolism: The chemical processes inside a body that turn food or nutrients into energy. LLM's do not spontaneously do this, they are powered by plugging them into the wall.

Growth: The ability to get larger and develop over time. LLMs are fixed in size (and in fact don't really have a size, because it's a computer program) and do not grow or change over time.

Reproduction: The ability to create new organisms. LLM's do not reproduce themselves.

Response to Stimuli: The ability to react to changes in the environment. LLM's do not have an environment. Their environment is a man-made, theoretical structure of logical operations implemented in silicon.

Evolution: The capacity of a genetic system to change and adapt across generations. LLMs do not change or evolve over time.

So... 0/5! Big fat goose egg for LLM's.

mlsu··on All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it
In my experience, reproduction and child rearing is fun, and it also is a human to human experience.
mlsu··on All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it
I think Tao correctly sees the problem with AI. It’s not that it is ineffective or has weaknesses. It’s that it’s not human.

Like, it ought to be enough to say that the problem with AI is that it’s not human. Unfortunately, we live in a world where many (most?) people have willingly put away the childish things, so as to achieve some goal.

The problem is that the point of life is to explore and have fun and have human to human experiences. I think math is probably fun because you’re working on hard problems with your collaborators.

It should be obvious to everyone, as it is to children, that the point of life isn’t the goal, the point is the experience one has of living. They say that when you die the only thing you lose is the current moment. The problem with AI is that it doesn’t have a current moment to live in or to lose, it’s an inanimate thing. So, it should be obvious to everyone that the problem with the AI is that it’s not human. Alas.

mlsu··on I resigned from Anthropic today
This is like unphysical gibberish. I’m not even kidding. There are such things as the Landauer Limit and the earth has a finite surface area to absorb solar radiation. For crying out loud these are smart people but at the end of the day the singularity is not actually singular.

It’s just silly talk. My dad works for Nintendo and he can give me a gold foil pikachu any time he wants, also, he can delete your Pokémon any time he wants because he has admin access on the Nintendo server. And also he can beat up your dad because he has a black belt. Oh your dad has a black belt? Well actually I lied, he has a rainbow belt which means he can beat up your dad still.

Like this is silly right? It’s insulting. We both know that there are live nuclear weapons whose coordinates point at my city and at your city and the only thing that stops them is two keys and a button. Nuclear weapons, you know those things that have killed hundreds of thousands of living men women and children? There is no room for speculation in that regard: my city has a navy base and there is a live nuclear weapon pointed at it, myself and my entire family will die if it goes off. Now contrast: ahem.

Oh sorry my dad also has like a super secret rainbow STEALTH powers that could actually totally insulate my house from nukes. If you think about it, I actually have no reason to be concerned.

mlsu··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
I don't know one way or another but there is a credible allegation that the "AGI" was training on the (very extensive) test set that these two mathematicians produced.

If that is true then this seems to be, again, a case of AI producing an interpolation over data it has seen before. Everything about openAI's behavior indicates that they were using the transcripts as input. Why not have the AGI choose a different Millenium prize problem?

mlsu··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
It seems like there were a couple of human mathematicians that were higher on the 'solving complex problems ladder' than this machine.
mlsu··on An Alien Mind
Every version of the AI aligned future where the AI provides “meaning and fulfillment” to humanity also involves Sam Altman wearing a 1.5 million dollar Patek and driving a McLaren.

Funny how that works.

mlsu··on GPT-6 Astra on robot arms
Just about sums up the attitude.

It’s not that the robots are surveilling and that would be morally wrong… it’s that people are upset by it and that impacts the bottom line.

“I’m sorry that you chose to feel that way”

mlsu··on The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs
Think of how much money we could make if we weren't wasting so much time being creative.
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