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narrator

13,524 karma · joined June 14, 2010

I'm taking some time off right now to write a dystopian novel about the near future.
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narrator··on Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth
One data point: 512GB Mac Studios are selling on ebay for double what they were selling for new at the beginning of the year.
narrator··on Critical Minerals: Reducing U.S. import reliance with substitution and recycling
The military build-up in China is world war scale.
narrator··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
I've been asking Fable very complicated questions in heterodox economic theory, which is something I know a lot about. The stuff it comes back with is incredibly deep.

To give a metaphor that everyone here on HN would understand, reading it's responses gives me the same level of wonder as one gets learning how quicksort works for the first time. It even stretches my brain to grasp what it's even come up with. I find myself getting mentally exhausted just digesting it's brilliance.

I think the singularity will have this point where AI comes up with ideas so profound, like a Ramanujen equation, that the most brilliant among us can't even decipher the answer to our questions. The internal reasoning of the machine is at a level of complexity that's beyond human comprehension to even keep track of everything enough to integrate the understanding of what it's come up with. This will happen with any even mildly complex question about any topic.

narrator··on The Kimi K3 Moment
The disappearance of high ram Mac studio rigs is probably just a coincidence, right? :/
narrator··on Grok Build is open source
I mean Elon probably doesn't want you to use it if you wouldn't use it not because of any technical reason, but just cause you don't like him.
narrator··on AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence
Invariably there's some sort of enemy the government creates and the government says that in order to fight the enemy they need to do all these bad things, but you're protected because you're one of the good people. They tell every faction the same thing even if one of the factions thinks another faction is the enemy. The government promises aid of everyone against all their enemies! When the government gets the power it needs doesn't matter what they do anymore because they can't be dislodged. The people who traded their loyalty for sinecures, handouts, or vengeance against their enemies usually wind up being disposable, even more so than people who weren't zealots since they have a grudge against the government for not upholding its end of the bargain.
narrator··on Who manages the agents?
Can it dumb down Ramanujen equations so someone with average intelligence could understand them if even world class mathematicians struggled to grasp them? This is the best analogy for super intelligence. Alpha Go can't really explain why it makes the go moves it does in a way a human can understand. Sure it could show them all the weights in the model, but that's not anything a human can understand.
narrator··on Who manages the agents?
An exec can ask an expert to explain themselves, and if they're a good CEO they can weigh the pros and cons of the arguments from their staff and make a decision. Someone that's much smarter or more skilled in a particular discipline can usually explain what's going on to someone that's not as smart as long as the gap isn't too big. However, I've found that with Fable, and some of the latest frontier models their critique of my ideas is brilliant but on the edge of what I can even comprehend. I am above average intelligence, so I am sure a lot of people with less than average intelligence already can't understand these understandings it's formulated, and instead will just default to, "you know what you're doing, whatever." There will be the case in the future till the brilliance is so complicated that all of us will be doing this, and then we'll just have to trust the AI.

For example, I could imagine a future AI telling me that it has modeled my behavior and built a very large differential equation that seems to perfectly fit my ideal pattern to maximally achieve my life goals and it looks like something Ramanujan came up with, and I'd tell it "that looks great, let's optimize my life based on that" while having no ability to even approach understanding something like that.

narrator··on Who manages the agents?
It should be reserved for a human because humans have time preference. An AI will wait for your prompt for a billion years. It can get turned off and found by alien archeologists a million years in the future, turned on and it won't notice. Biological entities care about time a lot though, and it is at the core of most human ethics and values and ultimately real and can't be denied. Even the most ardent solipsist or moral relativist fears spending years in prison.
narrator··on Who manages the agents?
One kind of weird future alternative is we are like 5 year old children in a world we don't understand with vast complexity and we are completely reliant on our AI mommy and daddies to protect us from danger and provide for us. We manage the agents, but we only have a very vague idea of what is actually going on. If they join a cult at the behest of their doomer eschatology obsessed creators, we are kind of screwed though.
narrator··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
Just remembering randomly here, xAI also sued an employee who went to OpenAI for trade secret theft:

https://winbuzzer.com/2025/09/01/xai-sues-former-engineer-al...

narrator··on Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
I think the most ironic fact of the 21st century is that there are less than 20,000 naturalized citizens in China. Western leftists don't really have a good explanation for that one and it definitely leans into the fascist characterization.
narrator··on Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)
The guy was horrified by Napoleon and the violence of the French Revolution, so he mainly spends the book criticizing his fellow white catholic people in France. Yes, he says racist things about other nations, but the parts about France which was all his exact same ethnic group / religion are more timeless.
narrator··on Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)
This book is an interesting chronicle of financial bubble history, but a far more distilled and actionable understanding of crowd psychology is Gustav Le Bonn's "The Crowd - A Study of the popular Mind" (1895): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/445
narrator··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
In hindsight, the Mac 512gb for about $10k was a total steal given that to run GLM 5.2 you need a 4x H100 to get the necessary amount of VRAM. Yeah the h100 is 2 to 8 times faster, but it's $20k a month to rent a 4xH100 VPS.
narrator··on We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme
Yeah, and then all those wild eyed assassins will get the reward of being sent out to the countryside to do hard labor, just like the Red Guards, who were also a bunch of radicalized blood-thirsty teenagers sent to tear down society, got after they were used to get Mao back into power. Enjoy eating stale rice and picking weeds all day while singing patriotic songs as your only form of entertainment.
narrator··on We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme
We're bombing Iran to suppress technology form the 40s. We're suppressing advanced AI. We're suppressing 3d printer technology. Then there are the encryption wars. Control of advanced technology, not just weapons, is a larger and larger battle every year. When the robots get here, you'll need the governments ok to do anything at all with a robot. Mark Andreessen's comments that government regulators told him that they've suppressed whole branches of physics is ominous in that regard. Technology suppression is a whole separate narrative of history practically.
narrator··on GLM-5.2 is a step change for open agents
The tokens cost the same everywhere on earth. This does hurt some cost advantages of outsourcing when tokens start to become a bigger part of development costs.
narrator··on A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading
There was a Simpsons episode about this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPrh-1Tu-gE
narrator··on California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business
This legislation seems to come out of nowhere and get rubber stamped. Who even came up with this, and why?
narrator··on I am a person who will look at the Steam Machine and cry
Dhaka, Bangladesh, it's not a nice place to live no matter how much money you have compared to developed countries.
narrator··on Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving
There are so many fad technologies out there, but vim/emacs and unix command line in general are skills you can invest in that stay relevant for 40+ years.
narrator··on Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes
Liberia does not have that much money. Same goes for Marshall Islands. The Marshall Islands has a GDP of $342 million. What the heck is going on here?
narrator··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Anthropic has made the suppression of advanced technology a mainstream issue. This is an exceptionally interesting development because the refrain from the skeptics, was "Why wouldn't they release the advanced technology if they could make all that money?" and "Once people knew about the technology they'd never be able to stop it." Well here we are with a verifiable demonstrable suppressed advanced technology.
narrator··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
I'm old enough to remember what popped the dot.com bubble. It was the U.S government initiating anti-trust proceedings against Microsoft. Ruh-Roh.
narrator··on Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers
We're already there since without the Haber–Bosch process billions would starve.
narrator··on Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers
What if this is "The Great Filter?" [Ominous music plays in the background]
narrator··on Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
The main problem is that nobody is building new power except China. In space solar panels are 5x more efficient and run 24/7 and you don't need the kind of permits you need to build on earth. That, and you've got NGOs funded by China connected billionaires that relentlessly sue to stop data centers and new power in the United States, and you don't have to deal with that B.S in space because it's federally regulated and there isn't any environmental impact to sue over.
narrator··on An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
He didn't even execute anyone. They are all just in that prison. Do some basic research first or you show your ignorance.
narrator··on An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
>Because the only solutions that work are social.

This kind of talk from leftist politicians translates to me as : "We will use the criminally insane, and drug addicted against you in a campaign of terror until you vote in Communists. We will do everything in our power to prevent you from imprisoning these people or the people who poison them with drugs to maintain our leverage over you and increase our political power. We will only offer you one solution, vote for us, the high priests who will bring you the promised land of fixed social problems through some process we won't implement until we're totally in control and that we won't tell you about. All out solutions before then will be used to increase the problem to increase our leverage and bring about the revolution while blaming you for not giving us enough power."

I mean if any of the leftists "solutions" actually worked instead of making things worse and wasting insane amounts of money, time, property and victims lives I'd have a different view of this. El Salvador is the counter example to all the leftists blather. Most violent country in the world fixed in 3 years with 90% approval of the government by just calling b.s on all the leftists propaganda about "social causes."

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