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program_whiz

1,662 karma · joined December 21, 2016

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program_whiz··on Performance Improvements in .NET 11
actually this is likely just as performant as the "Ugly but fast" code from the famous talk. After all, this is just branching on GetType() == typeof(Dog) which is presumably boiling down to an integer comparison. This roughly the same as the following C code:

    void speak_generic(void* animal, int type_id) {
      if (type_id == DOG) {
        dog_speak((Dog*)animal);
      } else {
        dispatch_speak_vtable(animal);
      }
    }

Advantage 1: You don't have to maintain this logic (its automatic), so you won't get weird cases if you forget to update all your switches everywhere, and/or you get weird fallthrough logic and footgun yourself in C.

Advantage 2: You still get the flexibility of the vtable if you need it (for the case the type is chosen at runtime at not known). But for 90% of cases, its just as fast as the ugly C code.

Disadvantage 1: Losing a smug sense of superiority because you eschew abstractions and prefer writing verbose error-prone switch statements over clean easy to understand code.

Disadvantage 2: Writing performant code can no longer be gate kept behind archaic practices, now everyone can just use `var animal = new Dog()` and be done with it.

program_whiz··on Navier-Stokes Announcement
The entire controversy was that researchers were about to release their proof which OpenAI claimed to simultaneosululy discover. The proof is the researchers in question.
program_whiz··on Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields
its because prior to that (2000 Bush era), congress and president had a plan to payoff debt and had a balanced budget plan in place to avoid over spending.
program_whiz··on Navier-Stokes Announcement
Surprisingly this is actually rather fitting in terms of time scale. When you consider it took ~10,000 agents 88 hours, or 880,000 hours to solve. That's 14.5 years in agent time of continuous 365/24/7 processing. Of course, humans solve things much more efficiently (and didn't also need the massive pre-training of every expert on the planet for 1,000,000,000 human years equivalent). But yeah, human researchers can solve a problem like this in a decade or so, while sleeping, teaching, traveling, and taking breaks, only working a few hours a day on the idea.
program_whiz··on AI rent can save humanity
A modest proposal to save humanity from the alignment problem with AI rent.
program_whiz··on GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning
Good point, you don't have to -- but my argument is just that removing CoT doesn't make things less safe. Anything CoT can tell you is just a point sample of a probability surface. Having the whole probability surface can already answer any question the point sample can answer (for example, how likely is the model to produce a problematic phrase). While its more computationally expensive, you could always just draw point samples like the model does and evaluate those (or use temperature zero to just sample the most likely output tokens).
program_whiz··on GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning
Actually, removing CoT might make models safer, because we can analyze the entire landscape of their potential outputs, rather than a point-sample (we'll never know how close we were to "kill all humans"). By inspecting intermediate vector spaces, we can actually get certainty bounds on how safely the model is behaving (or even trending).

Wrote about it here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-214402969

program_whiz··on Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI
yes to a degree. When I was 16, my idea about "what cutting edge thing to work on" was pointless, I couldn't make a meaningful contribution. Most developer's work is mundane and wrote. Things they think are "cutting edge" are actually just ideas they haven't considered, or markets they don't realize are saturated with really good players already. It takes time, effort, and knowledge to make a meaningful contribution. But if those fields are saturated by players that are beyond human ability, then its a bit like trying to become a competitive chess player when the bar for entry is stockfish -- no human will ever again pass this bar. At a certain point, the bar for being paid for intellectual contribution will surpass human abilities. The things humans can understand and ideas they contribute will not be worth much.

To make an unrelated anology, the presence of Lebron James definitely dampens my ability to contribute meaningfully to basketball. Even with all my practice, I cannot achieve his level. But if he didn't exist, and the best 90% of basketball players were eliminated, then I might be able to meaningfully contribute. Of course, I can still play basketball as a hobby, but you were talking about making meaningful contributions on hard novel problems at the frontier of knowledge and ability. That frontier is moving away from humans and will soon be the domain of electronic experts.

program_whiz··on We have world ending AI, today
I wrote this in response to people that have been downplaying the threat, or not understand how it would work without terminator-style robots in the streets. I also see people saying "we have a year or two to prepare". That may not be the case.
program_whiz··on I resigned from Anthropic today
I wrote about this, as I thought it warranted a deeper look: https://nonlineartransform.substack.com/p/world-ending-ai-to...
program_whiz··on I resigned from Anthropic today
What? Shutting down infrastructure, destroying critical records (economic collapse), spoofing / impersonating world leaders (confusion, panic, world war, nuclear event), taking over comms generally (you get a message to evacuate your home due to impending disaster, is it real?). All these could cause sufficient chaos and fear as to instigate global collapse. Once the panic sets in after a few of these indicidents, unrest and rebellion can occur, causing authoritarian backlashes or civil wars. IoT and precision ag can be controlled to disrupt supply chain and food supply. Forging documents to cause mass evictings, bankruptcy, credit disruption, transfer of property, asset seizure, arrests / SWAT-ing. Intelligence / signal gathering devices can be corrupted to spread misinfo and cause massive disruption or conflict. This is all possible today with enough hacking ability and malicious intent.

Anyone's life can be suddenly ruined: falsified criminal record, banks drained, credit cards maxed, phone numbers repossessed, internet, water, power shutoff. Friends and family sent your fabricated suicide note, warrants for your arrest issued to local and feds for kidnapping and threat to the president, etc. Injecting tons of copyrighted or illegal material into your hard drives, falsiying messages from your account and sending them publicly containing damning material. Sending messages to employees / employers to destroy business / work relationships. Harnessing your social media to destroy your life or cause panic. Getting you put onto pharmacy watch list so you can't access medications. Its very possible to ruin lives and destabilize the world without money or a physical body.

Now imagine this at scale and how it would affect the world at large if this was covertly done to a substantial portion of society and/or world leaders. Hell just shutting off all the "smart refrigerators" for a few days would cause a massive disruption to the first world.

program_whiz··on Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI
So when AI is also better at coming up with the tasks and already solving the frontier problems? 1M AI agents running full time thinking at 10M times faster than humans, with 100 times the intelligence in each agent? Any human ideas regarding "frontier problems" or "what the AI should focus on" are irrelevant. We have automated our own thinking and human cognition will be about as important as being "the best at abacus". Its an interesting party trick, but in no way useful.
program_whiz··on Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI
Timing is everything https://nonlineartransform.substack.com/p/ai-swarms-timing-i...

Article arguing math is the next "human calculator".

program_whiz··on What is Nueralese and Why is it Bad
A response to this, which I think is reasonable. Its a bit of a fuzzy line, but the likelihood there is "magical maniacal planning" happening here is unlikely (about as unlikely as that planning happening in hidden vector states between layers).

https://nonlineartransform.substack.com/p/relax-about-neural...

There's also an argument here for why its _better_ for monitoring (because we have the whole state space).

program_whiz··on Relax about Neural Space
Comparison of "neural space" and "chain of thought", and why CoT was actually worse.
program_whiz··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
Sorry I disagree with that. This is more like gain of function research. You are trying to develop an agent with the ability to do hacking and the like without having proper safeguards. When it breaks free and causes massive damage, the lab is at fault. Or do you think "we were just trying to help" is an excuse to kill millions of people too? This isn't an alligator wondering down main street, this is an agent that could potentially ruin lives and is being actively trained to do hacking in an adversarial testing environment trying to push its limits to develop that ability. Furthermore, the people doing it have seen it cause similar problems in the past, and now have concrete evidence they cannot properly control it. So I think pressing the "play" button effectively transfers responsibility and liability to them for doing so.

In fact the people pressing the play button are the ones telling us it cannot be controlled, it is a threat to human and national security, and warning us of the impending damages they are about to cause. I'd say we've established motive (profit at the cost of safety).

To abuse your metaphor: if the zoo was genetically modifying animals to give them enhanced abilities to escape and kill, and then putting them into an escape room with a reward for escaping / killing, then they would be liable for doing so if the animal went on to kill. Just the same as a trained fighting dog bite is different than an accidental bite from an otherwise peaceful animal (you turned the dog into this monster, now its your fault).

program_whiz··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
equally valid analog: had they merely written a script to do the hugging face exploit, they would go to prison. However, since an "agent" wrote the script for them, nothing happens?
program_whiz··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
the person who controlled / started it? If open AI had hired a team of 50 hackers to break into hugging face, they would be prosecuted (as would the hackers). If they had written a bot to break into hugging face, the devs and managers who wrote it would be prosecuted. Just because the agent wrote the code on their behalf doesn't change the equation much.
program_whiz··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
are you arguing AI manufacturers and developers are not aware of possible risks?
program_whiz··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
The solution is simple: hold anyone who deploys an agent responsible for its behavior. If it commits 10 counts of felony hacking, ouch. If it kills 10 pedestrians by running a red light, ouch. If this is "human level intelligence", then setting it loose is the same as instructing / coercing a human to do an activity. If I strap a bomb to someone and force them to run into a crowded building (or put them in a scenario where that is the only reasonable choice), I'm held responsible.

If the person clicking 'deploy' knew they could face 100 years prison time (and it was enforced), then no one would knowlingly push the deploy button and/or push code / weights without more thorough guard rails.

program_whiz··on Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest
the link works for me
program_whiz··on Nvidia AVO scores 100% on the ARC-AGI-3 interactive reasoning benchmark
Its interesting because I didn't think it was, but then reading the NVIDIA approach, this kind of loop plus generating a program to explain things. Maybe that is AGI? I don't know, but it seems like an additional layer that maybe is a fundamental shift in capabilities (kind of like reinforcement learning and COT was).
program_whiz··on Nvidia AVO scores 100% on the ARC-AGI-3 interactive reasoning benchmark
Is this AGI? I don't think I can score 100% on ARC AGI.
program_whiz··on Jaithon 3, a fast programming language with the perfect syntax
AbhiramaVS I think your choice to use exceptions is fine, it matches closely with Java / Python your inspirations. The "show me every error" crowd loves to harp on this issue, but the truth is, its a tradeoff like all others.

Exceptions provide flexibility in error handling, and most code just forwards and you end up in the same situation anyway. Something like this (go style):

if result, err := do_thing(); err != nil { log.errorf("Got an error! %v", err); return err; }

Or the rust equivalent isn't super useful, the code is just outputting an inferior form of stack tracing and debugging.

Honestly unless the code at the immediate site of the error can handle the issue, or perhaps one level higher, having precise error information (usually obscured by some generic Error class anyway) isn't very helpful, and ends up propagating up to a high level where the whole thing is terminated / cleaned up anyway, which is what exceptions provide automatically.

Also, only catching the things that you can deal with and know about is useful in the sense it keeps code flexible (e.g. you don't handle a DiskFull exception because the only thing you can do with it is throw anyway, and if you had a DiskFull error returned, you would just return it up the stack / panic). As new unhandled errors emerge, you just throw them up the stack, the same way error code would, except errors just require you to explicitly manage the machinery everywhere, requiring rigid, over-specified, fragile code in many cases.

I do see the argument for explicit errors especially in system programming, realtime / perf-critical, kernels, etc. But this language doesn't appear to be targeted at that, and uses GC. So having exceptions seems like a valid design choice to me. Using them also frees you a bit since you can pass around functions, captured references, threads, etc. in a bytecode + GC lang without worrying to much about the error states and memory ownership.

program_whiz··on More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts
I don't expect it to be free of corruption, but I can also acknowledge the systemic forces that are beyond my control which enable the corrupt excesses we see. Unfortunately, until the incentives reverse, it will continue.

One of the easiest and most assured paths to success, wealth, a comfortable life, influence, significance, and security, is by playing the power game. Hence, it will attract those who seek those ends, and discourage those who let beliefs, values, morals, or other similar concerns interfere with their own acquisition of power.

Its only inevitable then that the most corrupt players will eventually ascend, as they continue to amass money and power in such a system. Believing that the real difference is voting for "the good guys" and that will cause wide-sweeping change is probably what Tea Party voters thought in the early 2000s before they morphed into MAGA.

program_whiz··on More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts
(not a repub) I don't defend it, its outright fraud, but I also accept the reality that it is a more visible, and perhaps exaggerated, form of what has been ongoing forever.

Those who seek power seek it to: 1. Enrich themselves and their family 2. Wield it to achieve their means

The "pay to play" is rife everywhere. The contractors who get a sweet deal from local / fed government, the competition is stifled. The senators who make 10's of millions on insider information. The imminent domain cases where property is seized so corporation / donor can make millions. The "futures market" where insiders use their knowledge of product release date to swindle money for ordinary folks. The crypto scams, lotteries, casinos, street vendors, telemarketers, info-mercials, self-help gurus, snake oil sales, lemon peddlers, and more.

The truth is that the human system has not deviated far from the imposed hierarchy of feudalism / monarchy, we have only become better at concealing it, making it more potent in some ways. Power, corruption, opportunism, and greed are part of our nature. In an extremely large population with a democratic veneer, the levers of power become diffuse an ineffable, until they are blatantly shoved into our face.

In some ways I'm glad because its only through a constant vigilance and resetting the public vigilance that these kind of things can be controlled to any degree. Its an entropic force, seeping into the system at all times, only kept at bay by the disdain of the populace and fear in the hearts of the ruling elites.

Its definitely not a Republicans only phenomenon, the list on both sides of the aisle is embarrassingly long. But due to how our political system is setup, and human psychology, little will change by voting. People are tribal, and only have two choices in the matter, both of which are usually power-seeking corrupted. The prisoner's dilemma is giving the US a life-sentence.

program_whiz··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
Correct, no justification to breed is needed whatsoever. Its a biological drive similar to eating and drinking, albeit on longer timescales and across generations rather than individuals.

However, thought processes like the one you identified above are probably adaptive, as gene lines which spend time trying to find the "justifiable reasons" for breeding were likely eliminated.

Gene lines where "I can raise my kids with like-minded community of peers", "I feel ready for more in life", and "sharing children with my parents, and letting my kids bond with healthy gradparents" (restatements of your phrasings) win out and reliably produce healthy offspring. So those reasons become strong motivators (despite being un-necessary justifications), that may seem irrational at first glance.

program_whiz··on New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
This is the human equivalent of "simply write code with no bugs". If you can't figure out how to write code without bugs, you think you can cause a human being in a complex environment to do exactly what you want against all influences?

How effective are you at controlling anyone in your life, including yourself? If we're really honest, we have a moderate amount of control of ourselves within strict limits (sleep, food, water, temperature, hormones, organ function, etc.). We have little to no actual control of others, we can only try to create incentives / structures to coax behavior we desire.

Posted study in comment below, but actually harsher parenting tends to result in more rebellious behavior.

Maybe a counter point: would you work better for a boss that was up your ass constantly and forcing you to work on stuff you didn't want? I've found I'm more effective when incentives are aligned and my boss is supportive and collaborative. Same works for parenting.

program_whiz··on New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
Interesting, so this was effective when you were a child and you only listened and never did anything your parents told you not to? Sounds like if that was effective it might be your personality, but most people aren't like that.

The vast majority of kids will require borderline abuse to force them to do things on a regular they don't want to. If they are forced, it tends to breed rebellion behind their parents back (there's a reason that the stereotype of the naughty "preachers kid" exists).

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5193236/

""" Similar to findings regarding smoking and alcohol use, harsh parenting is considered to be one of the most important predictors of adolescent involvement in risky sexual behaviors """

program_whiz··on New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
Well said, it also reads like someone who greatly overestimates their own control in what they think and "decide" to do. We are products of society unless we are truly living completely alone in the wilderness. Someone above said it better, if most students in class had easy access to heroine and were using heroine talking about how great it is, its up to luck whether your kid listens to you or friends, ads, influencers, etc. The numbers are in, and parents aren't winning.

Did people do exactly what their parents said? If so it sounds like they would just jump off a bridge if their parents told them to. Oh wait, you didn't listen to your parents? Ok, so you just did what you wanted, so your parents didn't have control of you? In that case, we can't really say "parents just control your kids" can we? I'd also be curious how well these same proponents would think "abstinance only" works (e.g. tell your kids just don't have sex). The same types usually say "you can't stop it, so we need to have robust education and safety measures".

A 5-16 year old has an undeveloped brain, and they badly want to fit in and have fun, and they have no concept of what long term even means. They are facing a deluge of influences that are spending billions with the brightest minds to influence them. They are surrounded by peers with full uncensored internet access for ~8 hours a day. Like all children they are curious and a bit rebellious against their parents at times. Its just realistic to say "just tell your kids not to do it".

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