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sourdecor

222 karma · joined November 10, 2021

sourdecor at gmail dot com
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sourdecor··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
I was hoping a 2-in-1 foldable that acts like an iPad too. I have been waiting decades for that.
sourdecor··on Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI
I read about the cobalt mines in college. I care. If it comes off as snarky, maybe you should have empathy for enslaved people in Africa instead of peons being replaced in first-world countries.
sourdecor··on Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI
You can stand up to AI and claim it is against humanist beliefs, and you could also look for conflict-free CPUs for your computer and business[0]. Those are both actions a moral agent could take - why did he choose that action? I like humanism and am currently reading a book on it - but I think I have a very different interpretation than this professor or you.

[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/intel-says-its-processors-are-n...

sourdecor··on The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]
"Any NP complete problem can be changed into 3SAT in polynomial time" - if I remember correctly, turning an NP-complete problem into 3SAT is not part of the problem statement - it just means that when working with NP-complete problems, they are always translated to 3SAT first, and whenever someone is trying to prove something they are working against 3SAT.
sourdecor··on Pharo 14
Somebody has never used ENVY[0].

[0]: https://paulhammant.com/2017/09/01/smalltalk-envy/

sourdecor··on Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
From 'Transcendence' (2014):

00:15:40 Dr. Tagger: Can you prove that you are self-aware? PINN: That's a difficult question, Dr. Tagger. Can you prove that you are?

---

01:09:31 Dr. Tagger: Can you prove you're self-aware? Will Caster: That's a difficult question, Dr. Tagger. Can you prove that you are?

sourdecor··on How the Military Will Hack the Election
The Supreme Court decided our President in 2000. I think the secret is that Alphabet agencies don't actually care about elections - otherwise it would have not reached the Supreme Court. If I was an Alphabet agency, instead of choosing a predetermined fate and faking things, I would admit I was weak if I could not handle any outcome. That is the joke I think the Alphabet agencies pull. They could force things to go their way, but that would breed weakness in themselves for being unable to handle events that do not, and they know it.
sourdecor··on Vibe coded browser ports of Halo, The Simpsons: Hit And Run, GTA work well
There is a point at which simulating reality just gets depressing - that is what I learned about myself from that.
sourdecor··on Vibe coded browser ports of Halo, The Simpsons: Hit And Run, GTA work well
I was so depressed when they checked the refrigerator in GTA VI in the gameplay video on YouTube[0]. I know there was a glitch, but that's not why I got depressed. It was just too much for me. I don't know why, but it was soul-crushingly depressing. It made me feel so empty at such an existential level.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJbzMqJGH4k&t=438s

sourdecor··on Mistral Large 4
If your belief is accurate, we should expect China to short the IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI and release better frontier models immediately after their IPOs.

Does anyone think that likely? I have no clue or bias.

sourdecor··on Amazon seeks to offload $8B of Nvidia chips to investors
'Everything is a depreciating asset' is a fair statement - but things depreciate at exponentially different levels. A lot of things can be bought today which can be used for the same purpose just as efficiently in 10 years - and there are those which do not meet that criteria.
sourdecor··on Amazon seeks to offload $8B of Nvidia chips to investors
Then how do you explain the capitalization of nVidia?
sourdecor··on Amazon seeks to offload $8B of Nvidia chips to investors
Chips are automatically a depreciating asset - is there a historical basis for understanding how that affects companies, and how that will affect GPU-centric companies?
sourdecor··on The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
My favorite dude. Imagine one of the world's smartest people almost continually killing himself because he can't stop reading while driving.
sourdecor··on Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers authored with Claude
Scientific progress only requires the scientific method, not humans being in-the-loop.
sourdecor··on Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
I thought this was a cool fact about the Bronze Age: "According to a new study, it's possible that all iron-based weapons and tools of the Bronze Age were forged using metal salvaged from meteorites".[0]

[0]: https://www.sciencealert.com/bronze-age-artefacts-have-meteo...

sourdecor··on What TLA+ can and can't check
I discovered Quint[0] due to this comment[1] on HN. Quint is "an executable specification language [which works in JavaScript] with delightful tooling based on the temporal logic of actions (TLA)". I think it is awesome and anybody interested in TLA+ should check it out.

[0]: https://github.com/quint-co/quint

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49865720

sourdecor··on Thinking fast and slow in AI: The role of metacognition (2021)
I don't know how this is related, but it reminds me of how I have always believed compression to be the ultimate sign of intelligence. If you can reduce something while keeping comprehension, you are finding more abstract symbols to represent the information of the original source.
sourdecor··on When did Google get so weird?
Yet there is no accountability or 'reporting' under the tab 'Total Revenue and Expenses' about how much went into 'administration costs'/fundraising and how much that is in relation to donations.
sourdecor··on When did Google get so weird?
Give.org says Watsi did not want to be evaluated by the BBB's standards for charity accountability[0]. I never donate to anyone without good numbers on Give.org and I recommend everyone check out Give.org when considering donating to any charity.

[0]: https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...

sourdecor··on Telling a Computer to Do Things
Also Scsh[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsh

sourdecor··on Developing provably correct Rust code with Verus
Verus seems to be exactly what I have been looking for! I discovered AllConcur[0] on HN a while back, and I wanted to port it to Go, but since it used TLA+ and C, and it was very confusing for me to understand how you can trust the implementation unless you can compile TLA+ to C.

I was talking to Gemini about comparing Verus to TLA+ and it said that TLA+ is usually used (for example) "to prove that a distributed consensus protocol is logically sound" but when I asked if Verus can do that too, it said yes. So Verus can be compiled and integrated with Rust, whereas TLA+ is used more for blueprint development that then guides the implementation in the mind of the implementer.

Seems awesome!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12357976

sourdecor··on Functional State Machines in Rust: Typestate and Newtype Patterns
Could someone compare this to ST in Idris?
sourdecor··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
What does Linus’s hatred of NVidia drivers imply for this situation?
sourdecor··on CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s
That was because Russia was creating actual art and laughing at the media America produced.
sourdecor··on [dead]
I think it makes sense in that autonomous agents are going to soon have their own bank accounts for spending and earning. They will start companies. They will make investments. They will evaluate SaaS offerings for you, and they will ping you that it found a cool mug on Etsy that you might want to buy.
sourdecor··on Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?
https://xkcd.com/224/
sourdecor··on If I own Claude's outputs why can't I train my own model on them?
But LLMs are being trained on GitHub libraries that leveraged Claude?
sourdecor··on Delta
I wish LLM summary of code was put aside the actual code, like the Jasmine documentation[0].

[0]: https://jasmine.github.io/tutorials/your_first_suite

sourdecor··on Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK
That is a cool perspective to consider.
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