v64

Those who haven't read Mythical Man Month are doomed to repeat it. I don't recall anywhere in the book where it states that the problems described in its essays don't apply to you if you're working with dozens of the most intelligent engineers in the world who can produce code in hours instead of days.

I was discussing this with someone else and used the analogy of nuclear energy. Although nuclear plants are highly complex and use forces that have only been understood for the last hundred years, at the end of the day it's still boiling water to create steam to spin a turbine, and nothing about nuclear innovation can engineer away the laws of thermodynamics.

Agents have and will continue to drastically change how we develop code, but it's my belief that drastically changing our software practices to speed up development just means we're going to hit engineering limits faster, rather than being able to overcome those limits entirely.

You're wrong, it's much more than half.

And the response back will be "If you could've asked the AI, why did you ask me then?"

In some cases, it may even be the appropriate response. Interrupting somebody to ask something that could be cleared up by an AI is in the same ballpark as asking them something that could be cleared up if you read the docs.

> By now the code of frontier models works well, and the need to read it is gone.

Like anything else, it depends on what you're working on. For small personal projects I agree, but in maintaining large scale business applications with millions of lines of code, I am still having to guide the models to reuse existing code and to be more flexible with their data structures to accommodate changing business requirements in the future.

They only see a snapshot of the world the application exists in due to their ephemeral nature, and until that is overcome, they will only be able to learn general principles and not the particular nuances of your codebase that only arise from observing how the users use it on a daily basis.

Not a comment on this link in particular, but just a general observation from my experience.

One should be skeptical of the demos they initially see at model release, as there have been instances of some being called out as AI generated video or work that took days and millions of tokens and not a one shot as claimed.

The first few days Astra was out, I attempted to reproduce a few of the demos I saw on twitter, and it was clear Astra had a distinctive style and certain limitations when working in short sessions with tools like Blender that could distinguish genuine demos from bs for retweets.

People putting out these demos should share their sessions to really show what was going on, and I invite people to test models and try to replicate what they see and draw their own conclusions.

The US Constitution has a whole bit about forbidding cruel and unusual punishments.

The circumstances under which they were able to get the synthesized DNA this way would not work in the general case [1]

>Multiple IGSC member companies detected the ordered sequence and determined the order to be legitimate as defined in the 2023 guidance. Specifically, the orders were placed on behalf of SecureBio, an organization known to IGSC member companies given the role played by SecureBio in the SecureDNA project, an effort to build a DNA synthesis screening system. In addition, the name on the orders was an individual who has co-published multiple times with Esvelt, an individual well known to IGSC companies to work in viral evolution and who is known to have access to laboratory facilities sufficient to work safely with the ordered material.

>In short, the system worked as designed: a legitimate individual ordered DNA sequence that, by itself, posed no risk of misuse, for delivery to a company associated with legitimate scientific contributions directly relevant to the sequence that was ordered.

[1] https://thebulletin.org/2024/06/why-a-misleading-red-team-st...

This is going around due to rumors and baseless speculation on Twitter [1] right now that Anthropic has solved the Millennium problem related to Navier-Stokes [2]

[1] https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2096062392442724805 for example

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_existenc...

I have visual aphantasia but not aphantasia of any other senses, so I can assure you it's not a semantic misunderstanding. I play piano and can hear tunes in my head and use what I hear to play it out on the piano, like playing by ear but without actual sound. And I simply don't have this same ability with visualization.

However, I do visualize in my dreams, so from my own experience, I suspect that aphantasia is not a complete inability to visualize, but rather an inability to visualize intentionally. When I'm very sleep deprived or on psychedelics, my ability to conjure mental images changes, not necessarily to full visualization, but at higher levels than in normal life.

The evidence is Anthropic's own reporting [1]. You may doubt that they're telling the truth, but that's what they're reporting.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

You have to pay to read the rest of the article, which says:

>In August 2024, the town of Cedar Grove held a routine city council meeting. There, they discussed raises for their crossing guards and the purchase of a new truck for the local waterworks.

>The last item on the agenda was whether to accept a donation of new automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras for the town’s police department.

>“We’ve received a generous donation of new ALPR cameras … a very generous donation that the police department is receiving,” the town’s manager said. “These are very heavily used tools in the law enforcement toolkit, so it’s good to add more to our belt.”

>The total monetary value of the donation was $37,004. In the approved resolution, the town detailed its provenance: an LLC based out of Encinitas, California.

>It just so happens to be the same LLC that property records list as the owner of a $9.5 million mansion in the town.

>The address for the LLC is also used for a number of other businesses, investment ventures, and a charity. All of which have the exact same manager.

>Aaron Rodgers.

Supporting documents:

https://cedargrovenj.org/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/1065

https://www.bizapedia.com/tx/pantheraleo-investments-llc.htm...

Memento mori

I live here and use Dallasian myself

Those problems are because of the tobacco. Zyn packets et al are just nicotine, and nicotine itself has not been shown to be a carcinogen.

On 1 February 1871 Charles Darwin wrote about these publications to Joseph Hooker, and set out his own speculation that the original spark of life may have been in a "warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed". Darwin explained that "at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm_little_pond

And that video game is called Gambonanza [1]

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3509230/Gambonanza/

> Makes you wonder why they never added any rng into chess, ya know, to keep the player base "engaged"

arguably this is why Chess960 was created

as far as I understand it, turing completeness is a weaker property than combinatory completeness, which Craig's theorem is addressing. The nonexistence of a singleton combinatory basis doesn't necessarily imply the nonexistence of a turing complete combinator.

Looking forward to hearing about how you're using Opus 4.5, from my experience and what I've heard from others, it's been able to overcome many obstacles that previous iterations stumbled on

your score is the length of your two words plus the space

Formalization of many of the ideas from HoTT are currently happening in the Agda community. [1] It's out of my wheelhouse, so I don't know the exact motivations, but Agda is apparently a better way to formalize those ideas than in Lean.

Also, there's a new textbook coming out later this year that's a more modern update to the original HoTT book [2] which also has an Agda formalization. [3]

[1] https://martinescardo.github.io/HoTT-UF-in-Agda-Lecture-Note...

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/introduction-to-homotop...

[3] https://github.com/HoTT-Intro/Agda

Earlier comments found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43869093

From my brief reading of it, it seems like the interesting bit here is the development of the Hypercatalan numbers as the coefficients of the infinite sums of roots of polynomials. Some partial results for special cases of the Catalan numbers and roots had been found in the past, but the full understanding of the structure they call the Geode enabled generalization of the previous findings.

Have been using Suno over the last few iterations and can vouch for this; steering the final product with style tags is a lot better now and I can use more natural language rather than trying to come up with what the genre specific "wordings" for certain styles of music would be. Good to know the tip about the brackets in lyrics too.

Some examples of style descriptions I've used that generated results close to what I had in mind are "romantic comedy intro music, fast and exciting, new york city" (aiming for something like the Sex and the City theme) and "mature adult romance reality tv show theme song, breakbeats, seductive, intimate, saxophones, lots of saxophones" which did indeed produce cheesy porn music.

I had one of these as a kid; the slow way it drew the graphics onto the screen [1] for a new activity was an aesthetic in itself, like a coloring book being drawn and colored in before your eyes, a perfect loading screen for kids.

Wikipedia notes: The system will "draw" images by filling in areas of the screen with color one line at a time; it is not known whether this is an effect employed for the student's enjoyment or if it is due to the slow processing time of the system.

[1] https://youtu.be/r71ejYkkmDY?t=64

moving around on the noise site, you can get it to resemble parts of loud pipes, especially at around 2:35 [1] with the repeated upward bits

https://youtu.be/64liF2VuLxI?t=155

I'm also self published. I would rather a thousand people steal and read and interact with and talk about my work than to be able to eat selling it to a privileged few. The free software movement is a parallel example of this viewpoint.

The economic reality of today is that words and publishing are cheap. If you have something to say and need to get the word out to as many people as possible, that's wonderful. If you need to eat, then accept this is how it is and write for an audience that's willing to pay you for your work even if it's available for free.

link does not work for me, discussion is here https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1fc98fu/confirm...

Programs like this and VCV Rack are great ways to get started on the road to building your own modular synthesizer [1]. Many of the modules in the program are based on real hardware, and while the hardware versions of these modules can cost hundreds of dollars, the software versions are using the exact same firmware. Whether you stay virtual or go out and build the hardware equivalent of your rack, it's a great way to experiment and learn the basics at a lower cost than in the past.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_synthesizer

Thank you for taking the time to clean this up and release it. I've never played DD Poker, but have experienced the loss of other games when servers go down and the software stops being updated.

I realize source releases aren't always possible, so it's a great gift to the community when one can make it happen and they put in the effort to do so.

> I'm wondering if aphantasia is merely the inability to induce sensory hallucinations at will.

I have aphantasia and this is how I'd define it for myself. I have visual dreams and sometimes when I'm tired or on certain drugs I experience visualizations, but not being able to call these visualizations to mind deliberately I feel is what sets my experience apart from others.

I only have visual aphantasia though and can imagine sounds in my head quite well (with verification of this through being a musician and being able to play by ear), so the effect is definitely not universal and can be limited to certain senses.