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No their weird designs are not better in any way - yet.

Factorio rewards the players progression through the game by taking away points of pain. The helper bots being a key transition. Without that pain there would be no reward. The fact that refactoring is expensive in time and complexity is what makes it realistic - it makes the earlier decisions important and consequential.

You can always enter creative mode and make whatever changes you want in the game instantly, but in my experience that does make it less fun.

Don’t worry I didn’t stay long. I loved the Bay Area but did not like SF all that much.

I believe some of the busses were occupied when they were attacked and the lack of injuries was largely due to good fortune. I could believe a claim that this was done by false flag agitators intent on undermining the protests.

I think there is a massive selection criteria bias, AI has been a batshit insane productivity boost for me but I’ve been so busy with it that I’ve generally stopped posting online - I only do so now because I’m out of quota. I no longer see any point in arguing with people - I’ve got better things to do, like argue with AI. I used to scour the Earth looking for smart people to talk to and now I don’t even have to leave my apartment.

In 2014 I moved from London to SF to start a big tech job. In my first day there I accidentally wondered into a massive rally, I asked one of the participants what it was about and they said they were protesting all these foreign tech workers coming to SF. It felt a bit weird to end up in the middle of an ‘anti-me’ rally - especially one so passionate and energetic. A few protesters pressed me on where I was from and what I do, I lied and told them I was an investment banker. They told me that they suppose that was ok. I specifically told them that because not long ago it was finance being the target of protests and I curious to see if they had somehow moved on - if this was a principled stance or if it was being astroturfed.

These protests ended up getting pretty violent, people were throwing rocks through bus windows, throwing up on cars.

You don't seem to be understanding the importance and effect of selection criteria bias.

Much of the personality and intelligence is genetic and that's determined at conception, as for optimum parenting it seems that general indifference yields the best outcomes. There are many ways to damage a person so they won't reach their potential but there does not seem to be many ways to 'make' a person better than they otherwise would have been if they were largely left alone to control their own lives.

Understandably parents want to feel more important and in control, and that their investments will yield good results. And since most people want to feel this way they like to promote messages that reinforce these priors, so the whole platform slowly turns into Linked-In.

I base my assessments on large scale machine learned behavioral analytics done on a full click log history on a non-trivial portion of the US population. Unfortunately I know things about society that I really wish I didn't.

Mother of all selection bias criteria, one thing about getting older is noticing all the people who didn’t make it

When I hear Microsofties talk about how AI coding agents are not very good I have to remind myself they’re using copilot

That has not been my experience after bumping it up to 1M. I do run a lot of agents in parallel ~10-16 and I actively babysit them so perhaps I'm just used to reminding the agents with things I've already told them. But I don't notice much of a difference between Sol 6.1 1M and Opus 5.5 1M

The work I do cannot fit in 256k so it was just relearning the same things over and over again while making zero progress. AFAIK the 1M burns tokens at twice the rate but I use Sol on medium as the work I'm doing now needs more memory than it needs intelligence and it's working great. I use Opus 5.5 for the stuff that needs stronger intelligence.

You can override the context length of Sol to 1M

They imply a heavy weight with the suction downforce numbers but I think those numbers are not real. I’m reminded of neural link where the pig food detector was unimpressive, then shortly later a monkey demo was very impressive, they have since had human trials and humans don’t appear to get anywhere close to that same level.

Neat, but that car has to be practically empty. It appears to have very low inertia.

By rough estimate, using hydroxide jet packs as a reference, I’d say they got it down to about 600kg.

I wasn't intending to suggest eliminating the whole profession, I intended to suggest a reduction.

3 of the last 3 dentists I went to in the US were likely scammers - so now I don't bother with dentists at all. First one told me I have a bunch of cavities that needed filling, having never had any before I figured I'd get a second opinion, same thing but cavities in different locations. I had hoped the third opinion would break the tie but the locations were different again. This was 16 years ago and still no trouble with my teeth, fingers crossed this continues. The new Oral-B electric brushes are really good and that could be a factor.

I do wonder what we should do to gracefully wind down a profession that isn't needed as much anymore due to technology. I'm guessing dentists in the era of fluoride, flossing, and electric brushes just don't have as much work anymore, which is great for everyone else.

Where that falls down is that it is not even a good idea to limit the use of medicine to only what is well understood - i.e. that would be very un-intelligent. There is nothing higher level about it, quite the opposite.

“ They understand nothing at the level that Tao means. Literally nothing.”

Was this sarcasm and I missed it? Because not only do I think I understand at the level of Tao I also think he is wrong and not understanding something.

Now I’m even more confused, perhaps we are in agreement. My position is that there already exists many such medications that no one knows how it works. It also used to be the default way medicine worked. Lots of things that work were found though observation of trial and error.

My position is that Tao is not only wrong on this but his example makes the opposite case.

Perhaps I'm in the lower half but I do not understand what point you're trying to make. Are you saying that as some higher plane of understanding Tao is actually correct? My thinking is that a simple counterexample would be sufficient - i.e. are there medications that people use for which the mechanism is not understood? There are many such examples as others have given in this thread.

This was published today, I had to check the date to be sure. I used to be an applied researcher working in big tech and for the things I wanted to build if I had to pick between LLMs and hand picking a team of 100 from the best programmers / researchers in the world I would pick the LLMs. Of course the combination would be even better. I've had LLMs immediately understand concepts that took me months to effectively communicate to a colleague and there are some concepts I was unable to communicate to any other human at all. Then the LLMs could build what I needed in less time it would take me to set up a meeting about it.

If someone has modified their appearance in a way that appears foolish and their intent was to signal intelligence then I my prior would be that they are extra foolish.

Instead if they know Latin then my prior assumption would be that they are intelligent.

Acquiring information is costly (multi armed bandit) which is why signaling is important. Perhaps in the future with AI and attestations we can replace expensive signals with cheaper ones that are more difficult to fake and thus more honest.

With the improvements in machine intelligence I have become much less concerned with human intelligence and only persist with disagreeing with netizens out of a quickly fading residual sentimentality.

That signal certainly sounds pretty costly to me, it would not be effective at signaling intelligence though.

Signals must to be costly in order to be effective

Not only that but the weight loss is often a side effect of fixing other issues, for me I’ve been taking a low dose for autoimmune related ME/CFS for about 4 years now.

I’m going to stick with my pointless designation, sure many things can yield knowledge and if money, time, and expertise were infinite then sure, why not. But they are finite and there a million better things for these people to be doing that would yield useful knowledge more efficiency.

Engineering exists within an ecosystem and that old ecosystem is gone. Everything would be a once off. The materials science could be interesting but that’ll also be one offs and probably wouldn’t generalize.

As a consumer of black market peptides (formerly gray, thanks RFK) there doesn’t seem much of an attempt to hide it nor does it appear that anyone is intercepting them. The only package I lost was due to the LA Railroad heists.

They usually have someone on the inside they can contact to remove negative reviews, eBay doesn’t care because the high positive ratings means more sales which means more commissions.

I’m with the old guy on this, too long since it last flew.

It makes no sense to me, it would be an expensive and pointless vanity project. Sounds like there is a chain of people too afraid to say no, perhaps they’re hoping to drag their heels until priorities change again.

Most people are trend followers and what trends they see decides what trends they follow. It sounds like the algorithms that chose which influencers to promote made the decision, which was already somewhat true before the current AI trend. This happened when there was a big push from deterministic feeds to algorithmically ranked feeds by facebook and twitter. I guess an argument could be made that the people who chose what content to consume feed the algorithm but really there is a heavy hand on the scales that tilts the algorithm in favor of various things.

I rarely use C++ but when I do it is for speed. It’s not uncommon that carefully crafted intrinsics can 10x the straightforward naive implementation.