cromwellian

I'm skeptical frontier LLMs can actually do well (e.g. alpha 5%+) without fine-tuning, especially on historical market data. Presumably you support fine-tuned models?

Sabine got her wish. DOGE cut NSF by 40%. Tons of scientists out of work including physicists. But she'll be ok, she only needs to pimp another ad for Brilliant.com

NASA's budget is 0.35% of the Federal Budget. The US Government spends the equivalent of 20 years of moon mission spending on ICE. They're spending 2x that on Iran war. They blew $200 billion in PPP Loan fraud in 2020 alone.

I'm tired of nickle and diming science funding. You had scientists like Sabine Hossenfelder cheerleading NSF cuts cause of "waste" on string theory and particle accelerators. NSF is 0.1% of the federal budget, and it has funded a remarkable number of world changing inventions over the last 40 years.

We don't spent JACK on space. Look at the huge returns from the Hubble and James Webb. Why aren't we building HUGE HUGE space telescopes as immediate followups? We should have 50 James Webb equivalents. NASA once had plans for a "Terrestial Planet Mapper", a bunch of giant space telescopes flying in formation that combine their signals for truly incredible resolution, good enough to image planets around distant solar systems to a few pixels.

We've now seen plenty of planets in the habitable zone with nearby signatures of biological precursor molecules. We've found asteroids with sugars and amino acids in them. Give NASA 10x the budget and end these damn wars. The Pentagon failed 7 audits and can't account for $2 TRILLION and we're talking about humans in space a waste? It's a drop in the bucket, and it provides a beacon for humanity to dream.

The Apollo projects created a whole generation of people who wanted to go into STEM, that's the biggest ROI.

NASA, the NSF, the NIH, et al, are not the problem. Their spending is insignificant, NASA+NSF is < 1% of the budget.

I was in SF in the 90s this kind of talk is nonsense. Crime was far higher in SF back then, area near the stadium was a no-go area, there were open gang wars in SF on TV. Hell, go watch the Michael Douglas TV show “The Streets of SF” from the 70s80s

Crime is down, mic of the city is gentrified and the total number of homeless in CA and SF is roughly in the same range it’s been since Reagan was governor.

A lot of this BS about CA and how bad things are seems to be from people who haven’t been here long or people overdosing on right wing media which has Non-stop been attacking CA for 30 years nightly, all the while it has continued to become more and more dominant economically.

Because it is an externality. Capitalism works when there are property rights. Even educated libertarians admit that that which is not able to be given property rights must be subject to government oversight.

Public safety is an externality. The air and water are externalities.

Private industry can't effectively compete to optimize a cost which is not "priced in". That's the whole point. If you can pollute, damage public safety, et al, it amounts to a free subsidy, you are externalizing costs which should show up in your balance sheet.

It's like people read Ayn Rand, or some cliff notes version of free market capitalism, but don't read any of the deep philosophical economic arguments in the literature, and then parrot slogans around.

Nothing to do with energy star. Modern Bosch Dishwashers use less water, wash better, and dry better, than your old 1990s washers.

In the same way that people think low-flow toilets are why their sh1t doesn't flush, instead of the proliferation of multi-ply super-thick toilet paper that are almost as bad as paper towels. It doesn't matter how much flow you have, if you flush a wad of cellulose that won't instantly dissolve like single-ply or thin-two-ply, you'll need to break out the augur.

And really, if you don't have a Toto Washlet or Japanese toilet, you're missing out. You barely need any toilet paper at all, and don't walk around with fecal particles wiped against your skin all day.

Those are applied-ML level advancements, OpenAI has pushed model level advancements. xAI has never really done much it seemed except download the latest papers and reproduce them.

What do you consider a proper security clearance? One emergency approved by the President on a whim, or one that is the result of careful vetting over a 6 month process which seems to be the standard for renewals or new clearances? One of them is 19 years old, the other 5 are 24 and younger. You want 6 kids in charge of a 6 trillion dollar system, and one of them with hedge fund connections? Yeah, nothing that could go wrong there.

And what was so urgent about axing USAID that required this weird process of bypassing all of the normal ways people audit a six trillion dollar payment system? Seriously, what was the hurry?

You don’t think they’re being sloppy and reckless? We literally have critical websites going off line, we have airports like San Carlos losing all their ATCs, we have republicans in Congress confused whe their own constituents lose access to services because of misworded EOs, this is not normal.

We couldn’t have had a report prepared over six months, have Musk go to Congress and testify and show all the waste, and a plan to prioritize the cuts, have an orderly wind down, etc?

The US government isn’t X where you fly in in the middle of the night and are so incompetent you start randomly unplugging servers and have to be frantically rescued by heroic sysadmins.

This is the people’s property, not his. We have three branches of government, due process, checks and balances, we don’t have a dictatorship and frankly everyday this is looking more and more like a soft coup.

The issue isn't just Musk's clearances, it's the clearances of the employees he's giving access to. With stuff like Salt Typhoon out there, and reports of Musk's college age hackers hooking arbitrary hard disks up to government computers, can you imagine the potential for potential Russian or Chinese infiltration given how careless Musk has shown his management to have been in the past?

Remember how Israel destroyed Iranian centrifuges with a worm on a USB stick that they just waited for someone to be dumb enough to plug into a government connected intranet?

C'mon man, the people defending Musk's brazen behavior here really need to think long and hard about what they're justifying because the like the guy's cars or rockets, or MAGA politics. This is CRAZY.

Usually drug use, financial debt to foreigners, or any criminal violations can get you rejected for clearance, especially top secret, so the only way he has this clearance is because the executive branch overrode it.

You’re forgetting about 2 decades of US DoE funding of EUV research through EUV-LLC which ASML joined late. A lot of the early groundwork and foundational research was done by DoE including using US built synchrotron accelerators to try out various early approaches.

Seems to me that what Andreessen was really mad about was the CFPB forcing his portfolio companies that committed consumer fraud to return money to their customers. He also lied about the CFPB doing debanking, they don’t have that power.

While debanking may be a problem, there’s a false populism in these disingenuous VCs, pretending that their troubles are the same as everyone else. These guys want to operate in grey areas that enable laundering, illegal gambling, buying/selling contraband, and straight up rug pulls, and not be subject to any risk or oversight.

No, he’s pretty much against them and makes a new excuse each time. He would claim that no vaccine ever has gone through enough testing.

He also denied HIV causes AIDS, days it’s Poppers or lifestyle.

He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID.

He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great medium for bacteria, it has avian flu viruses, parasites, etc). We invented pasteurization for a reason.

The guy latches on to whatever statistical outlier study he can find like an ambulance chasing lawyer and is a threat to public health that has been massively improved over the last century.

All of his attacks on dyes and seed oils won’t move the needle when the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.

I worked for Google for almost 14 years. Never did they, any other engineer, or even product manager I know of, ever suggest to snoop into cloud customer data, especially those using Shielded VMs and Customer Managed Encryption Keys for attached storage (https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/using...). I've never seen even the slightest hint, and the security people at Google are incredibly anal to a T about the design and enforcement of these things.

This stuff is all designed so that even an employee with physical access to the machine would find it very difficult to get data. It's encrypted at rest by customer keys, stored in enclaves in volatile RAM. If you detached the computer or disk, you'd lose access. You'd have to perform an attack by somehow injecting code into the running system. But Shielded VMs/GKE instances makes that very hard.

I am not a Google employee anymore but this common tactic of just throwing out "oh, their business model contains ad model ergo, they will sell anything and everything, and violate contracts they sign to steal private data from your private cloud" is a bridge too far.

Fake? Did they say anything non-factual? Seems to me they just chose to lead with the one new bit of information in the update since last time that is surprising and that people would want to know about in any new medical device: problems. They don’t totally trash the device, but I’m sure even people considering volunteering would be interested in the potential hiccups.

As soon as you mentioned Comax which has no safety record at all as an alternate you undermined your credibility.

The media has been nonstop attacked by the political right going all the way back to the 80. It started with talk radio.

Before cable TV News was a loss leader mostly limited to time slots that were the least profitable for commercials and mostly covered headlines.

When 24/7 cable arrived with CNN and then Fox, the filled in time essentially became 23 hours of talking head opinion. Suddenly the critics isolated to talk radio got their own forums.

But what really finally destroyed trust was social media. Now instead of just your uncle telling you to watch Fox, he’s resharing all over FB, and now Post-Musk Twitter.

With the signal to noise ratio going to hell, and one side almost constantly spreading (according to a peer reviewed a Science journal paper recently) significantly more misinformation to their own bubble, is it any wonder trust is declining?

The final nail in the coffin will be AI where deepfakes and bots will make it almost impossible to believe any story.

He’s not running for office but he sure does seem to waste a ton of time arguing politics on Twitter and getting into public battles with people.

I’d also argue he technically is investing, given all of the companies he’s starting, even OpenAI started from his investment. There’s Neuralink, Boring Company, and probably others. Though in Musk’s case it might be his autism/adhd.

? AppleTV and Apple Music are not decades ahead of anything. AirPods are way better than the existing Bluetooth headsets that were on the market.

I wanted to see critics of Tesla, but I can't, because Musk has banned several accounts that track Tesla manufacturing defects, FSD crashes, etc. Jenn Senshiba even got banned for talking about unions it appears. Lots of others too: https://twitter.com/dictionaryhill/status/172997549431631465...

Free speech, sure, right.

The rest of the industry doesn’t build dozens of ships in a massive assembly line. Blue Origin hasn’t even completed a single full test prototype ship yet.

And if you go look at NASA during the Space Race era of the 60s, they blew up plenty of ships.

? Chrome shipped with a fast JS JIT, simplified UI, per-process isolation. Acting like you had to pay someone to perceive a superior user benefit to Firefox, which at the time would crash and you'd like all your tabs, is ridiculously ahistorical.

What if the guy was using paper maps? If this was 30 years ago would paper nap publisher be liable?

When you are driving, you’re responsible for being aware of the road. If you drive over a dangerous road that has no visible signs of it being dangerous, then it’s the government’s fault, or if a private road, the owner’s fault.

For more hilarity, a blog post I wrote in 2006 on currying in Java using CGLib tricks:

http://cromwellian.blogspot.com/2006/07/fun-with-generics-an...

Hot take: If the Earth's core is Iron-Nickel, is it an Invar, and therefore, there's an effect too reduce earthquakes from expansion from heat movement being lower, or is the pressure alone enough to counteract that?

I was tired of hunting around for the Twitter tab because my visual muscle memory is looking for Twitter icons. I wanted to test ChatGPT's Code Interpreter, so I asked it to do the work for me. This repo is the result (including the shared ChatGPT session if you want to play around and improve it)

Have you looked at what SpaceX promised NASA for HLS? They need to be able to launch it and rapidly refuel it with 13 tankers. They’ve already spent a few billion, by the time they can reliably launch 13 refueling tankers in rapid succession and not destroy their stage 0, we could be taking $10-15 billion in dev costs putting Starship firmly in SLS territory.

That would be a great scenario but people were hoping that about Putin and unfortunately it didn’t happen in time to save Ukraine.

Also we don’t know if whoever follows Xi will be better or worse.

Kotlin has some pretty nice StateMachine DSL libraries out there, like https://github.com/nsk90/kstatemachine