glenstein
glenstein on Hacker News
Right, he said as much on reddit
Unfortunately my recollection was dead wrong and it's apparently not a tattoo. At least I can't find anything corroborating my memory. Instead, it was part of his reddit handle. As part of the extended bad german political party iconography it frequently is a tattoo but I don't see anything showing that he has it.
I don't necessarily share the certainty of the post linked below to but it discusses the user handle and its connotations.
https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113850246346827615
I first heard about Andy Yen from his claim that Gail Slater's appointment was proof the current administration will be more effective enforcing anti-trust and was the "party of the little guy." And lately he's saying stuff like this:
>According to the report, an employee in Proton's security Slack channel urged the company to take at least a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. Yen replied, at the end of August: "That's bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it's possible to be fast and secure." He added: "Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster." In a follow-up message he wrote "only losers think like that," and his message to the team was to "stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more."
I think he's terminally online in a way that fried his brain. And I used to think his 88 tattoo was just a coincidence but now I honestly would believe anything.
My opinionated take is there was a kind of cultural moment where the world was ready for Something Else post-twitter, and instead of just the Fediverse, or just something else, the world encountered a fractured, motley combination of Fediverse/Bluesky + AT proto/Threads and there was never a unified zeitgest moment that belonged to any single answer, though BlueSky was closest to having a kind of cultural watershed reaction moment.
Back in 2005-2008 or so, I think Ubuntu was a genuine breakthrough as a polished desktop version of Linux that set a standard that various other distros, eventually, caught up to. I think Cinnamon and other distros eventually caught up on polish.
They also had credible commitments to long term support that brought people on board. I think that was enough to get them on the map, but personally as a desktop user, I haven't used it in a while, mostly sticking to Debian and Arch.
Meanwhile the Fediverse is and has been running for years, long before AT jumped in and took the spotlight. You're not wrong, and I'd rather have AT than not have it. But it reminds me of N'Sync eating the Backstreet Boys' lunch back in the day.
It also reminds me of the Onion article "Sumerians Look On in Confusion as God Creates World".
https://theonion.com/sumerians-look-on-in-confusion-as-god-c...
I would love deeper access to the data set. I've been on a quest to understand why Godel Escher Bach, a book that I think is great, is apparently bad and is something I'm supposed to grow out of as a teenager. But that opinion, when glimpsed, like bigfoot is gone before you are able to figure out what you're seeing. It says 8% negative. It shows top 30 comments which is nice but seems to only be a snapshot of the praise.
The author of the article isn't advocating for using these domains for trusted services.
Fun! One less than intuitive piece is that, as far as the game is concerned, evenly dividing a district 50-50 stops that district from counting toward anyone's majority.
So if Blue was only present in a single district where its the majority, you could have ten more districts all evenly tied between Purple and Orange, and Blue would still win.
There used to be a convention on reddit to respond to some comment bots with "bad bot" or "good bot" and the bot would use that feedback to assess if its responses were helpful. I think maybe wikipedia summaries or things like that.
Then I think it became a kind of put down and/or a way of saying certain inauthentic comments seemed insincere. In this context as reply to you, though, it feels pretty inexplicable.
Seems to be fine on my firefox with ublock enabled. Though the hexes sometimes are confused about which groups I'm modifying, which I'm not sure if that's a firefox thing or not.
Color also seems fine to me. Horse is bright blue and the other is lavender.
So my whole previous comment was a plea to not do exactly this, namely, treat the example of open models like they somehow negate the value or strategic significance of having a model that leads at the frontier. I would submit that it's the core confusion behind the "Deepseek moment" and what it supposedly teaches about the relative strategic positions of different actors in the AI race.
> whether you want to acknowledge that or not is not my affair.
I felt I acknowledged it pretty explicitly. I said the likes of Deepseek are "cheaper and open and that matters", but it's the rest of that sentence that I think went without acknowledgment.
>And just like there are still people driving Renaults and Volkswagens the latest batch of open models will be useful for a long time to come.
Walking is great too! But you're not filling an economic need by selling walking to But those companies are marginalized and the economic destiny of the world is being set by those who own the infrastructure to build out the world's next generation of electric vehicles (at least in the automotive space).
When you're not in the lead, your best strategic move is to neutralize trade secrets advantages of the leaders. I think a strategic approach is being misinterpreted as a demonstration of virtuous ethos, which is crazy given (as the other commenter mentioned) the norm of secrecy when it strategically suitable in basically every other context.
>They'll be just as useful as they are today
I mean how useful are GPT-3 weights today? That's the kind of useful they'll be relative to the frontier.
I feel like the so-called "Deepseek moment" broke too many people's brains and they've lost the ability to reason about why frontier advantages matter. I think we have to learn some new core concepts and rate of improvement over time is going to be a big one, and not understanding that causes people to exaggerate the significance of downstream distillation that's done in response to it. It's cheaper and open and that matters, but it's not the kind of mattering that replaces the relevance or advantage of the frontier, and I feel like I'm not seeing people demonstrate that they know how to really compare the relative merit of these two things so much as zoom in on one to talk past the other.
I think the vast majority of physicists have been perfectly able to avoid Penrose's error. I would also think the lesson would be simply to strive to avoid making errors or the kind he did, not necessarily to sacrifice realism about physical objects just to avoid the possibility of someone's mistake. Plenty of people, in fact I would say many more people abuse the observer effect in QM to make crackpot claims about consciousness. But it doesn't mean the observer effect is wrong.
I also think you can be a realist without having to make the jump to ontological irreducibility. You can say that our latest theory is a better approximation than the previous one and the previous one was an approximation as well.
When we say electricity is a "natural monopoly" what that means in the history of transmission utilities, states have stuck a bargain to grant monopolies in exchange for being tightly regulated, and so there's no version of reality where the state isn't already immersed in regulating them.
Every state in the country has a public utilities commission and they are constantly immersed in complex policy work from implementing legislation to working through an endless docket of cases that fine tune policy to specific tasked out responsibilities like getting a "standard offer". Sure it's complicated but I can't think of any reason that defaults to "don't regulate". We regulate healthcare too, and Medicare is always cheaper than private alternatives.
The problem with leaving private actors to their own devices when they have monopolies is that every conceivable grey area of judgment calls that impacts profitability will be subject to abuses of discretion, such as building out overpriced infrastructure, and investing in cheaper, unreliable transmission infrastructure instead of building for the long term.
So an open-source non-profit, ad-free search engine that's building its own index and tailoring it based on community feedback. And if I'm follwing correctly, this announcement is a paid membership program to support growing the index sustainably by offering paid program for additional URL submissions.
The notion of a "seed" appears to be a program for building out its index with a specified URL or handful or URLs as a starting point that are used to discover additional links. But also "uses external search results to find additional pages". So there's that.
I suppose I'm always game for additional independent search indexes. Independence is a good mission in and of itself, so here's another option outside of Kagi and DuckDuckgo if you're looking to DeGoogle. But beyond that I'm not sure what the motivation or mission is. Is it a better index, is it an anti-slop index? Is it a smol-web friendly or human content friendly index? Millionshort gets rid of "top" results, Kagi filters custom domains.
I suppose I don't disagree that the world could benefit from a thoughtfully curated and independent index and maybe the community input/feedback approach could be a new and novel secret sauce.
Also it was YACB (yet another chromium browser), as is the successor browser Dia.
I agree he wasn't able to anticipate technological changes or the impact they would have, but the response to that isn't to simply insist his theory is literally still true just because he tried his best. I'm not suggesting he could or should have done that, but I don't have to have that expectation to nevertheless note, correctly, that it's not a model of the population dynamics we actually see.
Shucks, you are correct, it's not a coincidence at all. I thought it was about the predicted population boom writ large but TFA's hook is about the specific predicted date.
Hard disagree, population forecasting is more rigorous now but the data stretches back to the origin of civilization, and it's more than a binary of having or not having data, it's having stronger and more predictive methodologies. The biggest risk is the false equivalence between predictions from 60 years ago and now.
It's like Isaac Asimov's essay the Relativity of Wrong, which, if boiled down to one sentence says (paraphrasing), "People who said the earth was flat were wrong. People who say the earth is round were wrong. But if you think believing the earth is round is just as wrong as believing the earth is flat, your view is wronger than both of those put together."
Same thing about equating 2020s and 1960s population forecasting.
Right, the racist part is equivocating between "demographic change" and "extinction event" and thinking in terms of hypotheticals and extrapolations that aren't supported by data.
And there's all kinds of value prejudging that is entirely external to the data about what cultural change means, what it implies, what effects it will have, all of which involve disputable and extremely politicized assumptions that are trying to borrow from the objectivity of population data for rhetorical momentum in favor of specific preferences of racial composition.
I mean insofar as the idea is about contemplating those mechanisms in the abstract, sure. But insofar as they were predictive or an attempt at a descriptive characterization of where populations would actually go, clearly it didn't hold. And if it didn't hold because it's true on it's own terms in some abstract sense, so much the worse for its inability to model changes that would prove to be relevant to actual population dynamics.
It's also not just that we accommodated explosive populations but that eventually birth rates really did simply start slowing down for discernible reasons that future models were capable of integrating. Even if we continue to have technology that would give us the capacity to accommodate future increases in population, those increases are no longer happening.
I think the racist part is the pivot from demographic changes to the inference that they herald an extinction event for a particular culture, and especially tying that assumption to unwarranted extrapolations that misread the data, and especially when it's a fixation on populations that don't realistically face any such threat but nevertheless talking about the perceived threat in existential terms.
Great link, thanks. In a pretty remarkable coincidence the post you linked, which itself is from seven years ago, considers a prediction from over 60 years ago of an anticipated doomsday, and that doomsday date just so happens to be a few weeks from today:
>In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they predicted the world would end on November 13, 2026.
Set your calendars!
Well I wouldn't both-sides this one. 2020s population forecasting is better than 1960s forecasting, the latter was repudiated and the former is correctly modeling basically everything. Demographic decline really is happening and has reasonably well understood mechanisms.
I suppose I would separate out some of the more extreme predictions about demographic collapse in Russia or China. I'm not sure what to make of those or if they're similarly credible to other kinds of population forecasts.
I think it's terribly unfortunate that the the "in mice" meme ever took off. If overhyping science based on preliminary tests is bad, so too is the blanket dismissal of that research that overcorrects in the wrong direction.
We share enough mechanisms across genetics, proteins and even our immune systems and that research is capable of asking meaningful questions that matter to us, and frequently has paid off. That's not to justify the ethics of it but I think it's beyond question that research iN mIcE has been an important research platform for things like immunology and lead to nobel prizes. Research writ large is a vast cumulative program of small iterations that are, individually, of provisional significance, and the categorical dismissal of it as not producing instant one-shot cures is at least as bad a misunderstanding of science as overhyped articles are.
You're still doing more than most, and if everyone in the world made choices like yours it would still cash out in massive changes to animal welfare even if it was short of 100% perfect.
I think an unfortunate thing that has poisoned too much of the talk of animal welfare has been what I consider a small minded and frankly frivolous accusation of hypocrisy. The "hypocrisy" is the price of agreeing to be accountable to a much higher standard. The "consistency" of not even bothering to try is not morally preferable.
I would flip the question on its head and ask why the response to uncertainty is to default to an assumption of zero. Environmental benefits are notoriously hard to calculate and it's unfair to weaponize that difficulty as if it confirms the default assumption should be zero. I also don't think the calculation needs to hinge on one-for-one timed tradeoffs in the form of "this windmill exists to replace power from that dam" or assume that backfill is 100% fossil fueled, given that solar is now arguably the most rapidly deployed form of new generation.
It's not that the cost never matters but I think if the cost is really just $25MM for a transformatively beneficial environmental impact that has equivalent no alternative, in exchange for scaling back a fungible resource, is a no-brainer.