metanonsense

Even pre-AI, there have been proofs that took years to be verified, understood and some were disputed forever and still are (like the Mochizuki / IUT drama). So, even without AI, maths has reached a point of specialization, where only a few people in the world know the areas used in a proof well enough to check it. When „new math“ is invented for a proof, people may even be more disincentivied to put in the effort. So, I‘d argue, AI makes understanding new proofs easier, not more difficult.

Always ran this to impress my friends

    10 for i = 0 to 359
    20 plot 100+100*cos(i), 100+100*sin(i)
    30 next i

Yeah.. that's something that I thought about for a few years now. I think making sense of code bases and software design will soon be a completely new industry. I had expected that companies like Jetbrains would be in a prime position to offer solutions for that, but it takes longer than I expected.

We're listening. We hear you. We're hear for you.

Maybe the boundaries of the memory subsystem are a bit fuzzy.

I think this is only "statistically" true in the sense that training is based on facts and not non-facts (except maybe with the ingestion of flat-earthers literature ;-). The existence of hallucinations in a bare transformer shows that the convex hull is not about information but about text, so the limit may more be "possible linear combinations of text", which allows for much extrapolation and counterfactuals. True creativity may be one reinforcement learning mid-training goal away that rewards novelty over correctness.

This visualization really makes not much sense. Very modest signal-to-noise ratio.

I think with agents all around, honeypots will get more important than ever.

Yeah. I also only use pro in very specific situations. Not (just) because it's slow, but if the question is too simple or vague, pro responses are sometimes overfitting to the noise in my question. Until there is lots of context and the basics are laid out, high or xhigh somehow work better. Pro gives you the last 10%.

It feels very humbling that here is one of the smartest humans on the planet asking questions, and the LLM keeps answering in this "Yes, it's really simple if you think about it" way, like a professor talking to a talented student.

I also had a frustrating but funny conversation today where I asked ChatGPT to make one document from the 10 or so sections that we had previously worked on. It always gave only brief summaries. After I repeated my request for the third time, it told me I should just concatenate the sections myself because it would cost too many tokens if it did it for me.

Impatient execs can also be painful. EDIT: Writing this while I am waiting for Codex to complete, so I may enjoy slow AI more than the usual developer ;-)

Tbf, if I did whay they do in this video, my battery life would more like a handful of seconds.

I think the issue it the (literal) "head-of-line blocking". Some requests can be processed either "concurrently" like tapping a beer from a keg or in parallel by having multiple bartenders, but having all people standing strictly in line makes this difficult.

only learned about SKIP LOCKED because ChatGPT suggested it to solve some concurrency problem I had. Great tool to learn such things.

Honestly a crappy situation. In Germany, Telekom is a monopolistic bully. In evening hours, any service behind Cloudflare more or less stops working (for instance, before I cancelled my subscription, chess.com web assets were delivered with neck-breaking 5kB/s, which made loading a 20MB wasm for stockfish analysis no fun).. but there are absolutely no viable alternatives that aren’t also crappy: Vodafone -> same peering idiocy, Starlink -> king Elon). VPNs make things complicated, but are often the only alternative.

I’ve seen this with some of my Indian colleagues, though definitely not all. In fact, most are more than eager to disagree with me :D (even though I’m their superior)

Spending months dealing with folks attempting to blackmail us over ridiculous non-issues has pretty much killed any sympathy I had for bug bounty hunters.

In my experience, this depends a lot on the subreddits you are subscribed to. Even in that set, the general mood sometimes changes significantly over time, e.g. because moderators change, a flood of new people is coming in because of some trends (AI), or some reddit meta events (eg a post being bestoffed). Generally speaking, a few vocal asshles can spoil your subreddit and drag the overall sentiment down.

Ironic that I switched to HN from chess.com because Deutsche Telekom‘s peering with Cloudflare (or more its lack of) made the site even more unusable than usual. 5 minutes ago I thought „Maybe it’s time to switch to Vodafone“

I remember back in 2000 or so when I declined the invitation to a party because I wanted to compile a new kernel in the evening.

But isn’t that exactly what GP meant? There is an original, very precise but also very abstract definition (and what is more abstract than category theory). Then people come along who give a different definition that matches the original one in their specific context („three laws in Haskell“). After that people take these three laws and apply them (sometimes overly simplistic) to other contexts („just give it a flatMap in Scala to get a monad“). And at some point the original meaning got lost, and there are competing definitions out.

I would be very cautious to give an advice like this to my team. Making a thing simple is actually very hard, and many, who hear the words, may just equate „simple thing“ with „first thing that comes to mind“, which may eventually turn into a nightmare of complexity.

Maybe I am too pessimistic, but as an EU citizen I expect politics (or should I say Trump?) to prevent access to US-based frontier models at some point.

In our product, we have different strategies depending on the requirements. Sometimes, we just delete. Sometimes, we do soft delete with timestamps. Sometimes, we have a history table with or without versioned entities. Sometimes, we have versions in the table. Sometimes, we have an audit log. Sometimes, we use event sourcing (although everyone in the team hates it ;-)

I am not saying I‘d do this, but in theory you could deploy a single reverse proxy in front of your HTTP-only devices and restrict traffic accordingly.

Cheers, huge Huggins fan here :) Looking forward to Valet

In my opinion, there’s also a third (and certainly controversial) option: suicide is the ultimate expression of freedom, self actualization, and human dignity. I don’t plan to kill myself in the foreseeable future, but the thought that I could gives me hope, power, and removes any fear from my life. A friend of mine is 94 and lives in constant, non-treatable pain, and the thought that she can end her life when she decides to do so makes things bearable for her.

I know that this ultimate freedom is also ultimate selfishness, because the loss is felt by your close ones, not you. But this makes me perhaps an asshole, but not sick.

Been on a Dylan concert a few months ago, and I really wondered why he did this to himself, at his age, with his money. He seemed so utterly bored.

Did not see your comment until after I posted mine, but exactly this. The amount of disk io from these sort operations can be massive and very surprising.