varelse

It's certainly one of the few things that actually gets their attention. But aren't there more important things than this for the Luigis among us?

I would suspect there's good money in offering a service to detect AI content on all of these forums and reject it. That will then be used as training data to refine them which gives such a service infinite sustainability.

Bezos? Abandoned by his dad who was literally an alcoholic clown and raised by his mom and her 2nd husband Bezos?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Jorgensen

So $300K in 1994 is about $640K. That's nice but about 80th percentile of net worth. It's nice his parents believed in him. How many of your parents would do that for you? I'm sure at 1 in 5 of them have that kind of money because of the distribution here. So the difference here is He was smart, he got lucky, and your parents don't believe in you enough on this front.

But compare and contrast Bezos and Musk. Bezos's mid-life crisis is leaving his wife to run around on his yacht banging models. Musk's mid-life crisis is trying to destroy democracy so he and his mom won't have to pay US taxes. Neither one is a role model, but I don't even get the point of the latter.

Which brings us back to AlphaFold. The AlphaFold team did something amazing. But also, they had a backer that believed in them. David Baker, for better or worse, didn't achieve what they did and he'd been at it for decades. It's amazing what good backing can achieve.

ACE score of 5. I turned out badly. Rich, but badly. Just ask any of the data faking cheating scientists I channeled my trauma into exposing who got me kicked out of academia. But that's how I got rich. Money changes everything.

You will never feel safe. You will instead build a life, a portfolio, and a network of friends as a surrogate for feeling safe. And you can trust my words, I'm shadowbanned.

It was only last year that I realized the country music opening theme "Benson, Arizona" was about relativistic travel through space, shortly after playing it because I had just driven through Benson, Arizona.

Sure, people hate tech. And tech clearly hates its own customers. So why hasn't something that doesn't hate its own customers disrupted tech? If anything, the enshittification is just getting worse. Prime video's random ads alone should have led to mass cancellations but it's not happening, is it? So what exactly will lead to people walking away as opposed to grumbling as things keep getting worse and worse?

Reminds me a lot of politics in the United States at this point: stuck with two disappointing parties with almost no chance of a third party really shaking things up because the one thing they can agree on is that a third party should never arise.

Ministry For The Future was far too optimistic. Termination Shock presents how late stage capitalism and the accelerationists would team up to make money on half-baked science to save the planet. The West will probably be fine but we're going to make Mao and Stalin look like amateur hour mass murderers when we finally save our own butts.

Why the burgeoning economic development of full self-driving space needles! Sure, their former homes will be uninhabitable, but imagine how much they'll get selling the land? Why they'll be able to move to Antarctica if that's what it takes! I'm getting a tear in my eye right now over all that profit and shareholder value as we boldly evacuate the planet into the future!

There are a ton of contaminants in our drinking water that the EPA recommends you remove and we know they are harmful but they are not mandated to do so. Get yourself a water filter because they're not going to filter it for you.

And that's the consequence of giving the market leader a decade and a half head start. No one and I mean no one was preventing AMD or Intel from building a competitive hardware and software ecosystem other than themselves.

I once had a manager at my dad's company steal my code for my opus Star Trek game. He left tracks so I followed those tracks into his account and made the game absolutely no fun to play by making it impossibly hard (1979).

He then had the nerve to complain to my dad that the game was too hard.

The real question would be why anyone cares about empty mission statements like this anyway?

Parsing them for meaning is nearly as useful as parsing your morning bowel movement to predict your day.

Sure, they give you two computers. But you better not ask for a GPU!

It's a feed forward network guaranteed to halt with an obscene power envelope that tells lies with an air of absolute certainty. Not scared, but really annoyed with those who are...

Legalize it all and regulate it to protect sex workers. Make pimps and their equivalents obsolete.

It would be better if we could provide better options to those who end up turning to sex work, but that's crazy talk. So let them make the best of a crappy situation that most Americans seem to favor them being in instead of punishing them for not being born rich.

Come on guys you can vote this one down, you just know you can vote this one down. If you even see this one, please vote this one down. I need 2,979 more down votes.

The concept of anything a light year away or more being able to wipe out life on Earth is pretty mind-boggling to me. I wish we focused more on things that were mind-boggling rather than mind killing. But that's just not how this culture is playing out.

Anything beyond ~50 light years is out of range.

New variants are now emerging every 30 days. Good luck with that plan. Why is the concept that life finds a way so hard to accept? We're getting our asses kicked by this thing.

But I would agree with you if the variants would just stop creating themselves. But it doesn't seem like any immunity really lasts. So this leads to repeatedly infecting yourself with variants as they emerge (1 in 6 chance of a bad outcome of long covid or worse), become a bit of a test rat for the latest vaccine, or some combination therein.

I'm hoping we eventually get a vaccine that transcends the evolutionary range of this thing. And then we could do exactly what you're suggesting. But that's a science project and you never know how those will go.

The main concern I have is will we be a nation crippled with PTSD and long-term healthcare concerns when this is finally over with?

Back in the day, the downvotes here would flow like a river at the suggestion that an engineering career behooved one to understand Calculus and Linear Algebra with Statistics and Differential Equations if possible thrown in for good measure because Peter Thiel said college degrees were worthless and he was even offering $100K to some lucky winners to prove his point. Admittedly, I would have probably taken that offer had I been 18 and then gone to college afterwards, but it seemed to deliver mixed results.

For the above math comes up again and again writing software. Pure math like real analysis, graduate level algebra, number theory and topology not so much. I'm guessing the rise of AI demonstrated the previous mindset against math was poppycock all along so now we've gone to the opposite extreme and made it a religion? I think people are bringing their own biases into that interpretation and you are right about which biases.

But, also, not my problem. My personal bias is that I recognize this problem as exactly the sort of thing that gets brought up as a gotcha interview question by people who couldn't come up with that exact solution themselves yet understand it just enough to use it to make an interviewee squirm.

Sci-fi authors get to do whatever sci-fi authors wants to do. If the author of this hit piece has a problem with that then maybe the author should be writing science fiction that exemplifies what is apparently now required of it according to his new rules.

Or maybe he should just go back to reading some Nevil Shute or some Walter M Miller if he thinks science fiction is so optimistic across the board.

Likely Qualcomm bales them out as they have offered to do so and eventually takes them over quietly by osmosis so no one notices until the deal is done.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/qualcomm-offers-to-rescue-a...

Not going to criticize you, I think it's a cool math problem, but I've experienced people throwing problems like this at me at job interviews in the past so it echoed. And in those cases, they weren't looking for an answer, they were looking for the answer they knew about and no other answer would do. I once ended an interview early over one of these questions.

I am relentlessly production focused but that doesn't mean I don't like math. But by the time you get to FP64 with this thing, the probability of finding a fail case seems insanely low and in fact for the most part you can provably bound the error of the sum and therefore likely prove you have found the solution. Anything beyond that is a corner case as the mathematicians love to say. And now I see the criticisms coming.

Which itself requires hours of listening to alternative influences in order to develop, no? The pressure to conform within 2 sigma is strong in almost any society IMO.

What people don't seem to grasp is that most of the supposed alternatives to mainstream are pretty mainstream too or we wouldn't have stores like Hot Topic in the first place.

Those models are surprisingly tractable. You're nowhere near as interesting and unique as you might think you are at scale.

Evidence: actual work experience at building latent representations to characterize customer behavior at FAANG. It's hard to come up with something that really gets you, but it's not hard to come up with something likely to make you spend more. You're surprisingly predictable on that axis and even if you aren't because you put the hours into being a crazy outlier, almost everyone else is, and you don't matter.

And I admitted it's a cool pure math problem. The challenge in the tech industry is balancing the rigor of a pure but nearly intractable solution with using the theory to pump up an O(n) imperfect solution to acceptable reliability. I find the latter more interesting, YMMV.

But if that isn't as interesting as the original problem, maybe stay in academia? AI itself is an example of tailoring activation and pooling functions to deliver imperfect solutions that are "good enough" to ship. It's unfortunate these two viewpoints are seen as contradictory rather than complementary, but that does echo our political balkanization so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

"red pilled" + "Glenn Greenwald" == bozo bit already. Add "Robert Malone" and we have the guy with a clever brainfart unwilling to do the gruntwork to ship that brainfart as a useful product so no, not changing my mind one bit.

Downvotes welcomed and expected snowflakes, I am truly aiming for zero karma here as an experiment and a commentary on Sam Altmann's hell site, so you're doing me a favor with your downvotes, have at me.

while I hate being part of a flash mob science experiment myself, and while I will not be surprised if there are long-term negative consequences to repeatedly vaccinating, I will be even more surprised if they are worse than the consequences of repeatedly catching variants of this horrible thing because we politicized masks and containment efforts. So I picked the least crappy option according to my doctorate in biochemistry. You do you. I'll do me.

Sure and there are a lot of simple ways to improve the accuracy of the simple approach before you go for the pure math sledgehammer here. It's all a question of how accurate the answer needs to be.

For example, It's pretty easy to come up with an FP64 error bound on the sum. And if the difference between the two sums is greater than that error bound you don't need to do anything more complicated. Where this would get complicated IMO is if you were dealing with 128-bit or higher integers.

Edit: I am learning so much about the mindset here and what triggers acute attacks of the heebie jeebies. This place has really changed in the past decade since I joined and not for the better. Yes good, good, more downvotes. Show your love with downvotes. I'm stuck at 2970 karma, only you can help me on the journey to zero. Can we beat -4? Let's find out.

This problem is a perfect example of better is the enemy of good enough. What's striking here is that the simple FP64 solution is for the most part more than good enough for any practical application you would find working in Tech. Anything beyond that is likely unnecessary gold plating.

If I were asked this on a job interview and they didn't accept that answer and started going on about me missing the pure math here that would be a great sign that such a place probably doesn't ship things very often. I would also bring up that no one can solve the traveling sales problem either but that approximately optimal solutions run the world of logistics on a daily basis.

Yet much like you can dedicate an entire supercomputer to calculating the energy of two hydrogen atoms to arbitrary precision, it's a really interesting problem with respect to the pure math. But come on, the guys most likely to bring this question up are relying on 16-bit floating point to train their neural networks.

Exponent.Mantissa.Boom. In practice, I know just about no one anymore who can tell me the format of 32-bit or 64-bit floating point because they're so used to abstracting that away.

In tech, engineers that aren't paying at least some attention to the compensation of their peers will not fare well IMO. No one wants you to undervalue yourself more than the org underpaying you to undervalue yourself. I'm for open compensation personally, but since we can't have that lest there be madness or something, make sure your grass is sufficiently watered to remain green.

Raising the ceiling on compensation for exceptional talent seems like good business strategy to me. This is a great time to understand technology as we become a science-hating culture completely addicted to science and technology to survive. Milk it for all it's worth no matter what your skill level. If your boss can afford to buy bottled farts from reality stars and Bored Ape NFTs they can afford to pay you more.

You say we can't wire up America, but what's your source? I'm not personally seeing a problem with a TVA-level engagement to bring high-speed Internet to as many people as possible. Starlink looks like it will be half the price, but Musk has gone on record saying this is for rural areas.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...

Further, I was getting 150 Mb a few months back, but now I'm down to 30 Mb. This isn't a polished product yet and it's in danger of losing federal funding.

https://broadbandbreakfast.com/2021/12/starlink-download-spe...