whalee

"No good choice" in the 2020 election was a universal and sane opinion to have. The 2024 election was the thinnest electoral margins in recent history. You don't know something everyone else doesn't, and these inflammatory comments are out of touch with reality.

We lack robust frameworks for 'forward engineering' stochastic thermodynamic computation over molecular free-energy landscapes (which is basically what a "chemical soup" is doing) like we do for analog/optical/digital computing. This is why, as a field, medicine is so heavily empirical and reverse engineering oriented.

I think counter to the assumption of myself (and many), for long form agent coding tasks, models are not as easily hot swappable as I thought.

I have developed decent intuition on what kinds of problems Codex, Claude, Cursor(& sub-variants), Composer etc. will or will not be able to do well across different axes of speed, correctness, architectural taste, ...

If I had to reflect on why I still don't use Gemini, it's because they were late to the party and I would now have to be intentional about spending time learning yet another set of intuitions about those models.

This was a common argument against LLMs, that the space of possible next tokens is so vast that eventually a long enough sequence will necessarily decay into nonsense, or at least that compounding error will have the same effect.

Problem is, that's not what we've observed to happen as these models get better. In reality there is some metaphysical coarse-grained substrate of physics/semantics/whatever[1] which these models can apparently construct for themselves in pursuit of ~whatever~ goal they're after.

The initially stated position, and your position: "trying to hallucinate an entire world is a dead-end", is a sort of maximally-pessimistic 'the universe is maximally-irreducible' claim.

The truth is much much more complicated.

[1] https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2512.03750

People could trivially switch their search engine to Bing or Yahoo, but they don't.

If ads are so overpriced, how big is your short position on google? Also ads are extremely inefficient in terms of conversion. Ads rendered by an intelligent, personalized system will be OOM more efficient, negating most of the "overvalue".

I'm not saying they should serve ads. It's a terrible strategy for other reasons.

Not at all. Vanishingly few things during the development process of a novel thing have truly objective measures. The world is far too complex. We all act and exist primarily in a probabilistic environment. A subjective evaluation is not so different than simply making a prediction about how something will turn out. If your predictions based on subjective measures turn out to be more correct than others, your subjectivity is objectively better.

Hence the author's main point: a good taste is one that fits with the needs of the project. If you can't align your own presuppositions with the actualities of the work you're doing then obviously your subjective measures going forward will not be very good.

I don't think the concern is whether a user can compile git from source on said platform, but rather whether the rust standard lib is well supported on said platform, which is required for cross compiling.

See this page [1], particularly the 'Tier 3' platforms.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/rustc/platform-support.html

> LLMs are a dead end in achieving "intelligence"

There is no evidence to indicate this is the case. To the contrary, all evidence we have points to these models, over time, being able to perform a wider range of tasks at a higher rate of success. Whether it's GPQA, ARC-AGI or tool usage.

> they are delegating to other approaches > Faking intelligence is not intelligence. It's just text generation.

It seems like you know something about what intelligence actually is that you're not sharing. If it walks, talks and quacks like a duck, I have to assume it's a duck[1]. Though, maybe it quacks a bit weird.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

This question becomes difficult whenever a system becomes sufficiently complex. Take any chaotic system, like a double pendulum, and press play at step 100,000. You ask 'what is it doing'? Well, it's just applying it's rule. Step to step.

Zoom out and look at it's trajectory over those 100,00 steps and ask again.

The answer is something alien. Probabilistically it is certain the description of its behavior is not going to exist in a space we as humans can understand. Maybe if we were god beings we could say 'No no, you see the behavior of the double pendulum isn't seemingly random, you just have to look at it like this'. Encryption is a decent analogy here.

We're fooled into thinking we can understand these systems because we forced them to speak English. Under the hood is a different story.

Cool idea!

I would note there are some known health hazards in handling thermal-paper receipts(BPA/BPS)[1] with your bare hands if you do so often. I don't know much beyond this, I would look into it.

[1] https://www.pca.state.mn.us/business-with-us/bpa-and-bps-in-...

imo it's a mistake to interpret the marginal increases in the upper echelons of benchmarks as materially marginal gains. Chess is an example. ELO narrows heavily at the top, but each ELO point carries more relative weight. This is a bit apples and oranges since chess is adversarial, but I think the point stands.

The complaint about his ego is warranted, but he also earned it. Wolfram earned his PhD in particle physics from cal tech at 21 years old. Feynman was on his thesis committee. He spent time at the IAS. When he speaks about something, no matter in which configuration he chooses to do so, I am highly inclined to listen.

I am deeply disturbed they decided to go off-device for these services to work. This is a terrible precedent, seemingly inconsistent with their previous philosophies and likely a pressured decision. I don't care if they put the word "private" in there or have an endless amount of "expert" audits. What a shame.

The near 8x increase in compute capacity since March 2023 is the eyebrow raiser for me. My belief is that the vast majority of speculative value in Tesla has almost nothing to do with their hardware and everything to do with the potential of FSD.

If you believe the hypothesis that Americans will pay a huge premium (directly or indirectly by subsidizing the poor build quality) to decrease the mental load by 85% on their twice-daily 35 minute commute, then the company is in good shape.

On top of this, their data moat is enormous and their pipeline is mature. Other car companies seeking this level of autonomous fidelity will need to either race to start harvesting as much data as possible, or make a bet that this quantity will be unnecessary with future models.

Then again, if you don't buy the value-add promise of FSD hypothesis then this company is faltering hard. Cybertruck is flopping in sales (with life-threatening build issues as a bonus), the company is facing deteriorating public perception, the tightening economy makes the 'premium'/'apple' presentation less appealing, serious competitors recently entered the EV market, on and on.

The main energy export of Texas is natural gas, which is responsible for a significant portion of the decrease in greenhouse emissions in the US[1]. Furthermore, Texas has led the nation for 17 years in production of wind energy, and accounts for 25% of US production[2].

If you are going to act joyful for the suffering of others, you should at minimum get your justifications correct.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48296 [2] https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=TX

The arms race between generators and detectors has just begun.

> Weight is an outcome that has many factors outside of diet

Thermodynamics disagrees with this assertion.

Building organs in microgravity, a potentially crucial ingredient to make the process work. From what I've seen this is the most realistic near future application.

"When you're 3D-printing a tissue culture on the ground, there's a tendency for them to collapse in the presence of gravity," he says. "The tissues require some sort of [temporary, organic] scaffold to hold everything in place, especially with cavities like the chambers of a heart. But you don't have those effects in a micro-gravity environment, which is why these experiments have been so valuable."[0]

Although I do think, taking human progression in the limit, moving to self sustaining manufacturing in space, using local raw materials (asteroids or otherwise), and dropping products back down to earth will be the natural progression. Space offers what earth does not -- infinite resources, infinite space(heh), infinite energy. Delete scarcity and what remains is purely a logistics problem.

Whether it'll be 50, 100 or 500 years, who knows?

[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210601-how-transplant-o...