d_burfoot

5 ms·

1.
by d_burfoot 20d ago
> they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed This actually seems completely doable for a properly configured LLM. There will probably be a platform in the future where companies can setup LLM to d
2.
by d_burfoot 22d ago
Partly this is because the big companies are diverting vast amounts of money towards building data centers, instead of hiring new grads. I expect young people who learn AI skills will be fine, once the data center spending binge is over.
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by d_burfoot 1mo ago
Author's bio: > Annie Sexton is a Developer Educator at ngrok with a passion for nerd-sniping developers.
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by d_burfoot 2mo ago
Tip for smart science-y young people: think about a career in experimental physics. Experimental data is the complement of theoretical power. Since theory can be provided cheaply by LLMs, experimental ability is now the bottleneck for progr
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by d_burfoot 2mo ago
> the more you spent building A.I. infrastructure, the more you would earn, or so the logic went. Computer theorists called it the scaling hypothesis. Good Gell-Mann Amnesia moment.
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by d_burfoot 2mo ago
Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and t
7.
by d_burfoot 3mo ago
A good puzzle for political philosophers: how do you build a decent system of government in a world where people to not listen to reasoned arguments?
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by d_burfoot 3mo ago
It is going to be a big problem for humanity when the superintelligent AIs start telling us that our political philosophies, to which everyone is deeply and emotionally attached, are total garbage. One obvious example is: we have a bizarre
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by d_burfoot 3mo ago
> What possible use could there be for doing this? The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert stu
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by d_burfoot 3mo ago
There's a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis of career advice that I wish PG took better notice of. If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact will diffuse quickly throughout society, causing the pa
11.
by d_burfoot 3mo ago
The people of the town decided they'd rather have $10M and $3M/year instead of some random extra parkland. That money is significant for a small, non-wealthy Texas town. Also, there is already a park right to the west of the res
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by d_burfoot 4mo ago
39T is just the outstanding value of all the Treasury instruments (T-bills, etc). The entitlement programs (SSA and Medicare) have made commitments to certain levels of service and payments that are far in excess of the revenues they bring
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by d_burfoot 4mo ago
> Firms in the broad Russell 3000 share index have a total market value of $79trn I sometimes try to get people to worry about the catastrophic state of American public finances by pointing out that the net national debt, including unfun
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by d_burfoot 4mo ago
It's a poignant piece, but I feel that HN should have some stories of soaring enthusiasm, optimism, and visions of a spectacular future, to counterbalance the doom and gloom.
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by d_burfoot 4mo ago
The buy/rent decision is quite complex for many reasons, but two overlooked factors are: 1) When a bank loans you $1e6 to buy a house, they are effectively deputizing you to act as a money manager: they allow you to make an investment
16.
by d_burfoot 4mo ago
Many commenters seem to be appealing to an almost religious defense of present political borders. That attitude is untenable: there is nothing sacred about national boundaries, they are mere political artifacts like rules, regulations, tax
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by d_burfoot 4mo ago
Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a blan
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by d_burfoot 4mo ago
I'll accept your first sentence for the sake of argument. You are still better off with a localist / federalist approach, because state governments are much less vulnerable to corruption and bribery. It is far more economically ef
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by d_burfoot 4mo ago
America cannot, as a country, discover a reasonable approach to managing health care costs because Americans do not have a sufficient core set of shared political values. The solution is to end regulation at the federal level, and allow the
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by d_burfoot 5mo ago
I'm not sure if this is the direction the OP is going, but I would love to see a world where local small-time investors can get a bank loan, rent a facility, set up a bunch of computers, and run open-source cloud software on them that
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by d_burfoot 5mo ago
Many Americans do not realize how much money the US government spends. When you include all three levels, it comes to $32K/person/year [0]. This is much higher than countries that are considered "social democracies" such
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by d_burfoot 6mo ago
> So just manual memory management with extra steps This is actually the perfect situation: you are allowed to do it carefully and manually for 1% of code on the hot path, but you don't have to worry about it for the 99% of the code
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by d_burfoot 6mo ago
I don't disagree with these principles, but if I wanted to compress all my programming wisdom into 5 rules, I wouldn't spend 3 out of the 5 slots on performance. Performance is just a component of correctness : if you have a good
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by d_burfoot 6mo ago
Gah, don't take advice about doing a PhD from the dude who had the best possible academic experience! The vast majority of people who've gone through the PhD grinder have had radically worse outcomes than Karpathy. It's like
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by d_burfoot 6mo ago
The business plan makes sense to me. They are a company that is focussed specifically on building AI data centers, which is a huge part of the economy at the moment. The big cloud players know about generic data centers, but there are likel
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by d_burfoot 7mo ago
Interesting historical anecdote: the Swiss became the world's best watchmakers because, in Protestant Geneva under the leadership of John Calvin, jewelry was banned as ostentation. But you were allowed to wear a watch - it was importan
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by d_burfoot 7mo ago
It's a bad idea to phrase advice as "Don't Do X", for most values of X that are often undertaken: - Don't move to Detroit - Don't go into academia - Don't use dating apps - Don't buy Google stock It&#
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by d_burfoot 7mo ago
These kinds of stories may seem silly to some (certainly it would seem silly to my past self), but I think these narratives of personal journeys are going to become more and more important to humanity as AI and automation take over most job
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by d_burfoot 7mo ago
> they mimic and amplify the inherent racism present in their own training data LLMs turn out to be biased against white men: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/me7wFrkEtMbkzXGJt/race-and-g... > When present, t
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by d_burfoot 8mo ago
I mean this seriously: we need more cults. Cults have been viciously slandered by mainstream information sources, often because lurid cult stories generate clicks and headlines. Of course some cults are abusive, just like some marriages a

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