jebarker

8 ms·

1.
by jebarker 7d ago
That triggered a physical response of tightening in my stomach and heavier breathing due to frustration.
2.
by jebarker 8d ago
I noticed you edited your original post to point out these “silly” objections. The point of saying “private individuals” is that they have the right to determine for themselves what is a good use of their money and your opinion about whethe
3.
by jebarker 8d ago
You seem to be suggesting that there's a problem with private individuals spending their money as they see fit because that leads to what you see as wasteful vanity projects. So I'm asking how you think the world should change to
4.
by jebarker 8d ago
OK - what is the mechanism by which you believe this private individual’s $1.075M should be turned into a public internet cafe?
5.
by jebarker 8d ago
What is the mechanism by which you imagine that this private individuals $75K becomes a public internet cafe?
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by jebarker 8d ago
> That's... that's all it's ever meant? Per the dictionary, perhaps. But when people use it online they rarely mean it as a neutral statement about someone’s level of wealth. It’s typically meant to imply unfairness or tha
7.
by jebarker 8d ago
> and is being wasted Why is this use of their money a waste?
8.
by jebarker 11d ago
> Note that this proof while impressive does not add any value to mathematics as a human pursuit. I don't see how this can be stated with such certainty. We don't yet know what the implications of large scale autoformalization
9.
by jebarker 15d ago
Interesting that Fable produced the Venus elevation map by training a neural net to generate it. I wonder what the prompting looked like to make that happen, I.e. was this a spontaneous discovery or the result of a specific request.
10.
by jebarker 22d ago
I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of developers the author describes. I use AI daily for limited code writing and lots of debugging. I agree with the author that things go off the rails when you stop truly reviewing its output
11.
by jebarker 24d ago
> Blood Meridian is one of my favorite novels I cannot fathom how people enjoy that book. I appreciate the writing (and love other CM books) but Blood Meridian felt like a gratuitous ordeal to me. I tried watching lit professors lecture
12.
by jebarker 24d ago
I love reading, do it a lot of and per my Goodreads I’m “well read”. I’m less convinced how much I’ve learned from all the reading that would make me a better writer though. I definitely fell into the trap of wanting to have written a book
13.
by jebarker 1mo ago
What about the fact that due to modern medicine many people now live twice as long and therefore need to stave off the effects of aging, e.g. loss of muscle mass and stability, to have a good quality of life in those bonus years?
14.
by jebarker 1mo ago
Not if you want to run a marathon.
15.
by jebarker 1mo ago
> LLMs suggest that human-like "cognition" can be somewhat mimicked by purely mechanical means. This is not a strike against that hypothesis. Quantum systems can be simulated using non-quantum computers but that doesn't ma
16.
by jebarker 1mo ago
It is, yeah. The condition of the subsidy is that up to 60 times a year the electricity company can pull the power from our batteries to cover higher demand. When I said "at a societal level" I was more imagining solar farms and g
17.
by jebarker 1mo ago
Yep. Here in Colorado I installed two powerwalls moderately subsidized by the electricity company. It’s not going to save me meaningful amounts of money even in the long term and I would much rather see energy issues solved at a societal le
18.
by jebarker 1mo ago
Hence you can’t take the starting conditions from thousands of years ago and assume they will evolve in the same way now
19.
by jebarker 1mo ago
This is not convincing. Many of these are debatable when you actually pull apart what is meant then and now. But there’s also a long list of things that are different about the Roman Empire and US (and the world) today.
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by jebarker 1mo ago
> Eras like this one can be what kills an empire/great power. Is there actually any good analogue for this era that caused a previous empire or great power to collapse?
21.
by jebarker 1mo ago
What makes you feel like that? Is it AI specifically?
22.
by jebarker 1mo ago
As you say, that's just an efficiency play and, as I understand it, doesn't change the behavior of the models beyond perhaps a small amount of sampling noise.
23.
by jebarker 1mo ago
I agree completely - behaviorally the models have changed drastically due to RLHF, RLVR and now maybe even more so due to agentic harnesses. But the mechanism of prediction hasn’t changed, that was all I was clarifying.
24.
by jebarker 1mo ago
Just for the sake of clarity: all LLMs up to today are still only doing next-token/autocomplete. The training process got additional stages to shape the model weights, but standalone LLMs are still deployed essentially identically.
25.
by jebarker 1mo ago
A fascinating thing about the LLM/AI blogosphere and X is watching memetics in real time. An idea like this one propagates on the order of days until everyone that speaks publicly or in workplace meetings about AI is repeating it.
26.
by jebarker 2mo ago
On purely aesthetic grounds I'll take this over another substack-like site any day of the week.
27.
by jebarker 2mo ago
I second this and would add that it's really easy to catastrophically forget things in math. I'm pretty sure that most CS knowledge I have I will retain at a level where I won't forget the general ideas and re-reading materia
28.
by jebarker 2mo ago
> Do things you are bad at I think this should be coupled with: know when to quit. I've persisted with some things I'm bad at out of stubbornness but have never improved and it's just burned me out.
29.
by jebarker 2mo ago
Indeed. To get "aesthetic" play you would have to mimic real human play for an interesting reason: the space of possible Go configurations and games is so mind-bogglingly vast that all of human history has only ever seen a infinit
30.
by jebarker 2mo ago
This is the wrong way to think about mathematical (or any other kind of) creativity in my opinion. In the extremely high-dimensional space of "ideas" (whatever that means) there are almost certainly profound ideas that are the int

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