marsten

5 ms·

1.
by marsten 5d ago
Math is likely moving into a big science era, much like experimental particle physics and astronomy did before it. Once AI mines the easy unsolved problems, it will take large token budgets to make meaningful advances. That will need to be
2.
by marsten 8d ago
> The AI was able to race its car very well, but it took a lot of risks that a human player probably would not. There is a parallel with autonomous vehicles in real life. On northbound 1 in SF going through GG Park, the left turn lane on
3.
by marsten 8d ago
This is the direction of experimental particle physics and observational astronomy, where the budgetary scale at which progress occurs means we now fund these efforts at a societal level. These fields have graduated beyond "tabletop sc
4.
by marsten 17d ago
What is extremely valuable in slime mold organizations is clear direction from above on the relative importance of different objectives. This doesn't have to be very specific - senior people often aren't in a position to decide on
5.
by marsten 1mo ago
I think most people see AI as an economic inevitability, immune to what any of us thinks. Why spend the time and energy making a reasoned critique if nobody has a real choice in the end? It's like railing against the concept of money o
6.
by marsten 1mo ago
Alas I suspect that no combination of business and technical decisions could have allowed Commodore to succeed long term. They never had the scale or product market fit to succeed in the 32 bit era. Apple barely made it.
7.
by marsten 1mo ago
I too learned C on an Amiga 1000. Somehow I scrounged together $300 to buy the Lattice C compiler and all its manuals – a steep price in 1985-86. Funny to think that much better tools are now free.
8.
by marsten 4mo ago
A lot of people believe in Musk and will invest in anything he wants to do. Is this rational? It depends on how it plays out. I think we may be seeing a new type of capitalism that maybe Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet hinted at: A business em
9.
by marsten 4mo ago
Second-highest P/E is Tesla, currently at 97. Apart from Palantir and Tesla, the other big companies are trading at what would historically be considered reasonable P/Es given their growth rates and profitability. What's real
10.
by marsten 4mo ago
Japan is a classic example. You can drop your wallet there and someone will send it to you with all the cash intact. It makes you realize how much overhead it causes when you need to guard against cheaters and thieves.
11.
by marsten 4mo ago
I was an undergrad at Caltech in the late 80s and likewise it never even occurred to us to cheat on take-home exams. Maybe things have changed. People did plenty of collaboration on homework sets. Some of the harder ones were almost impossi
12.
by marsten 4mo ago
Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly. I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase my friend&
13.
by marsten 4mo ago
This is exactly right. Gone are the days when you could get a C+ average at Harvard and still land a good job or a spot in a prestigious law program – purely by virtue of having gone to Harvard. Everyone is in competition now. Everyone has
14.
by marsten 4mo ago
If you posit that Altman suffers from main character syndrome (as many CEOs do), then he likely believes that he alone can lead OpenAI to success. In this case, doing whatever it takes to get himself back into the job is by definition justi
15.
by marsten 4mo ago
CEOs are hired to run companies and make themselves, and their investors, wealthy. That is their prime directive and CEOs are the ultimate partisans. If a CEO feels that bending the truth, or outright lying, will advance the prime directive
16.
by marsten 4mo ago
> You cannot be sure that anyone other than yourself is conscious. It is only basic human empathy that allows people to believe that. In Bayesian terms what makes it reasonable to ascribe consciousness to other people is that (a) other p
17.
by marsten 5mo ago
Bitcoin attempted to replace cash, but failed because the transaction costs are orders of magnitude too high. The high cost of zero-trust makes it a desirable medium of exchange only for criminals and scammers. In an effort to make Bitcoin
18.
by marsten 5mo ago
I can see Apple's position: The Mac has been through four major ISAs and the value to most users of maintaining that entire stack indefinitely in the current macOS is nil. A number of digital preservation standards are emerging (Wasm,
19.
by marsten 5mo ago
More likely they would buy the assets of AI companies for pennies on the dollar. There could be a lot of H100s floating around at fire sale prices. Or they would acquire these companies for talent. Google did this for several years in the e
20.
by marsten 5mo ago
Unless they change their tack, Apple is unlikely to go head to head against Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace because they only target their own ecosystem (macOS/iOS). For MS and Google these Apple-owned platforms are not their primary
21.
by marsten 5mo ago
In fairness to all concerned, the MacOS to MacOS X transition was brilliantly executed. These days we take VMs for granted, but back then it was a novel idea to run MacOS 8 as a process inside of MacOS X (the "blue box"). For most
22.
by marsten 6mo ago
In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
23.
by marsten 6mo ago
Agents playing the iterated prisoner's dilemma learn to cooperate. It's usually not a dominant strategy to be entirely sociopathic when other players are involved.
24.
by marsten 6mo ago
What hit me when I read Rama in the 1980s is how alien it all was. This is not Star Trek where the aliens speak English and look human-ish. There's a lesson there for AI I think. We anthropomorphize AI in the media but perhaps the more
25.
by marsten 7mo ago
IMHO the EU is the best place to live if you're a rank-and-file worker, and the US is the best place to live if you're ambitious. EU integration brings some advantages but it also becomes harder to experiment. Ideally you'd h
26.
by marsten 7mo ago
Well said. Another factor that nobody in the EU likes to talk about is regulations like worker protections that make it hard to do layoffs. Such regulations are popular but they strongly favor large predictable companies over startups. No e
27.
by marsten 7mo ago
Yes, and housing is priced by competitive auction so if you drop out of the rat race and other people don't, you'll just get out-bid.
28.
by marsten 7mo ago
As we approach this pole running off to infinity, what bit of reality will intervene? An infinity in a model indicates you're missing some aspect of saturation or friction that will act to slow things down. Every exponential eventually
29.
by marsten 1y ago
Yes but the thing is, most people don't actually want realistic movement. They want to be Neo in The Matrix, not some average schlub that gets easily winded and jumps six inches high. Lex Fridman's interview with Todd Howard goes
30.
by marsten 1y ago
> Intel is strategically important. Fab capability on US soil is strategically important. Intel is one of many possible routes to that.

More ›