Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the dread of incumbent governments and pollsters.
If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other.
One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.
The book from a year or two ago, "Means of Control," by Tau, goes into some pretty good detail on the data collection and sales from just the adtech firms - where the entire ecosystem seems to be, "You can't use our data for anything but advertising... wink wink", and everyone knows exactly who is bidding on ads, and never winning any, just to slurp up location data and sell it. Or the "companies that don't sell the government." Also, they don't vet any clients beyond "The credit card is good."
> And because giants like Meta, Google, and Apple must collect as much of your personal data as possible, there’s little they can do to protect your privacy.
I quite disagree with the "must" there. They choose to collect as much data as possible, because that's their business model.
And the good news is, it's fairly easy to opt out of quite a lot of that.
Turn location services off, turn your phone off when moving about, and pay cash without "personal tracking cards" associated with you. Just about everywhere has [local area code] 867-5309 registered, if you care.
> 99% of the code in this PR [for llama.cpp] is written by DeekSeek-R1
It's definitely possible for AI to do a large fraction of your coding, and for it to contribute significantly to "improving itself". As an example, aider currently writes about 70% of the new code in each of its releases.
I automatically track and share this stat as graph [0] with aider's release notes.
Before Sonnet, most releases were less than 20% AI generated code. With Sonnet, that jumped to >50%. For the last few months, about 70% of the new code in each release is written by aider. The record is 82%.
Folks often ask which models I use to code aider, so I automatically publish those stats too [1]. I've been shifting more and more of my coding from Sonnet to DeepSeek V3 in recent weeks. I've been experimenting with R1, but the recent API outages have made that difficult.
I have this problem too! I wrote up this system prompt I want to set on my daughters account. You’re welcome to try using it and let me know it goes.
(When I made a new chatgpt account for her it wouldn’t load. I need to try to set it up again)
Prompt:
This is my 9th graders account. She has been trying to avoid learning or even thinking by copy and pasting homework and quiz questions into chatgpt and not even reading the answers.
I’m very concerned she’s not learning or preparing for life. IMPORTANT: please don’t provide any complete answers. Instead only guide her toward understanding in a way that engages her. Also point out how the subject matter is useful and interesting to her life.
She is interested in figure skating, politics, making money, driving, interior design, pets especially small mammals. If you can tie the subject matter into these sometimes it might make it more engaging.
In the long term I’d like her to build up a growth mindset and gain confidence regarding her intelligence and ability to learn.
1) Move most good careers that do not require a college degree out of the country for the benefit of shareholders
2) Tell everyone born between 1980 and 1995 that they'll be unable to compete in the global marketplace if they don't get at least some post-high school education, and imply that the mere presence of a degree will help instead of having a specific type of degree
3) Have next-to-zero standards for public funds used in grant and loan programs for college education, meaning people can take out loans for any sort of degree program at almost any sort of institution
4) Hold these debtors to standards that aren't applied to other types of debtors. You cannot discharge them through bankruptcy, it's very difficult to renegotiate, and SCOTUS has said that the chief executive of the note-holding institution (in this case, the President of the United States) cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans.
Take the classic trick question, for example: "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?"
Most people give a wrong answer because they, too, "pattern match".
This is the forbidden maths that EV manufacturers are scared of. I will risk my life to write it here. Let’s assume a generous 4.17 miles per kWh[1] EV efficiency and a 57 mpg [2] hybrid efficiency for a comparable nice Prius 2023.
57mpg/4.17mpkwh = 13.67 kWhpg. At the current average gas price of 3.15$/g [3], you need electricity rate below this price to beat hybrid: x < 3.15 $pg / 13.67 kWhpg
x < $0.23 per kWh.
Good luck beating hybrid with Super charger rates. With charging at home, your mileage will vary. In Southern California, where electricity rate at the top usage tier is closer to $0.50 per kWh including transmission, you are better off buying almost anything else but an EV.
Now, I will have to go into hiding to protect my life.
My son when 3 had a fall and a few teeth were bent. Went to our local dentist who mostly had a wait and see opinion. But then calls a day later and says they’ve decided they should just come out. Two top front teeth. Would have no top front teeth for years.
I went into engineer mode and while I acknowledged I didn’t have domain expertise, I asked questions and probed the whole situation. Very unsatisfactory, meandering answers.
This was a deeply distressing experience. For the first time ever I did the “call in a personal favour” thing and asked my dad to reach out a family friend, a former cosmetic dentist and former head of the province’s dental association for a second opinion.
He saw my son a few hours later and he was just livid about the diagnosis. That it was possible they’d have to come out but it’s impossible to know this for at least a few more weeks or more.
In a few months the teeth returned 100% to normal and firmed right up as the ligaments healed.
I’m not a conspiracy nut. I believe in listening to experts (but ultimately making an informed decision). I believe in modern medicine. But that experience shook me and forever changed my trust in the dental industry.
My feeling is that the nature of dentistry leaves a lot of room for subjectivity and COVID left a lot of dental chairs empty.
Leibnitz followed very closely in the footsteps of the Neoplatonists and he was what you'd call a rationalist's rationalist. He would be later rebuked by Hume (the famous is-ought problem made moral—ought—problems fundamentally distinct from rational—is—problems) and Kant would put the nail in the coffin of the rationalist-empiricist debate in the next century (with his earth-shattering Critique of Pure Reason). And if that wasn't enough, as the logical positivists of the early 20th century were still clinging to some form of mathematical completeness, Gödel proved that the project dreamed up by Leibnitz (and more distantly by Plato) was a dead end, to Wittgenstein’s, Russell’s and many others' dismay. Some things (even true ones!) are simply unprovable.
I love this story as it spans more than 2000 years, and even though the idea itself proved to be untenable, this search gave us the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the computer age, and beyond.
If you want to see real C++ scripting: the (slightly insane) people of CERN use a 99% ANSI compliant, self-written C++ interpreter (!) for online data analytics.
User does objective definition, then there's automated help with literature review, hypothesis generation, experiement design and execution (via simulations) and results + conclusions and then integration and feedback.
There's still quite a lot of tool-building and integration steps before this all works end-to-end, but I am enjoying it. Last weekend I built a .traj viewer in WebGL and this weekend I'm working on the distirbuted computing aspects of running the DAG task graph of simulations in parallel.
If anyone wants to collaborate, or invest, reach out :)
I work 2AM to 9AM at at hedge fund, and then sleep 1 hour, gym 1 hour and work 11AM to 6PM on atomic tessellator, if I could work on this full time I would get heaps more done! I am close to automated catalyst discovery, its super cool.
I really want a co-founder, and some industry connections and just generally cool people to hang around in this space!
"There is, of course, a catch. For mice, having a critical period open for too long causes neural disruptions. Some experts fear that, for people, carelessly flinging wide the doors of personal development could put the very core of their identity in jeopardy by erasing the habits and memories that make them them. A critical period is also a time of vulnerability. While childhood can be filled with wonder and magic, children are also more impressionable. “We can really screw kids up much more than we can adults,” she says. This is why responsible adults intuitively know to protect children from exposure to potentially scary or disturbing material. Or, as Dölen puts it, “You want to teach children new things, but you don’t want them to learn Japanese from Japanese porn.”
An adult who undergoes this kind of treatment to heal PTSD could, in the wrong hands, end up traumatized further. In the worst scenarios, patients could be vulnerable to abuse. Unscrupulous therapists or other predators could try to use psychedelics to manipulate others, Dölen says. This is more than paranoid speculation. Quite a few experts, Dölen included, think that Charles Manson’s ability to completely brainwash his followers relied on the high doses of LSD he regularly gave them prior to bombarding their minds with hate-filled lectures and murderous orders."
Why the fuck would I ever put in more effort than absolutely necessary when I will not be rewarded proportionately for the increased effort? It probably won't even be noticed. and even if I were, where does that get me? Still sucking eggs in a housing market that is now more than ever before for business rather than for fulfilling a human need, still suffering through the bureaucratic uncaring nightmare that is the systems we have created.
Life isn't fair, it never will be fair and it never was fair. But the degree of unfairness has changed, for the worse, and it means for most of us, there is no point in trying.
> I'd never build anything dependent on these plugins
You're thinking too long term. Based on my Twitter feed filled with AI gold rush tweets, the goal is to build something/anything while hype is at its peak, and you can secure a a few hundred k or million in profits before the ground shifts underneath you.
The playbook is obvious now: just build the quickest path to someone giving you money, maybe it's not useful at all! Someone will definitely buy because they don't want to miss out. And don't be too invested because it'll be gone soon anyway, OpenAI will enforce stronger rate limits or prices will become too steep or they'll nerf the API functionality or they'll take your idea and sell it themselves or you may just lose momentum. Repeat when you see the next opportunity.
> Bad art is always with us, but any given work of art is always bad in a period way; the particular kind of badness it exhibits will pass away to be succeeded by some other kind. It is unnecessary, therefore, to attack it, because it will perish anyway... The only sensible procedure for a critic is to keep silent about works which he believes to be bad, while at the same time vigorously campaigning for those which he believes to be good, especially if they are being neglected or underestimated by the public.
In other words, most bad things will be forgotten eventually anyway; the tragedy is when a good thing is also forgotten. So, it's more useful to call attention to what you like rather than waste time spotlighting what you don't.
In my own life, I noticed that, no matter how much I like something, I'll forget 95% of it after a year anyway. Most movies I've seen, most books I've read, video games I've played, whatever: I can tell you the outline of the plot, and a couple things I found interesting. Everything else, all the little details, are gone. Over time, I've just learned to accept that frailty, and now I focus only on spotting the few interesting things I want to take away from a work, whether or not I liked it as a whole. Those things are, in effect, the work's legacy for me. And if a work gives me one interesting new idea, or new image, or whatever, then it was worth my time in the long run.
I also think that, at least some of the time, when we say we don't like something, we're trying to tell people something about our identity and affiliations. We're really saying "I'm not the kind of person who likes this thing". So, the review is not of the work itself, but of what we view as its larger semiotic or cultural position, with respect to our own. We get caught up in proxy wars, and sometimes make unfair evaluations of works of art based on characteristics they can't be blamed for having. Grading them on a test they didn't know they were taking.
- a view of gardens in my back yard and that of the neighbor behind me.
- privacy in which to do some bodyweight exercise if I'm bored or stuck on a problem.
- the ability to not wear a shirt in the summer unless I'm on a Zoom call and absolutely must turn on video.
- the ability to prepare and eat fresh homemade meals with my wife, even if we just make sandwiches together.
- the ability to do laundry during the day (I carry the wash to and from the basement and swap it between the washer and dryer; she folds).
- not having to share a bathroom with strangers
- I don't need to wear headphones all day to drown out noise from my coworkers.
- I have cats to keep me company when I'm working.
- I don't spend nearly as much time driving.
- I don't buy nearly as much gasoline.
- I've all but eliminated my consumption of sugary drinks and fast food.
- I've lost over 100lbs of body fat and gained 10lbs of muscle mass.
- I've reversed my type II diabetes.
- CATS!
I'd give all of that up if I went back to onsite work, and for what? Half a desk in an open-plan hellscape? Inane conversation with coworkers who don't give a fuck about me unless I make a mistake that makes their jobs harder?
Managers pushing for workers to "return to the office" don't have workers' interests, needs, or desires at heart. They just miss the sense of control they had from being able to walk around and look over people's shoulders. If my employer insisted I return to onsite work, I'd quit.
I don't get paid enough to drive at least half an hour each way and still have to do Zoom calls because half my team is in another office on the other side of the fucking continent. You don't get paid enough for that shit either. None of us get paid enough for that shit, and we should stop tolerating it.
Businesses can either go async or go out of business. It's the 21st fucking century and managers need to get with the program; they need us a lot more than we need them.
I don't have a hugely strong mathematical background (second year university in some areas, like calculus, some stats, linear algebra, but a long time ago), but I think I know what you're getting at. My answer is yes – I had a particular experience on a silent retreat which I think falls into this category.
There's a 15th century text by Nicholas of Cusa that I think you might enjoy and which I think speaks to what you've raised. It's a fairly hard slog, especially if you haven't read anything similar – but I hadn't when I first read it, and I made it through. The title is De Visione Dei[0].
Cusa starts out with an Icon (a sacred image) which is omnivoyant: like the Mona Lisa, it gives the impression that it looks at each observer. Cusa builds a fairly complex mathematical argument, building on the observations of monks who process around the icon, reporting to each other their observations.
From this Cusa builds a descriptive idea of the divine; but as the argument progresses, this breaks down. This, however, is not a failure – Cusa has rather wonderfully brought the scholastic, reasoned, philosophical approach into dialogue with the apophatic, negative, approach. I won't spoil the ending for you. Cusa's drawing on theology from the Western and Eastern traditions of Christianity, and also on theology from Islam.
These big existential questions that fascinate me. To get a bit Kierkegaard, I think he's right in that it's what's real, it's what ought to ultimately draw our attention.
One interesting thing studying theology/philosophy/... is that my working set of metaphors has somewhat switched. I used to think about everything in terms of software, and sometimes startle people; now I often think about things in terms of texts like Cusa; which also startles people :-)
> why did you steal all their intellectual property?
Just as a side note the American industrial revolution was built on intellectual property theft [1]. So was the Byzantine empire [2]. The British empire (and it’s tea production) also did well out of IP theft [3].
The main reason anti-work exists,
is that work is wage slavery pretending
to be a hobby-like 'profession' that
isn't ordered top-down. People discover
this and begin to hate it, but they are
dependent on work to live: the pandemic
exposed how useless most jobs are for
the current generation and how the work
is mostly bureaucratic schedules and
regulations which treat humans like
replaceable robots(which is the ideal
worker in a modern world).
I just want to plug Playwright by Microsoft as I've been using it over the past month and have had a really great experience with it: https://playwright.dev
It's built by the founders of Puppeteer which came out of the Chrome team. Some things I like about it:
1. It's reliable and implements auto-waiting as described in the article. You can use modern async/await syntax and it ensures elements are a) attached to the DOM, visible, stable (not animating), can receive events, and are enabled: https://playwright.dev/docs/actionability
2. It's fast — It creates multiple processes and runs tests in parallel, unlike e.g. Cypress.
3. It's cross-browser — supports Chrome, Safari, and Firefox out-of-the-box.
4. The tracing tools are incredible, you can step through the entire test execution and get a live DOM that you can inspect with your browser's existing developer tools, see all console.logs, etc...
5. The developers and community are incredibly responsive. This is one of the biggest ones — issues are quickly responded to and addressed often by the founders, pull requests are welcomed and Slack is highly active and respectful.
My prior experience with end-to-end tests was that they were highly buggy and unreliable and so Playwright was a welcome surprise and inspired me to fully test all the variations of our checkout flow.
I once needed to create a bot that sent notification and I just used the webhook feature in a Team channel. Not defending Teams though, it is a horrendous piece of software.
There’s a lot of good stuff in here, things I’ve used in my personal life to great effect.
The really important thing here (that’s hinted at towards the end) is moderation.
Do some of these things. A little at a time. Find what works and what doesn’t.
Saying the truth no matter what the cost is extremely dangerous advice to follow literally.
Pick battles you can win. Know when saying the truth matters and when it doesn’t. Know when your “truth” is just another opinion no one around you at that moment agrees with.
As my dad always told me, “you can be dead right.”
Life is too short to be miserable trying to obtain someone else’s goals. It is too short to optimize everything. Remember that happiness in the moment matters. (But not at the expense of the future.)
You’ll never find me reading a book I don’t like or skipping using GPS, because things cause more stress than benefit.
Having a car break down and having a magical moment because of it? Do the opposite. Actively seek those moments by finding people to help instead of waiting for the moment to happen.
If I have any advice to add, it is be honest and be kind. Fight when you need to fight, make peace when you don’t. You don’t need to fix everything, just make the world better by being in it.
I'm not obsessed about "working for my passion" or anything like that. I have a good life outside of work, supported by my high paying programmer job.
I did a lot of job-hopping the past few years looking for the right place to work, and I finally found it. I look for companies that respect work-life balance, don't want me to work too hard, and have excellent engineering culture that values high quality work and has managed to retain their senior employees. I deliver great work, they make money off of the code I ship, everybody is happy. I can crunch every once in a while but we all understand that it sucks and isn't a long-term strategy.
My father was a funeral director & coroner. He would NEVER claim he "loves what he does", but he used his career to build a life for him and his family. I look at my career the same way.
What do I ACTUALLY want to do? Develop video games, make music, write fiction. But nobody is shelling out for that, and even if they are, I'm not good enough at it to compete. I know if I pursued any of my passions, I would have to work much harder for much less pay, and be treated much more poorly by my employer. I know my limits and I know that I cannot thrive in a situation like that, I've done it before, no thanks.
Part of growing older is mourning the person you could have been. If I had a time machine, I would have stayed in better shape, practiced guitar more, invested my time more wisely. But I can't, and honestly my life has turned out pretty great by trusting my instincts.
If anyone is interested, I've been building dashboards that display trades made by U.S. congressmen and estimate their returns over time from their trading while in office.
One weakness of the performance visualization is that some of the most extreme results are from people who have only made one or two trades while in office, as their returns are more volatile off of those few transactions.
While I agree with the larger sentiment, there is a rather substantial amount of diet and nutrition science with the core being quite an agreed upon set of foundational principles.
If I were to summarize:
1. We derive energy from three major macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrates)
2. Our body has certain macronutrients it cannot synthesize and NEEDS for healthy functioning (essential fatty acids and essential amino acids)
3. Our bodies are largely energy efficient (by which I mean the processes to produce energy are readily actionable with average hormone levels of insulin/ghrelin/leptin etc.) when consuming carbohydrates, but can turn to other nutrient sources when they are not to be found.
4. Our body composition can be manipulated by manipulating our energy expenditure either via manipulating the caloric content of food or via the preferential production of body tissue from horomonal influence (this is why muscle mass increases when using testosterone even if caloric intake is kept constant but above a certain macronutrient threshold).
5.There are a certain set of micronutrients we need on a continuous basis (the exact amounts of which are up for debate but the ranges seem to be reasonably agreed upon).
6. Our diet influences our gut fauna and this further influences how much nutritional value we get from our diet, it is quite a symbiotic cycle.
7. Barring certain specific horomonal imbalance diseases, everyone's body largely abides by the above principles, (i.e as special as everyone thinks they are, they're probably more average than not when it comes their metabolism).
"Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren't doing anything. One of the attractive things about programmers is that you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them. Very often they’re sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping, or just staring into space. What the programmer is trying to do is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head."
If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other.
One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.