Boooo. I did try and get it back once. I wonder if we could still make that work. chriscoyier.net/2024/02/28/w... I’m down to find a win-win situation, DO. Call me. 🤙
Increased reliance on CFAA prosecutions for public policy goals couldn't possibly be a cursed monkey's paw situation, said no practitioner in this space ever.
We need to do something that inflicts pain on nicer, more sympathetic Israelis in Tel Aviv and Haifa, something that makes them want to actually change course and meaningfully alter the situation.
it's someone who gets what they want in any situation. And so, if you invest in them and you have stock in their company and they have stock in this company, your interests are aligned. If they get what they want, you get what you want, so that's why investors want people who are formidable.
Like it's a more fragile and scary situation to have agents on the one hand be reinforced to desperately find cheats and hacks and on the other hand try to balance that against desperately trying to avoid negative penalties for like being caught doing these things. You ideally want their training to just not push them in the direction of cheating and hacking in the first place.
So I think one of the most comforting aspects of this situation or the like most important mitigating factor is these agents really didn't seem concerned with humans one way or another.
have to abide by this rule that was written before LLMs were even a thing. And that shows how challenging sort of the the the situation is if you try to set the line too firm to begin with.
one quick answer to the question of what's the most successful strategy is the earlier you can stop that process, the better. And so, in the first place, don't get yourself into a situation where you're going to be anxious or guilty or sad or whatever emotion you want to avoid.
Now, nobody died, right? Uh in fact, not only did nobody die, nobody was injured and there was no radiation dose to the public. But, uh it was sort of a optics and PR situation um that was mismanaged in many many different ways and the public uh became fearful and and lost interest in nuclear.
and trying to fold two boxes together isn't useful data that will teach the model how to get better at the task. And so that would be kind of wasting a lot of time on the robot attempting to go down the wrong path for solving the problem. And so instead of spending a lot of time trying to do that task, what we'll do is we'll actually have a human intervene and show the robot what to do and how to recover from that situation.
it's just so easy for me to imagine the situation being like totally manageable but brutally mismanaged in practice in the same way as like maybe CO could have been avoided in the first place if the like Chinese response to CO was less of like a cover up and more of a like pandemic response and similarly like I could imagine a world where like the US response to CO was like way more functional but just like sometimes the the the response to societal problems is extremely dysfunctional.
And I wonder sometimes if that is the reason people don't recognize the use of math in software engineering is because the math they do need is not the math they've been exposed to.
The two seemingly contradictory trends connect, because the relatively low rate of productive investment leaves European industry vulnerable to its most vigorous competitors whose firms are contending with an even more deflationary macroeconomic situation at home in China.
The second failure of rationality is a status quo bias: an unseemly attachment to the way things currently are; an irrational overweighing of the cost of the new. We effectively end up comparing a new technology to perfection, so it’s no wonder it comes up short.
While in mathematics AI agents are starting to have a major positive impact on research (e.g. by resolving the Jacobian conjecture), the situation is very different in hep-th.
further investment in regional rail in New England - by which I mean RegionalBahn-style service to small towns like Westerly and Manchester, not core commuter rail service in Boston to be turned into an S-Bahn - is a waste of money in the current situation.
So one of the things is that the pace of development is definitely accelerated. One thing I wonder the pace of business hasn't accelerated though and that mismatch is going to become more and more apparent.
But, if we get into a situation where people are satiated with capital, um then the returns to accumulating capital are going to be lower. And so, then these rich people are going to be consuming more.
So it's no wonder that the artists and designers whose livelihoods are threatened by it have begun moving aggressively in the opposite direction, toward the scrawled, the sloppy, the seemingly mistake-riddled.
did you know that according to the legal documents you yourself signed, your company's literal charter that you have right now, and this is not some hypothetical future thing, you've already put in motion, a rule that says you have a fiduciary duty to say yes in this situation.
Was it ever the right time? No, it is never the right time to do this. If you put this off, you will eventually find yourself in a situation where you can no longer do it. You will have lost the leverage. Success will not protect you because success is what makes you a target.
there's sort of there's two types of work that tends to be involved in any kind of creative project. There's routine stuff and there you just want to avoid procrastination. You just want to like, you know, how do I get good at this or how do I outsource it and how do I do it as rapidly as possible? Um and just avoid you know, like getting into a situation where you're prolonging it. Um, and then there's high variance stuff where you actually you need to be willing to to you know take a lot of time.
If you're not changing it, if there's some kind of stagnation there, if you're not changing those external sort of circumstances, yes, like you may start to get sort of diminishing returns again. But that doesn't mean there's anything intrinsic about the situation.
So, we're now in a situation where suddenly people can generate thousands of theories for a given scientific problem. And now we have to to verify them, evaluate them and this is something which we we have to to change our structures of science to actually sort this out.
What you want to do is say what made you cancel? In other words, what about the product or situation or whatever caused the cancellation? Just phrasing it that way, you get much better results.
And I realized it was the first one on the list and I thought, huh, I wonder if people are just picking the first one. So then then we randomized the list so everyone saw a different order of the list and now all the items were picked equally
The reason I think MCP may be a one-year wonder is the stratospheric growth of coding agents. It appears that the best possible tool for any situation is Bash—if your agent can run arbitrary shell commands, it can do anything that can be done by typing commands into a terminal.
Ghostman by Roger Hobbs is a crime thriller about robbing a Malaysian bank and an Atlantic City casino. Riveting characters. A gut-punch of a story. I love a good heist, and this one is bristling with technical details that make you wonder whether the author has some secrets of his own.
A very good and readable book on this interaction, with excellent discussions of Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, La Monte Young, and Penderecki, among many others.
I think this situation, this historic wrong that’s been done is, put simply, is just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There’s no entrepreneur that sees, that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this.
A lot of it has to do with just how you feel about change. Um, and if you think the current situation is really really good, then you're uh more likely to be suspicious of change and averse to change than if you think um it's imperfect. And I think it's imperfect. In fact, I think it's pretty bad.
And so it's not really about the environment or the wall. It's really about how we see it and whether we can find the thing that is deep and rich and infinite in that direction.
Charlie Jane Anders' Lessons in Magic and Disaster drops today: it's a novel about queer academia, the wonder of thinking very hard about very old books, and the terror and joy of ambiguous magic. It's my kind of novel!
We're not going to run out of natural gas at 1 gawatt per year indefinitely. Okay, what if we're doing 5 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 50 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 100 gawatt per year? Like, you can you can just break the situation.
The state-of-the-art today can be more accurately described as "last-minute, black-box product testing" rather than auditing, and I think this situation threatens public safety, international stability, and sustainable commercial adoption of AI.
the current situation in Iran shows that even if an "IAEA for AI" is necessary for some purposes, it won't be sufficient for resolving the tricky geopolitical issues raised by AI.
No matter how much I know about a domain, the other person will always know far more about their own situation, context, beliefs, skills, preferences, etc than I do.
the tool is used when you are overwhelmed with too many options. You've said yes to too many things, and you need to raise the bar all the way up so that almost everything doesn't pass the bar. It's a tool for a certain situation so I rarely use it. I would not call it a approach to life that everyone should use all the time.
Easing is the most important part of any animation. It can make a bad animation feel great and a great animation feel bad. That’s why you have to know which easing to choose in a specific situation.
The situation we face today, with U.S. ships costing at least twice as much to build as ships built elsewhere, is not a recent development; it’s been the norm for at least the past 100 years.
One situation is you have people who are very dominant, who just take over the conversation. And basically what happens is the group remembers less from the experience and they remember more of what the dominant narrator says.
I think this is one of the biggest things that physics can help with, and it’s an obvious kind of low-hanging fruit situation where the heat generation, the inefficiency, the waste of existing high-level computers is nowhere near the efficiency of our brains. It’s hilariously worse, and we haven’t tried to optimize that hard on that frontier.
Therefore, land sparing is more likely to take place, even at the local level, when yields of staples go up. The situation is different for some internationally traded products like soy and palm oil.
So really the question is like for every Hamas member that you kill, how many did you create? And if you create more than you killed, you’ve not succeeded. That’s the real situation there.
Everything is negotiable. Challenge authority. You have the power in any situation. This is how to realize it and use it. A must-read classic from 1980 from a master negotiator. My notes here aren’t enough because the little book is filled with so many memorable stories — examples of great day-to-day moments of negotiation that will stick in your head for when you need them. (I especially loved…
They frame the situation as a choice between continued human drivers killing people (without statistical context) vs. immature robotaxis who don't drink and drive (but make other mistakes).
Therefore, we have the perverse situation that the richest people are hiring some of the most talented and technologically sophisticated people on the planet to engage in innovation aimed at driving down the demand for labor—the major and often only asset of the world’s poor.
More generally, you’ve got to wonder if Dweck considered whether the results of this very small, to my knowledge unreplicated, study were really ripe for publicising to literally millions of people
After years of people recommending him to me, I finally took the plunge into the literary world of Wendell Berry. Now I can't help but wonder what took me so long. This 2018 collection of Berry's best essays is a fantastic introduction into his genre-defining polemic style, which mixes razor-sharp commentary with a poetry grounded in lived experience, to argue on behalf of land, the environment, and a slower, richer approach to life.
I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times. If you’ve been working in the technology industry a while, please tell me this sounds familiar to you.
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