During the 2023 U.S.-China nuclear talks, America proposed missile-launch notifications, a nuclear crisis hotline, and processes to limit the use of outer space for military conflict. China declined all of those. Blame the U.S. if you wish (do we always keep our word?), but that is what happened. China also broke off meaningful arms control talks.
Scoring internet points that can be converted into CV line items and promotion package paragraphs is vastly better than squandering it all for a quick dunk.
To my mind, if progressive policy hopes to engage with such voters at all - and it is open question whether it should - it must address not just the material realities of relative economic disadvantage, but above all the "outsider" credentials of the AfD.
the best teacher you had, like everybody remembers the one or two teachers who changed their life. It wasn't because they marked up your paper really well. That wasn't what did it for them. It was because you had some block. They saw you and they convinced you you could do so much more.
A big-enough random reversible circuit is plausibly a secure cryptographic permutation, a big-enough random irreversible circuit degenerates into having only a few possible outputs.
If you are working on material science, if you are working on pharmaceuticals, if you are working on chemistry, you in 2 3 years or even today are doing your role as a scientist dramatically different because of artificial intelligence.
we find that the performance on held out tasks decreases dramatically. Whereas if we um just take out a random 20% of the data that's less diverse than the most diverse subset, the performance um only decreases a little bit. And so this suggests that actually having really diverse data plays an important role in enabling it to generalize to new tasks.
Coding isn't yet another application domain -- it's the meta-skill required for AI to automatically develop its own training material, via symbolic world models. That's how the RSI loop actually kicks off.
And just human organizations are complicated and it's very hard to have um to manage to aggressively prosecute 100 different priorities and to deal with all the issues and interference that arises among them and so forth. And so, you know, Google has done incredibly well in a bunch of specific places, but it's not like Google has done all the things even if in some kind of basic material sense, uh Google maybe, you know, had that ability.
I mean I think like if you look at uh my colleagues work on say alpha fold that was a very specific model for uh protein folding and it was highly successful um and was able to really handle that domain quite well so that all of a sudden you now have this amazing tool and model that can give you answers to questions about proteins and their structure um really effectively um but it's not a general model it's a very specific one and there are other I domains where that kind of approach can work really well. Uh maybe in material science or chip design or things like that that uh will enable you to leverage the capabilities of a very accurate but but niche model uh to do things that are hard today.
But this is the book that I give to every junior engineer because I think like nobody ever really talks about debugging as like a discipline outside of like basic heuristics.
If you are starting a language completely from scratch, authentic media is just noise. You’ll absorb very little. You need highly repetitive, simple input.
a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput.
and then the power and the cost and then you can double the performance but you cannot double down on the cost and and area. So those are the thing you have to give give way unless you find some new way of material new way of design.
It was already clear a while ago that Anthropic mostly do not care about climate, environment or air pollution in any material way, even if they care a little bit more about bad PR than Elon Musk does.
The fundamental drivers of this change are panic and impatience, and that is what is behind the worst impacts of data centre growth, including a material risk to decarbonisation and climate action.
Um and then they can kind of suggest random things and it it but it it it um often I find that trying to chase them down and make them work and find they don't work, it wastes more time than it saves.
We show that equilibrium generically occurs at neither the Harberger nor Glaeser-Luttmer benchmark. Cost-minimizing suppliers drive allocations to vertices, not interiors. Corners are not an assumption but an outcome about what cost-minimizing suppliers choose. The correct benchmark is corners, not random, and corners generate qualitatively different welfare properties: losses far larger than either efficient or random distributions, and discontinuous jumps from small parameter perturbations.
but ice sort of forms through a process of random nucleation and then extension. And this is cool because you can uh modulate the like sort of nucleation the rate of nucleation and extension to then modulate the probability of ice formation.
Good Material by Dolly Alderton A simple story about a struggling stand-up comedian going through a difficult break-up. A funny, sweet book. I enjoyed it.
I just don't know where this is going. I don't know what the end is. When I don't know what the end is, I don't know what the beginning is. And it's that simple.
If you're a paper towel demon and feel guilty about it, I can't recommend these enough. Perfect for cleaning counters and random floor messes (talking to parents).
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: Made the random choice to listen to this and loved the experience (especially for getting through some of the boring parts, sorry). Shout out Maggie Gyllenhaal.
And it’s obvious, it’s obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. They can’t just have had inscribed stone seals, and many parts of India today write on palm leaf.
So our view of it is skewed by the nature of the material, and sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always, and sometimes the people who work with skewed material don’t even realize how skewed it is.
If a bed is too deep, one has to use a very coarse grind. The result in the cup may or may not be good enough, but the extraction level will be low, which is inefficient, in the sense of wasting coffee material.
I think if you have especially a B2B feature where you may have some lock in reverse trials can be super powerful. You just want to get people in there. You don't need to ask for their credit card because they're using your CRM or they're investing quite a lot of time in like building out, you know, material and content. And so by the time that window drops, you actually like feel, oh man, I probably should keep this and and start paying. I think for a lot of consumer products, it's a little bit harder for that to work. And so I've typically seen more just normal free trials be be the norm.
If you do too much exploration, you can have your team feel a little bit too scattershot, just trying a 100 different random ideas. What's the through line? What's the strategy? How do you pattern match, you know, successes across them? And if you do too much in exploitation, which is often the MMO of growth teams, it can lead to this like saturation and stagnation where you're just locally maximizing a thing.
Tweets from 1765-1799 by a 4’9” hunchback physicist, friends with Goethe and Kant, admired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. Such wonderful random thoughts, beautiful perspectives on thinking for yourself, observing nature, language, freedom, philosophy, religion, and more. Hundreds of initial insights, especially inspiring because they’re undeveloped.
We’ve come back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces — but this time not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality.
The scale word gets a lot of attention in this. The interpretation that I use is effectively to avoid adding the human priors to your learning process. And if you read the original essay, this is what it talks about is how researchers will try to come up with clever solutions to their specific problem that might get them small gains in the short term while simply enabling these deep learning systems to work efficiently, and for these bigger problems in the long term might be more likely to scale and continue to drive success.
It's a nice, short, and moving memoir by the comedian and actor Steve Martin. The book details his early working days at shops and clubs, his relationships, and eventually his rise to fame. He shared his struggles, his failures, long hours of practice, his reflections to refine his craft, and his efforts to find his own unique voice as a comedian. Any memoir that only talks about successes and never discusses struggles, rejections, or weaknesses is suspect. This one is not. What I like about his writing is that it feels candid and, at times, funny.
And this is important, so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks, how many joints they're going to be? Anybody's guess. Do you expect humanoids, things with a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That's probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.
The list of “complicity” in various bad things worries me because every platform has some element of that kind of content going on, in part because it’s impossible to stop entirely.
I know from the report that Stanford put out earlier this year that Telegram does not report CSAM to NCMEC at all. That is very stupid. I would imagine Telegram would argue that as a non-US company it doesn’t have to abide by such laws.
Physics hardly even acknowledges that the universe is random at its base. We like to think we live in a deterministic universe and everything’s deterministic. But I think that’s probably an artifact of the way that we’ve written down laws of physics since Newton invented modern physics and his conception of motion and gravity, which he formulated laws that had initial conditions and fixed dynamical laws.
It’s the fact that you’re a deterministic structure living in a random background. And also, all of that selection bundled in you allows you to select on possible futures. So that’s where your will comes from.
For the most part, it’s like these names are just utterly arbitrary, so you have no thing to latch on to. It’s not really a thing that our brain does very well to learn meaningless, arbitrary stuff. So what you need to do is build connections somehow, visualize a connection, and sometimes it’s obvious or sometimes it’s not.
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
At a higher level, the real event was a catastrophic failure of the industry's strategy of relentlessly shouting as loud as they can "Hey, get off our case, we're busy saving lives here!"
I think the main driving force is that the Palestinians feel oppressed as they should, and that this was a resistance move. They were resisting the Israeli occupation.
Look, I think I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to die in trenches, whether he talks to Putin or not, just don’t do that. Whoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people and history will not look kindly upon them.
Friedman’s focus on the money supply has not held up, as Samuelson suggested, but the alternative Keynesian macro models recommended by Samuelson in the same interview have not done better and they were not outperforming simple random walk models of predicting the macroeconomic future.
Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence, and it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology.
So if you think about entire all of nature, let's say all of living systems as a matrix that runs across two axes one is material sophistication, which is terribly relevant for designers, and the other is communication. The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap.
Buroker is a reliable author of very fluffy mind candy, either science fiction or fantasy. A lot of her output is re-working material from identifiable prior art, without hewing so closely to the canon as to constitute fan fiction.
Everyone who talks about AI talks about the button, the button to turn it off, right? Do we have a button to turn off Google? Is anybody in the world capable of shutting Google down?
Sovereign debt markets (and many other markets as well) are subject to sudden stops in which investors either drop out or ask for large spreads even in the absence of large changes in fundamentals.
These were the notebooks that we worked on in Moscow and one realised that here was most of the raw material for Life and Fate which I think is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II.
David Kaiser has contributed an introduction to the book (available here , or, if this doesn't work, try here ) which does an excellent job of putting the material in historical and intellectual context
Partly because of another book that nearly made it onto my list: Domain-Specific Languages by Martin Fowler. It talks about the idea of writing a small language inside another language, to express ideas in a specific domain
Becoming a Technical Leader is both an interesting and subtle book. At times it feels like a self-help book, at other times a Machiavellian explanation of how programming teams really wok. But in the end it's sincere and mature, and wants to help. Weinberg's introspective style will appeal to many programmers, and it appealed to me. This book is useful because it talks about many of the practical issues of becoming a technical leader or manager within a team of developers — and from many unexpected viewpoints.
I believe every material has a grain, including the web. But this assumption flies in the face of our expectations for technology. Too often, the internet is cast as a wide-open, infinitely malleable material.
Richard Hamming gave this talk in March of 1986. [1] It's one of the best talks I've ever read and has long impacted how I think about spending my time.
I spend a lot of time writing papers and preparing talks with free software: emacs for text editing, LaTeX for typesetting, and IrfanView for editing images.
I spend a lot of time writing papers and preparing talks with free software: emacs for text editing, LaTeX for typesetting, and IrfanView for editing images.
The other thing about Nietzsche's writing about Wagner is that it's wonderfully brilliant, unpredictable vivid and perceptive, even when he's deliberately distorting the material for a certain effect or working out his own profound ambivalence about Wagner.
I have an ASUS EEE PC S101 (10.1" screen with SSD disk) that I use to bring with me when I travel light and I use it as presentation computer when I do talks at conferences and similar arrangements.
Inform is the interactive fiction development system I've been helping to develop for the last few years. I use it on a near-daily basis both for my own work and to develop example material and do troubleshooting for other interactive fiction authors.
This is a great book for exactly, precisely the reason that all O'Reilly books are great: it covers complex material in a way that's accessible to uncomplex people.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.