If the useful life of an NVIDIA H100-vintage cluster turns out to really be three years rather than six, the capex cycle's economics invert, and the leverage that looked prudent looks reckless.
We talked in an earlier chapter about Resistance being the strongest at the finish line. It is. Resistance knows we’re about to defeat it. It summons all its genius and all its power to stop us.
Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.
Because one can measure these things, one can monitor this debt dynamic happening, so it’s easy to see problems approaching. I’ve used this diagnostic process in my investing and I’ve kept it to myself, but I’m now explaining it in detail in How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle because it is too important to keep to myself.
But passing an automatic filter is not a substitute for community acceptance; I do not believe that human referees can be removed from the publication process.
This is a little bit different than actually literally I vector centrality but it's very similar and so we call this technique IGEN reviews and I've become convinced that this is more or less the right way to do performance reviews.
And that's why every hype cycle produces a wave of absolutely spectacular demos and very few real products. And the recurring mistake of every cycle is spending on the demo when you should be saving for the nines.
I think startups tend to win when um the sort of like technology landscape is moving very quickly. uh when costs are coming down when cycle times are short and all of those things are happening right now.
And at the end of the day, they're all like different ways to pass tokens into a model and ask it to produce usually some structured output. And understanding that is a lot more powerful than trying to learn memory and trying to pick some agent framework off the shelf and some memory framework off the shelf.
new laws are like code that is pushed live to production without even being read (let alone tested), often in the face of tremendous opposition, affecting millions of citizens, with minimal monitoring to ensure they’re producing the desired results, an extremely slow customer feedback cycle, and few ways to truly opt out.
The chapter on medieval Islam wasn't very deep, otherwise this is truly excellent, particularly when covering the very complicated 20th century. I don't have much more to say, because it is so good, except that I should try to get my brother to review it.
what makes the GAWA theory such an interesting example is you have um literally this 100-year segment of like an idea that like flows through many different people's heads before it like settles into something that the math community like agrees is good.
It's actually very difficult because, yeah, you would have to the only way to to really do the evaluations is then delay the model release cycle. Um and you know there's a lot of competitive pressure right now to not do that.
it's this nonscalable way to scale your organization and it's through like passing your vampire blood. That's what inside Zinga they called it, Pinkis' vampire blood. What he did that I started to do is you pick someone from the organization who's promising. I usually pick the people who didn't fit in the smart misfits and they become your tech assistant which is not your chief of staff, not your executive assistant.
That was always the idea, and that that goes back even to the predecessor of Turbo Pascal, this idea that it's not just a compiler. It's an experience, right? I mean, you don't just compile your programs. You also edit them. You also run them. You also debug them. You also have a runtime library. It all has to like fit together.
And so, the goal of this chapter is really just to give people the information in order to make an educated decision. But I don't want to make that decision for people. That's for businesses themselves to decide.
Many of the indicators I use to track unfolding events are explained in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. I especially recommend Chapter 6, “The Big Cycle of External Order and Disorder,” and, if you are interested in the unimaginable-in-peacetime investment-related developments that typically happen during wars, I recommend Chapter 7, “Investing in Light of the Big Cycle.”
And so this loop, this cycle, is gonna go on and on and on. It kinda comes down to basically intelligence is gonna scale by one thing, and that's compute.
just cuz the test suite passes doesn't mean that the web server will boot. You know, there's there's always a chance that when you actually try in the real world, something's not going to work.
I love Tolstoy because you get a third of a way into his book about a lady having an affair and the best chapter is about a dude experiencing a state of "flow" while mowing a field with his country peasants.
Trust by Hernan Diaz is an onion of a novel in which every chapter peels back a layer to reveal yet more beneath. Following the meteoric rise of a Wall Street financier in the early 20th century, the intricately plotted story will seduce you, transport you, stimulate you, mislead you, and, ultimately, move you.
Dead Weight by Emmeline Clein: Certain parts of this book really stuck with me and changed how I think, like the chapter on the psychological effects of restriction.
But I guess like the notion of culture and of written record and of like passing down notes between each other. I don't think there's an equivalent of that with LM right now. So LM don't really have culture right now and it's kind of like one of the I think uh impediments I would say.
If you’re stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don’t want to do anything, to do something. Try to make progress because the good feeling comes on the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.
There are obvious pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can’t turn a profit selling a lagging-edge chip at the price that was previously dictated by a fully depreciated fab. Prices have to go up.
Their words now
The COVID super-cycle, plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics, points to a forever glut.
We'd constantly be improving the tools and just the iterative process and the speed at which that improves products is the critical element to success in games. The slower the iteration cycle, if you make a build every week and you prove, you go through one iteration every week, you're going to be way way way worse by the end of your project than a game company that makes new stuff every day.
a passing test can still execute buggy code if the bug is data-dependent, or if the test is not sensitive to the specific mistake in the code. But a lot of the time, buggy code only triggers failures.
Passing ARC-AGI does not equate to achieving AGI, and, as a matter of fact, I don't think o3 is AGI yet. o3 still fails on some very easy tasks, indicating fundamental differences with human intelligence.
A number of studies, conducting full life-cycle analyses, have found that vertical farms currently have a higher carbon footprint than conventional outdoor farming.
I mean, if that’s right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together, when they thought about, “We need a count of time for us,” they didn’t look up into the heavens, they looked into their bodies. “What’s the first cycle that we actually go through as humans?” and they picked this nine-month thing. It really is our cycle, and no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.
about this idea that really when you’re older in most societies, your job is no longer to form new episodic memories, it’s to pass on the memories that you already have, this knowledge about the world, what we call semantic memory, to pass on that semantic memory to the younger generations, pass on the culture.
Almost everyone in the class said that the days were moving by slower. Then I would say, “Okay, so do you feel like the weeks are passing by slower, faster, or the same?” The majority of them said that the weeks were passing by faster. According to the laws of physics, I don’t think that makes any sense, but according to memory, it did because what happened was people were doing the same thing over and over in the same context.
The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
The Linux Programming Interface by Michael Kerrisk – an exhaustive reference on how Linux works. There are about a million chapters, but every individual chapter is pretty short and I find it quite readable.
Being on call should not be a constant cycle of things breaking down and firefighting, or alerts going off at all hours. This is not ‘normal.’ These are telltale signs of a fragile system and lack of alert discipline.
The analysis in
this chapter has shown that there is no such thing as a universal threshold over
which debt becomes unsustainable, and that the relevant debt level depends
on many factors, in particular the real interest rate on debt.
When you don’t give your team the context for the work and just pass on tasks and work items to them, you make it clear that they are simply “doers” and your job is the job of “decider.”
The trouble is that human beings can't really function, let alone thrive, when their primary psychological identification is with things like "the news cycle" or "history" or "the course of world events."
Suckless offers an alternative to this continuous cycle of bloat and meaningless redesign. Suckless tools aim to keep things simple, minimal, usable and hackable by default.
Not only is this a wonderful foundation for Fourier analysis, with a surprising and satisfying application to prime numbers given in the last chapter, but it's also a good starting point for analysis as a whole. Stein and Shakarchi have a series of four excellent books on the foundations of analysis, based on a now-famous series of lectures given at Princeton.
And just as a tornado cannot assemble a Boeing 747 by passing through a junkyard, functional institutions are not spontaneously generated. The machinery, if it functions, was assembled by someone with good judgment: the institution’s founder.
This book had a big impact on me as young software developer. It was the first time I saw in print the principle "bugs that go away by themselves come back by themselves". It's something that I've often repeated to myself, and my team, if nothing else but to prepare us mentally for when that hard bug does come back. The chapter advising developers to "proactively step through your code during development, don't wait for the bug report" improved my productivity enormously, and I followed the practice for many years.
This is one of those books where each chapter is by a different author. Despite that, it still manages to be coherent and I didn't mind reading it straight through.
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
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The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
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Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
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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
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The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
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quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
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Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
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are left in their original language.