Something few software engineers fully appreciate is how important personal connections can be as part of their work. I see far too many people thinking that "who you know" is relevant for *getting* a job but failing to realize it can be even more important for *doing* the job.
sometimes I talk to people in DC and their their natural inclination is to say why don't you punish the model for doing these bad things like why don't you like bring it under heel and like uh like you know show it who's boss and that is a very dangerous way to address these issues right
Maybe I would pick something again that's that's in the category hard and boring because that's usually a category that is a little bit easier to actually find people that will appreciate when you solved something. If you pick something that is fun, even if it's hard, you're gonna have a very tough time, especially in a time where people can just prompt things into existence.
we've both come to believe that when transformation fails repeatedly, it's time for something different, and one of the tools that leaders need to add to their tool belts (and probably use a lot more frequently than they do today), is starting fresh, creating new entities (agencies and departments, for example) and either endowing them with new authorities or transferring authorities from legacy institutions to the new ones.
My view is that an appreciation of China's REER is very much to be desired, but the real (haha) way to get there is through higher inflation domestically, and that means different macro policies.
And if they're completely failing, that's probably a good sign. If they're kind of able to do some of it but not very well, that's maybe not a great sign because that's a probably a a sign that the capability is starting to be present in those models and with more training data or larger scale models or or whatever it's likely to get better. So um you know look for something where the model succeeds 0% or 1% of the time not not 20%.
The original point of the China Shock 1.0 discourse was not to foreground the unfairness of Chiense competition, so much as the malfunctioning of US policy and societal institutions in the face of concentrated globalization shocks.
A lot of people don't realize that particularly brain development, but then also the refining of functions in the brain through neuroplasticity includes the pruning or removal of signapses. Often we think about it's all about growth and new connections, but actually it also involves the refining or removal of of other connections that aren't needed.
But just because we have a fixed relatively fixed number of cells doesn't mean that we can't change the connections between those cells. And that's happening all the time. And that is, you know, the main principle of neuroplasticity.
I read a bunch of blog posts about how it is totally fine to use SQLite in production for a small site and I think it is totally fine, but what I did not fully appreciate is that SQLite is still a database, databases are complicated, and I do not know a lot about operating databases.
but that's my guess on what most of the useful progress uh from these models will look like like in the next five years is just really filling in that landscape of like connections that you can draw if you're an expert in multiple fields.
One, you're surrounding yourself by failing states. You can look at Russia and China and they're surrounded by some of the most dysfunctional places on the planet and you go, "Gee whiz, are they unlucky or they complicit?"
You set them up to fail, you destabilize the rising, you ingest the failing, and you set up buffer zones in between, and you await the opportune moment to pounce and absorb. This is Vladimir Putin's game.
All they need before they can truly appreciate empathy and humanity is one thing: have one of their own posts closed and deleted by another group of gatekeepers.
The counterarguments against it are I'll politely call them fishy. Um, uh and yet it doesn't happen and we sell the chips because there's there's so much money. There's so much money riding on it.
Write notes in your own words, connect them to existing notes, and let ideas emerge from the connections. I wrote a whole blog post about this, so go ahead and read it. Highly recommended.
And the third one is like we did a lot of actually PR uh prior to the service going out just to get the word out. Um and you know PR has has its time and place. Uh but I think doing it before you have validation that customers definitely want the thing is quite risky. It can lead to a lot of sunk cost uh once you get it out because you're you're just you know you need to see it through.
Just imagine you use very bad software and um the team that started the project decided early to use Xamarin and then they never had a chance of making this as good as all the other things you really appreciate on your phone due to this decision no matter how good they are.
So, you while we kind of saved the system a lot, we bailed a lot of people out, they made us pay 5 billion dollars on the more the bad mortgages that Bear Stearns had done. And that's what made me make the statement I wouldn't do it again.
He takes a very proto-rationalist, practical approach to this, that I very much appreciate, complete with yearly predictions. The writing is consistently enjoyable and clear.
I suspect that both Substack and OnlyFans may become a Girardian bubble. Everyone joins after hearing from the few people who succeed; the thousands who slink away after months of effort netted them a mere 17 subscribers usually do so quietly.
I think it’s a failing of archeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those cities populations moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses.
Loneliness is one of the major problems in people. That said, I don’t want that to be the solution for humans seeking relationships and connections. I do see a world where we spend more time talking to AIs than other humans, at least for our work time.
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.
And rather than trying to ask, how close is it to being a human-like intelligent, we should appreciate it for what its capabilities are, and that will both be more accurate and help us put it to work and protect us from the dangers better rather than always anthropomorphizing it.
The 100-megawatt facility might have ten 10-megawatt blocks served directly by a 1500V DC feeder line without connections to other blocks that would require extra switches and routing.
The only way to learn is by doing things. That we can read about how to swim and we can read about how to make uh uh uh a vegetarian maki roll, but you will not learn how to do it until you do it. And the reading, the listening is important preparation, but learning is the act of failing on our way to mastery.
So in historical terms and intellectual terms, what is happening today in the war between Russia and Ukraine is the vision on one level or another level that was formulated by the noble laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, half Russian, half Ukrainian.
When a company fails, most people blame the CEO. I generally blame the board. Because the board's job is to make sure the right person's running the company, and if they're failing, help the person.
Unlike other interventions EA has sponsored, there are scant metrics for tracking the success or failure of investments in existential risk mitigation.
It is a sign that Hayek was not so great at seeing the viewpoints of other people, and that (political moralizing aside) also should count as a weakness of him as an economist and social scientist.
My view is that it’s going to take more than this regulatory campaign to defeat dynamism in China.
Their words now
What I did not sufficiently appreciate is that a state that would so casually decapitate a sector like online tutoring would also have the will to visit catastrophe upon whole cities.
Initial massive exaggeration of the importance of an effect gives way to more realistic, much smaller effects (which might still be useful) after people start doing better studies.
All the sockets between my computers are over Tailscale, so whenever I grab the laptop and leave the house, the connections to my VMs and NAS remain stable.
A lot of people have raved about this book in Silicon Valley, so I wanted to see what it was all about. It's a great interpretation of the history of man. Unfortunately, it has about 10% of the citations it deserves for the subject matter. I found it a really interesting set of ideas for how to think about how we evolved. I felt there was some inaccuracies, but appreciate having the perspective of an expert.
If you want to learn the art and science of copywriting, then this is the book for you. An expert copywriter for decades, Caples breaks down in detail what makes a great ad versus a failing one. It's loaded with examples and the kind of insights only a veteran can provide. You do need to provide a little imagination as he focuses on mail in based advertising in magazines, which isn't common today. But really, how different is that from downloading free whitepapers today?
But Anna Reid's book goes far further because, with excellent research in archives which weren't available before, she is able to show how totally cynical Stalin's attitude was to Leningrad. Indeed it was a major factor in the appalling loss of life and suffering, which is very hard to appreciate.
Discerning whether an institution is near failure is a difficult epistemic problem. There are many outwardly visible pieces of institutions that do not reflect their actual health.
I appreciate this book for its irreverence, the elegance of its prose and because the essays in it are succinct, punchy, with the tyrannical discipline that newspaper journalism has to have.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
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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
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are left in their original language.