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Ryan Singer x.com
Trying this out… Programming is telling a computer what to do. Engineering is solving cost/performance problems.
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20 September
19 September
18 September
17 September
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Their words
First, if most of our beliefs are handed to us by the society in which we live, it is vital that our society itself values truth and truth-telling.
Why the story of the Vegetable Lamb was believedtimharford.com
16 September
15 September
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korrents.com
Tokens are not the true unit of AI inference, because better models yield more problem-solving per token.Their words
Although you pay for AI by the token, that's not the unit of inference, because you get more problem solving per token as models improve.
14 September
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Their words
foundation is ostensibly a sci-fi series about empires, psychohistory, and hard technology, but really it's about individuals with extreme agency and puzzle-solving ability having wildly outsized impact on a universe that would otherwise just sit there waiting to decay
11 September
9 September
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Their words
OpenAI solving one of the most famous math problems is extremely impressive, and of little impact to most people's lives; Meta's Muse agent launch has the potential to be the exact opposite.
8 September
7 September
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Their words
I agree with Jakub that alignment is not a side problem, it is the central problem, if you ‘solved alignment’ in the relevant senses the rest becomes easy and if you don’t the rest is impossible or worse
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Their words
If you're lamenting writing code by hand like something you love is being taken away from you, see if you can fall in love with solving problems instead. Maybe you'll find out that's what you really loved the whole time
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korrents.com
The case for building AGI has always been framed around invention, such as curing cancer or solving fusion energy.Their words
The narrative around why building AGI was a good idea has always been about invention -- "it will cure cancer", "it will solve fusion energy", etc.
6 September
5 September
4 September
3 September
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Their words
what the benchmark is actually telling you is the shit you think matters does not matter
2 September
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korrents.com
Witnessing suffering, rather than solving it, may be the only way we can truly comprehend it.Their words
Seeing suffering, being made to witness it, is not of course a solution to suffering. But perhaps, it's the only comprehension we can really possess.
1 September
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Their words
I am telling you this is inevitable, which means I am also saying that “banning open source,” or for that matter any other regulation, will not solve the problem. Given the inevitability of this outcome, I think it is in fact plausible to argue that we should want more open-weight models to maximally empower our self-defense.
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Their words
So, we did a classifier sweep specifically looking for agents thinking about or making the decision to alert humans. And across, 1200 transcripts, each of which are extremely long, we only found like a halfozen instances of it ever occurring to any agent to potentially notify humans. Um, and all of them just decide not to do it.
31 August
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Their words
the number one motivator to get rid of a block. It's actually not the guy as the the biggest one. The number one thing that convinces kids they can do something is watching their classmate do it.
29 August
26 August
From one piece DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The language now is English. It's a cliche, but it's also true. Like I've been programming in English for the last three months. I've been reading a lot of code, but I'm programming in English. I'm telling the computer what to do, and I'm using natural language, and it is shockingly even more delightful. If there is one programming language more beautiful than Ruby, it is the English language.
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Their words
it was actually being damaged by overly prescriptive humans. And any programmer who's had a pointy-haired boss knows exactly what that is like. When the boss walks into the room, doesn't know anything, starts telling you how to program, how to code. What do you do? You sulk. You write shittier code if you're mandated to do things that are against your better judgment. Why would an agent not be the same?
17 August
13 August
12 August
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Their words
Models being stagnant in long-form, non-fiction writing should be alarming to those reliant on models autonomously solving grand, open science problems in the near future.
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Their words
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.
11 August
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Structure and Interpretation of Computer ProgramsTheir words
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) by Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson. SICP is my all-time favourite programming book. It's also where I learned about the power of wishful thinking when coding. SICP uses wishful thinking as a design tool: write code as if the abstraction already existed. Pretend. Then, once the ideal abstraction has taken shape, you go ahead and implement those functions. This meta-level is what made SICP so valuable. Ultimately, it's a book that teaches how to think about code and problem solving. I'm tempted to even say that SICP is more a work of art than a pure coding book, but I won't go there. A beautiful book.
10 August
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Their words
What I would not like to see is one person or or a few people coming from industry and telling everybody what to do. I think that would be dangerous because market forces are different from uh societal norms and culture and heritage are different from uh education and ethics and and these are multistakeholder problems to solve together.
7 August
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Their words
Well, I mean, okay, even the whole basis of building Helix is contrarian. Like, I think that if you raise a series A and then you tell your investors that you're going to vibe code a purchasing system, I think that any reasonable board is going to like ask you what you're thinking.
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korrents.com
Solving a systemic problem by doubling down on the same approach risks creating uncontrollable feedback loops.Their words
As a general matter, trying to solve a systemic problem by doubling down risks creating out-of-control feedback loops.
2 August
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korrents.com
Interviews reward presentation; only a hands-on case study shows how fast a candidate's thinking decays.Their words
the number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data and ask them to come back with a PRD on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics, uh is kind of really telling, I think.
30 July
From one piece Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And often you can actually make the model work better and succeed at that kind of problem by not just adjusting the model parameters which is hard to do from the outside but from you know creating better guidelines for the model you know writing skills for the model to know how to use different tools that would be incredibly useful for solving this particular class of problem.
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Their words
Um, and that's a very very useful general technique is you know inference time compute to perform search over plausible ways of solving the problem that can get much much higher performance or much more reliability in longunning agent flows.
27 July
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Their words
So when I look at engineers that have been, you know, coding for a long for a long time, you know, like for for years or for decades, this is a really really common failure mode is trying to over specify and it's trying to be overly specific and then, you know, get the model to do the to do the task exactly the way that you would have done it. And that that's just not the way the model works.
22 July
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On changing their mind
If you had asked me this question in the lead up to my 2019 book, Ultralearning, I would have said no. I was a strong advocate for doing hard problem solving and the associated mental effort it requires as a way to learn difficult skills.
19 July
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Their words
In a world of AI with agents operating across multiple systems, wanting source of truth data, the importance of having preferred paved paths that get the most of the benefits and produce some guardrails so we can make sure we're doing good work, common infrastructure, common paved paths, solving problems once with a core set of capabilities becomes more important.
13 July
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Their words
And so we've done this study where you have to, instead of me telling you where it is, you have to get up and find it. And so now you're engaging with the environment, you're going to go look for it and be like, gosh, it's been there the whole time. have walked by it so many times have never noticed it. And I think that's the difference between seeing something and noticing it.
10 July
8 July
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korrents.com
AI systems are now capable of meaningful contributions to formal mathematics, not only informal problem-solving.Their words
These developments inform our position that AI systems are now capable of meaningful contributions to formal mathematics, not merely informal problem-solving.
5 July
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korrents.com
America is a country that rewards first-principles thinkers and builders and encourages reinvention despite cynicism.Their words
increasingly I see America as the place that rewards first principles thinkers and builders; that asks "why not?" instead of telling you why you cannot; that imperfectly supports optimism, reinvention and perseverance in spite of cynicism.
22 June
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Their words
The phrase "your feelings are valid" does not invite curiosity or deeper self-understanding, which is the point of psychotherapy. It is the mirror image of "stop whining and get a grip." One sounds warm and one sounds harsh, but neither deepens self-awareness.
9 June
2 June
27 May
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Their words
General problem solving abilities are neither learned nor taught. While some problem-solving methods have broader applicability than others (such as the scientific process of hypothesis testing), students learn these methods better when they’re explicitly taught rather than simply giving students projects and hoping they’ll reinvent them on their own.
23 May
20 May
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Their words
I think this is kind of leads to another way that Rust really helps with reliability, which is that if you're refactoring, I think Rust is really good at telling you all the places you need to update. I've done this sometimes where I would refactor something. I change the code. I change the return type or whatever it is, and then I just fix the compiler errors and until the compiler stops shouting. And then once I've done that, I've updated every place I need to update.
13 May
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korrents.com
You cannot be best of breed in an ecosystem by telling its developers to write in a different programming language.Their words
I mean, surely you're not going to be best of breed in the JavaScript ecosystem by telling people to write in a different programming language.
3 May
24 April
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Their words
Canada and much of Europe have adopted different interrogation techniques — such as the PEACE method — which emphasize collecting reliable information over coercion. These approaches still garner confessions; they’re just more reliable.
2 April
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
Local Deep ResearchTheir words
Its responses are, in my view, pretty bland and not very high-quality. I did a side-by-side test of asking Local Deep Research a question, then asking pi the same question (telling it to use searxng to make as many internet searches as needed), and I fed both outputs into an LLM to ask which is better.
29 March
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Their words
The product you build is just solving a problem. So, is that like is the more you do that, the better you become at problem solving. And one thing I do believe that it will never change that there will always be problems to solve.
28 March
20 March
From one piece Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Um so yeah, the the the um the core of what I do, like actually solving um the most difficult part of of a math problem, that hasn't changed too much. I still use pen and paper for that.
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Their words
So, I think AI-type tools we really will will actually revolutionize the ex- the experimental side of math where where um you don't care so much about uh individual problems and and the process of solving them, but you you want to gather just large-scale data about about what things work, what things don't.
11 March
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Their words
I don’t think executives who take off and work 40-hour weeks should be telling anybody to stay late. I think that’s wrong and immoral. But to me as an individual, as long as I’m not telling other people to do it, my life’s work is my passion and I want to do it as much as possible.
4 March
3 March
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korrents.com
Solving a problem yourself, without searching or prompting, is a form of exercise -- the help makes you weaker.Their words
My brain feels stronger because I work through the problem instead of prompting it away.
18 February
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Their words
Forecasting AI capabilities is closer in kind to solving a thermodynamics equation than solving the three-body problem.
13 February
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Their words
I think the trillions of dollars a year market, maybe all of the national security implications and the safety implications that I wrote about in adolescence of technology can happen without it, but I I I also think we, and I imagine others, are working on it. And I think there's a good chance that that, you know, that we get there within the next year or two.
12 February
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Their words
If you get really good at coding that means you have to be really good at general purpose problem solving. So that's a skill, right? And that just maps into other domains.
8 February
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korrents.com
Most current software and ways of solving problems are structured the wrong way for the agent era.Their words
Most software is the wrong shape now. Most of the ways we try to solve problems are the wrong shape.
6 February
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korrents.com
In iterative problem-solving, each failure has value because it rules out one way that doesn't work.Their words
Failure is a good thing because it teaches us another way of how it's not to be accomplished.
30 January
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korrents.com
Solving your community's problems, not just doing your passion for pay, is the path to a profitable business.Their words
Just doing your thing for money rarely works. My personal take on "follow your passion" is this: find the place where other people have the same passion, then solve their problems.
Follow Your Passion (But Not Like That)thebootstrappedfounder.com
14 January
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Mixed onaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Art Work: On The Creative LifeTheir words
This book has more of a DGAF tone than Hold Still, I think, and it works best for me when Mann is telling stories instead of trying to extract a lesson for the reader.
29 December 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
BreakneckTheir words
Wang argues that the US & China each have a dominant form of government problem-solving
19 December 2025
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Likedrcmnd.app
Claude CodeTheir words
Claude Code (CC) emerged as the first convincing demonstration of what an LLM Agent looks like - something that in a loopy way strings together tool use and reasoning for extended problem solving.
15 December 2025
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korrents.com
The best sign that a subject is worth writing about is that you are interested in it and nobody else is.Their words
And I've learned just to not even talk about it cuz it kills my interest to watch it kill their interest. But I know why I'm interested and why it's important and I'm not I'm not relying on the world telling me it's important.
18 November 2025
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korrents.com
Solving a problem yourself, without searching or prompting, is a form of exercise -- the help makes you weaker.Their words
Learning requires an investment of effort, and AI will make us stupider if that effort is avoided.
21 October 2025
17 October 2025
From one piece Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals” 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
a lot of my times the value that I brought to the company was telling them not to use AI.
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Their words
a lot of what looks like learning is actually a lot more maturation of the brain and I think that actually very little reinforcement learning for animals and I think a lot of the reinforcement learning is actually like more like motor tasks. It's not intelligence tasks. So I actually kind of think humans don't actually like really use RL roughly speaking is what I would say.
30 September 2025
From one piece Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So it's extremely important to curate the information sources that you have, so that you wouldn't be somebody who is left to the will of AI-based algorithmic feed telling you what's important so that you end up consuming the same information, the same stuff, the same memes, the same news as everybody else.
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Their words
The investigation itself should have never been started. It's an absurd and harmful way of solving an issue such as complicated as regulating social media. It is just the wrong tool.
18 September 2025
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korrents.com
A job title is a calcification of how a company once solved a problem, not a description of what a person is.Their words
you are you are a sales operations expert, right? Like what is that? That's that's that that's like a title for a particular way how companies end up solving a particular operational problem they had at some point.
16 September 2025
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Their words
The value of research is usually in telling you which of two plausible theories is true, or which advice from different, seemingly sensible approaches works best.
23 July 2025
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Their words
So picking the right question is the hardest part of science and making the right hypothesis. And that's what today's systems definitely they can't do. So I often say it's harder to come up with a conjecture, a really good conjecture than it is to solve it.
22 June 2025
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Their words
Little is lost by preventing a 14-year-old from accessing TikTok or Snapchat, or telling a 10-year-old they cannot have unrestricted access to the internet through their own smartphone, but so much will almost certainly be gained.
14 June 2025
From one piece Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #472 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Yeah, these are great work that shows what's possible. The approach doesn't scale currently. Three days of Google's server time can solve one high school math format there. This is not a scalable prospect, especially with the exponential increase as the complexity increases.
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Their words
It's becoming much more a thing of the past. So I think you just have to be adaptable and flexible. I think people will have to get skills that are transferable, like learning one specific programing language or one specific subject of mathematics or something. That itself is not a super transferable skill, but sort of knowing how to reason with abstract concepts or how to problem solve when things go wrong.
22 May 2025
5 May 2025
From one piece Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions | Lex Fridman Podcast #468 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Wormholes are not yet an engineering problem, but they sit entirely within the realm of plausible physics.Their words
That’s going to be really telling. So I’m not saying it’s simply an engineering problem, but it’s all within the realm of plausible physics, I think.
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Their words
I’m unhappy with that. I would not be happy with information loss. I love that it’s telling us that there’s this crisis because I do think it’s giving us the clues, and we have to take them seriously.
3 February 2025
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Their words
And humans are actually very good at reading or judging between two things versus... This goes back to the core of what RLHF and preference tuning is that it's hard to generate a good answer for a lot of problems, but it's easy to see which one is better.
22 December 2024
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Their words
Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there. Go to enormous lengths like the many-worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter.
20 September 2024
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Usesrcmnd.app
ChatGPTTheir words
This includes platforms like ChatGPT and Claude. These are my go-to for brainstorming, writing, problem-solving, and even some coding tasks.
15 July 2024
13 June 2024
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Their words
But mathematics too, and it’s interesting because people think that math has this Platonic reality that exists outside of our universe, and I think it’s a feature of our biosphere and it’s telling us something about the structure of ourselves.
16 January 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Search EngineTheir words
It's a deeply humane project that also manages to be formally inventive; I never feel like I'm in surer hands as a podcast listener than when Vogt is telling me about what he has learned.
14 December 2023
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Their words
So if I generalize what you're asking, you are talking in general about truth-telling and we humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals.
20 November 2023
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korrents.com
The only thing a maker really controls is telling the good work from the bad; what arrives is not up to them.Their words
Where we do have control is in identifying which is which.
10 October 2023
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Likedrcmnd.app
Finite and Infinite GamesTheir words
So abstract. Maybe the most abstract book you’ll ever read. Compares “finite” games with rules and winners, versus “infinite” games without winners where we can play with the game itself. Is it about a job versus a calling? Religion versus spirituality? A story versus story-telling? Who knows. Thought-provoking if you can apply the metaphor to whatever concerns you.
2 August 2023
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korrents.com
Anyone who tells you a contested legal question has one obvious answer is lying to you rather than analysing it.Their words
Here’s the point: there are legal and factual defenses to this indictment, but anyone telling you that it obviously, inarguably violates the law is lying to you.
30 July 2023
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Likedrcmnd.app
How Minds ChangeTheir words
The psychology of how and why we believe. How we learn and change. The craft of doubt and persuasion. Insights into the social definition of truth. Epistemology. Certainty is a feeling not based on facts. Well-written with a nice balance of story-telling and deeper dives.
14 March 2023
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Their words
We do this all the time: we attempt to reach the brain through the ears, but all we end up doing is vibrating the air.
You can't reach the brain through the earsexperimental-history.com
30 January 2023
9 August 2022
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Their words
What we could we could train people by saying, "Here's the recognition prime decision model. Now, you know, follow this." And that would be useless. Because of uh telling people the strategy isn't going to buy them anything. The intuition part is a reflection of the patterns they've built up through experience. And so there's no shortcut for that.
10 June 2022
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Their words
The best and easiest-found-by-optimization algorithms for solving problems we want an AI to solve, readily generalize to problems we’d rather the AI not solve; you can’t build a system that only has the capability to drive red cars and not blue cars, because all red-car-driving algorithms generalize to the capability to drive blue cars.
15 July 2020
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What is a korrent?
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.
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