James Webb

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on the atlas — 52

highlights — 116

My opinion of geohot definitely dropped after he started tweeting how easy it would be to fix Twitter, and then he started soliciting free work. He obviously underestimated the difficulty of shipping a feature across web and mobile. Hacking a prototype is trivial. Making it work well for all platforms, fully accessible, and across all supported languages is a bigger hurdle. It just gave me the impression that he thought frontend development was trivial and he'd just be able to hack it out in a day. pavlov 40 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Why is Twitter such a Waterloo for all these obvio…
The tiny corp raised $5.1M | Hacker News
There's a difference between common knowledge (something that applies to many different problems) and original problem-solving. Of course you have to master these (just examples): prefix sums and binary search to become green Basics of graphs, std::set, fenwick tree to become cyan Basics of DP to become blue Lazy segment trees to become purple Sqrt-decomposition to become orange...
I solved more than 1341 problems till difficulty 2200 but no improvement at all , I feel frustrated should I quit? - Codeforces
There's a difference between common knowledge (something that applies to many different problems) and original problem-solving. Of course you have to master these (just examples): prefix sums and binary search to become green Basics of graphs, std::set, fenwick tree to become cyan Basics of DP to become blue Lazy segment trees to become purple Sqrt-decomposition to become orange...
I solved more than 1341 problems till difficulty 2200 but no improvement at all , I feel frustrated should I quit? - Codeforces
But not without practicing coding skills — this can be done by solving many problems. But to reach red and beyond, you need to be prepared for original problem-solving. Apparently, this means having more advanced mathematical training — mastering concepts from abstract algebra, number theory, combinatorics, but more importantly, building the intuition about when and how to apply these concepts to problem-solving. This intuition building cannot be done by reading editorials. The editorial will merely give you the solution, not how the author came up with it. You have to do that yourself by tryi…
I solved more than 1341 problems till difficulty 2200 but no improvement at all , I feel frustrated should I quit? - Codeforces
I also almost never look at the editorial. I have problems enqueued since almost a year ago and I'm still trying to solve them from time to time. IMHO trying for 30 minutes is ridiculous. → Reply Sixpathsguy 3 years ago, # ^ | 0 Wow! Even though 30 mins seems less sometimes to me too, yet I never imagined that this number can be bumped to 1 year! One question, how do you keep track of so many old problems? Does your browser always have a lot of tabs open? → Reply ivan100sic 3 years ago, # ^ | +14 When I have free time, I read a random 2700+ problem and try to solve it. Usually I can solve them…
I solved more than 1341 problems till difficulty 2200 but no improvement at all , I feel frustrated should I quit? - Codeforces
Well, truly there is of course no such fixed upper bound, you can do whatever you want. Some people say leave the problem after 60 minutes or 30 minutes. But, I think, in this case, what is the best advice is what Errichto says : "try till you are out of ideas" , this sentence truly captures everything. Sometimes, if you have a lot of ideas, then maybe try all of them and see if they work (this will take more time), and other times maybe you don't have many ideas, then try the one idea that seems obvious and then if you are really out of ideas, check the editorial maybe. Also, sometimes it is …
I solved more than 1341 problems till difficulty 2200 but no improvement at all , I feel frustrated should I quit? - Codeforces
AI will make research even more of a scam than it already is. If Sokal or Boghossian-Lindsey-Pluckrose can successfully “punk” humanities journals, AI will be able to do the same on an industrial scale. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot writing a thousand turgid pages a second about “neoliberalism,” “patriarchy,” and “anti-racism” — forever. Outside of the most empirical subjects, the only rationing tools left to determine academic status will be uniquely human: networking and sheer charisma.
10% Less Stagnation - by Bryan Caplan - Bet On It
But he also said he was criticizing an academic subculture “that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside.” He concluded: “How can one show that the emperor has no clothes? Satire is by far the best weapon; and the blow that can’t be brushed off is the one that’s self-inflicted.” Messrs. Lindsay and Boghossian were already known for a hoax paper titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” which they published in the journal Cogent Social Sciences last year under the names Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle. Such hoaxes are unethical, and The Wall Street Journal d…
Fake News Comes to Academia - WSJ
Governance research The main advice I give people who want to enter this field: pick one relevant topic and try to become an expert on it. There are about two dozen topics where I wish there were a world expert on applying this topic to making AGI go well, and no such person exists; I
AGI safety career advice - EA Forum
f there is one thing I have learned, from living a life with chronic headache, migraines, and a few cluster-headaches, it is that; comparing pain is completely meaningless. What we feel is relative to what we have experienced, learned to deal with, and what is important to us in the moment.
9 months after my ICLR spotlight award, as an Independent Researcher. | by Andreas Madsen | Medium
My love for science is a love for truth-seeking. Formed by being constantly asked to question, if my headache were real.
9 months after my ICLR spotlight award, as an Independent Researcher. | by Andreas Madsen | Medium
And it actually was possible to do so a surprisingly large amount of the time. Most of what computers were commonly used for could be accomplished using only whole numbers — for example, by using Euclidean division that yields a quotient and a remainder in place of decimal division. Even financial software could be built using integers only to count the total number of cents rather than floating-point values to represent dollars and cen
» The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 2: Three Dimensions in Hardware The Digital Antiquarian
So, it was settled: computer graphics would become the University of Utah’s specialty. In what can only be described as a fantastic coup, in 1968 Evans convinced Sutherland himself to abandon the East Coast prestige of Harvard, where he had gone after leaving his post as the head of ARPA, in favor of the Mormon badlands of Utah.
» The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 2: Three Dimensions in Hardware The Digital Antiquarian
Many people in EA really enjoy philosophical discussions and debates. This makes a lot of sense! What else would you expect from a movement founded by moral philosophy academics? I’ve enjoyed some of these discussions myself. But I often see important and controversial beliefs in moral philosophy thrown around in introductory EA material (introductory pitches and intro fellowships especially), like strong longtermism, the astronomical waste argument, valuing future people equally to currently existing people, etc. And I think this is unnecessary and should be done less often, and makes these i…
Post 45: Simplify EA Pitches to “Holy Shit, X-Risk” — Neel Nanda
Why did I make everyone watch de-biasing videos: Because our goal is to find the best students to admit, period. If we find amazing students that our competitors don't, that's an automatic win. :) It's easy for the very few candidates who meet all of those bins. The real job of admissions is to find the students who don't. This latter point is exactly why the HN post author is right: we try very hard to look for signals of research success, which are somewhat different from the signals of academic success that are present in applications.
Reflecting on CS Graduate Admissions
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable.
Think of language models like ChatGPT as a “calculator for words”
I find a very low likelihood that, by the end of this century, the human genome will be the only storage system for intelligent life on Earth. I think CRISPR gene-editing technology means scientists are going to make babies who don’t need sleep, who have IQs of 200, who have gills – whatever you can imagine. Some religions are going to be deeply challenged by it, there will probably be wars about it. But CRISPR is out of the bottle – our DNA is going to be mucked around with. There will be disasters and mistakes at the start, but eventually they’re going to come up with something new that will…
Physicist David Wolpert on how to study concepts beyond imagination | New Scientist
Think about a paramecium, a very simple, single-celled organism. It’s not just that it wouldn’t understand any questions I ask – it wouldn’t understand the concept of a question. We need to put ourselves on the other side and say: we are the paramecium, what is beyond us?
Physicist David Wolpert on how to study concepts beyond imagination | New Scientist
The Haah phase is opening the door to many more exotic things. It’s an indication about how little we know about 3-D and higher dimensions.
Physicists Aim to Classify All Possible Phases of Matter | Quanta Magazine
Companies' rush to get into the game led Wall Street investors, consultants, and analysts to try to one up each other's projections for the Metaverse's growth. The consulting firm Gartner claimed that 25% of people would spend at least one hour a day in the Metaverse by 2026. The Wall Street Journal said the Metaverse would change the way we work forever. The global consulting firm McKinsey predicted that the Metaverse could generate up to "$5 trillion in value," adding that around 95% of business leaders expected the Metaverse to "positively impact their industry" within five to 10 years. Not…
The Metaverse, Zuckerberg's Tech Obession, Is Officially Dead. ChatGPT Killed It.
I basically don't think that big changes come from people who aren't pursuing a vision that some part of them “believes in”, and I don't think low-risk, low-reward, modest, incremental help can save us from here. To be clear, when I say “believe in”, I don’t mean that you necessarily assign high probability to success! Nor do I mean that you’re willing to keep trying in the face of difficulties and uncertainties (though that sure is useful too). English doesn’t have great words for me to describe what I mean here, but it’s something like: your visualization machinery says that it sees no obsta…
Focus on the places where you feel shocked everyone's dropping the ball - LessWrong
Or the Alignment Research Field Guide’s advice to “optimize for your own understanding” and chase the things that feel alive and puzzling to you, as opposed to dutifully memorizing other people’s questions and ideas. “[D]on't ask "What are the open questions in this field?" Ask: "What are my questions in this field?"”
Focus on the places where you feel shocked everyone's dropping the ball - LessWrong
don't think we'll be saved by the shard theory folk; not everyone audaciously trying to save the world will succeed. But if someone does save us, I think there’s a good chance that they’ll go through similar “What the hell, are you all idiots?” phases, where they autonomously pursue a path that strikes them as obviously egregiously neglected, to see if it bears fruit. (Regardless of what I think.) Contrast this with, say, reading a bunch of people's research proposals and explicitly weighing the pros and cons of each approach so that you can work on whichever seems most justified. This has mor…
Focus on the places where you feel shocked everyone's dropping the ball - LessWrong
Don’t ever lie, make up results or sweep negative findings under the rug. These things might help you in the short term but in the long term they never will, and good research is all about the long term. For example, if you run your new model with 4 different random seeds, and in one of those runs the improvement is 10%, and in the other three runs the improvements are -2%, 1% and -9%, that means that the 10% run was a fluke. If you wanted to, you could submit a paper where you don’t mention the other runs, but that would be deceitful. Sure, that paper might get accepted, but eventually someon…
Ofir Press
. As I reflect on my 4.5 years with the company, the most prominent theme would be "learning." I vividly remember my first few days at the company, feeling excited and thinking, "I breathe AI day and night here." Since then, I have worked on numerous projects and gone through different stages of the company. What remains constant is my eagerness and exposure to learning — learning about computer vision, MLOps, product development, sales, and more. I have thoroughly enjoyed my learning and growth here. With my goal of continued learning in mind, I have decided to move on and embark on a new jou…
Things I Learned at Landing AI — Ivan Zhou
Why is it The Future ? Obviously, I cannot predict the future, but I do believe HTMX (or something like it) will become an increasingly popular approach for making web applications in the following years. Recently, HTMX was announced as one of 20 projects in the GitHub Accelerator
Chris James -HTMX is the Future
One of Cohere’s selling points is that it is not bound to a single cloud, Gomez pointed out. “We’re not locked into Azure,” he said, referring to OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft. “We have a relationship with Google and have access to their supercomputer TPU pods, and we also recently announced a partnership with AWS.” This means that customers can deploy within their chosen cloud or even on premises. “If you want to be extremely low-latency, or if you don’t want us to have visibility into your customer data because it’s something super sensitive, we can support that in a way that no one e…
OpenAI rival Cohere AI has flown under the radar. That may be about to change. | VentureBeat
Formalism says: let’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a fancy little certificate. Let’s not get into who should have what. Because, like it or not, this is simply a recipe for more violence.
A formalist manifesto | Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug
In other words, violence equals conflict plus uncertainty. While there are wallets in the world, conflict will exist. But if we can eliminate uncertainty
A formalist manifesto | Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug
The key is to look at this not as a moral problem, but as an engineering problem. Any solution that solves the problem is acceptable. Any solution that does not solve the problem is not acceptable.
A formalist manifesto | Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug
If you’ve never heard of any of these people, neither had I until I started the procedure. If that scares you, it should. Replacing your own ideology is a lot like do-it-yourself brain surgery. It requires patience, tolerance, a high pain threshold, and very steady hands. Whoever you are, you already have an ideology in there, and if it wanted to come out it would have done so on its own. There is no point in starting this messy experiment only to install some other ideology that’s the way it is just because someone said so. Formalism, as we’ll see, is an ideology designed by geeks for other g…
A formalist manifesto | Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug
When I was struggling to memorise all the equations for my exams I realised if I could reverse engineer the positions of the equations from the units I wouldn't have to memorise the actual equations themselves. It wasn't until I had a casual chat in my university lab some years later that I found out it was called Dimensional Analysis. This obviously goes a lot deeper than my own brain could come up with (7-dimensional vectors was where you surpassed me) but this was still very interesting
Seven Dimensions - YouTube
AI companies love the trappings of science, they publish ‘studies’ that are written and presented in the style of a paper submitted for peer review. These ‘papers’ are often just uploaded to their own websites or dumped onto archival repositories like Arxiv, with no peer review or academic process. When they do ‘do’ science, they are still using science mostly as an aesthetic. They publish papers with grand claims but provide no access to any of the data or code used in the research.7 Their approach to science is what “my girlfriend goes to another school; you wouldn’t know her
Beware of AI pseudoscience and snake oil – Baldur Bjarnason
Watson was supposed to transform healthcare and education but ended up being a costly disaster
Beware of AI pseudoscience and snake oil – Baldur Bjarnason
Any executive. Yeah. You have to communicate extremely well. And it is, it is basically akin of prompt engineering. Yeah. They teach you frameworks on how to communicate as an executive. Yeah. [01:06:45] Reza Shabani: No, absolutely. I, I completely agree with that. And then someone might hallucinate and you're like, no, no, this is, let's try it this way instead. [01:06:52] No, I, I completely agree with that. I think a lot of the more kind of I guess the algorithmic models that will return something to you the way like a search bar might, right? Yeah. I think that type of You wanted to disap…
Training a SOTA Code LLM in 1 week and Quantifying the Vibes — with Reza Shabani of Replit
at Friedman former GitHub ceo. CEO and, and or not current ceo, right? No. Former. Yeah. Went on replica Hired a bounty and, and had a bounty build this website for him. [01:04:25] Yeah. That allows you to kind of compare different language models and and get a response back. Like you, you add one prompt and then it queries these different language models, gets the response back. And it, it turned into this really cool tool that people were using to compare these models. [01:04:39] And then he put it behind a paywall because people were starting to bankrupt him as a result of using it. But but…
Training a SOTA Code LLM in 1 week and Quantifying the Vibes — with Reza Shabani of Replit
Right now we're hiring for the applied a applied to AI ml engineer. And so, you know, this is someone who's. Creating data pipelines, processing the data at scale creating runs and and training models and you know, running different variations, testing the output running human evals and, and solving a, a ton of the issues that come up in the, in the training pipeline from beginning to end.
Training a SOTA Code LLM in 1 week and Quantifying the Vibes — with Reza Shabani of Replit
listener, like the original scaling law was Kaplan, which is 1.7. Mm-hmm. And then Chin established 20. Yeah. And now Lama style seems to mean 200 x tokens to parameters, ratio. Yeah. So obviously you should go to 2000 X, right? [00:52:06] Like, I mean, it's, [00:52:08] Reza Shabani: I mean, we're, we're kind of out of code at that point, you know, it's like there, there is a real shortage of it, but I know that I, I know there are people working on I don't know if it's quite 2000, but it's, it's getting close on you know language models. And so our friends at at Mosaic are are working on some…
Training a SOTA Code LLM in 1 week and Quantifying the Vibes — with Reza Shabani of Replit
This became a popular view. In a 1957 article in The New York Times, the writer Erik Barnouw predicted that, as work became easier, our identity would be defined by our hobbies, or our family life. “The increasingly automatic nature of many jobs, coupled with the shortening work week [leads] an increasing number of workers to look not to work but to leisure for satisfaction, meaning, expression,” he wrote.
The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable - The Atlantic
TLDR America’s most remarkable kid didn't know how to swim at age 14 and drowned while kayaking not wearing life jacket I dunno, but I find that remarkably stupid, but I guess US has different standards for what's remarkable. SyzygistSix 7 months ago | parent | next [–] No, it is very typically stupid. Exactly the kind of thing young men and boys do often, which is engaging in risky behavior without thinking. Most of the time the result is stupid fun. Unfortunately some are unlucky.
A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah | Hacker News
As a counterpoint, if we look at the world of sports. I follow hockey quite closely. In hockey the term generational talent gets thrown around and assigned to kids, sometimes as young as 13-14. There is even an official recognition in the Canadian Major Junior system at 15 with "Exceptional Player Status" where a 15 year old is given eligibility to play in the league (normally 16+). Some of these prodigies do level out, like you say. Often on account of their size being caught up to. But some truly remain remarkable into adulthood and actually hit that Generational talent level (Connor McDavid…
A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah | Hacker News
I consider this rebuttal to be exceptionally well-argued, and I thank you for it.
A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah | Hacker News
Where are the verifiable facts? Where are the citations? You may see the story as just a list of 'verifiable facts,' but that's absolutely not what it is. I'm not saying I think the whole thing is made up, but it isn't simply a collection of attestations that any individual can verify. It is an emotional, evocative lifestyle story published by an outlet that, as far as I can tell, is outright owned by the LDS church. And the author? They have one other story credit. I don't know enough about the LDS or this particular publication to make a specific claim, but I guarantee this story has been af…
A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah | Hacker News
What's weird to me is that somebody would have such a hard time accepting verifiable facts about a gifted outlier who happens to be remarkably young but also reads Hacker News on a Sunday night, presumably because they see themselves as someone who is involved in the tech/startup economy. The whole reason that there's a story here is because it's exceptional. If he hadn't been an outlier, there would be no story. There's no conspiracy to embarass your younger self, here. I bought my first hard drive, drums and television with profits from contract software development when I was 10. I was on m…
A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah | Hacker News
Fortune favors the bold, history is written by the victors. The other stories usually don't get told.
A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah | Hacker News
Hence the term "Surviorship bias".
A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah | Hacker News
You should check out the MBA programs at leading business schools (Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, etc.) - those classes are a fairly good proxy for the people leading companies and similar 15-30 years down the road. Probably 60-70% of the classes have the same cookie-cutter Finance/Tech/Consulting backgrounds. Some of the most risk averse and carefully planned professionals you'll find.
A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah | Hacker News
30 years ago in central Texas we visited northern Mexico many, many times a year. 20 years ago we thought it was funny other people were starting to be scared to do so. 15 years ago we stopped going. We haven't been back since. It's so weird that, from a central Texas perspective, we used to be a short drive from visiting another COUNTRY, which is now effectively a blank space on the map of the world around us. Ski west in New Mexico, eat easy in New Orleans, Hike north in Colorado. South? Here be dragons.
A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah | Hacker News
This is not true. What the people who "lead the world" have in common most often is coming from a very privileged background. The idea that they are all iconoclasts or inherently in some way "better" than other people is a myth the wealthy tell themselves. The best of the best likely come from privileged background simply because of the access to resources. The idea that meritocracy is some of egalitarianism is a myth.
A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah | Hacker News
Even where wealth and privilege aren't important (and they have considerable effects in many fields) luck is also critical : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328939222_Exploring... We need to get rid of this idea of meritocracy.
A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah | Hacker News