flâneur

Jirat C

20 followers · 23 following · 1813 views

on the atlas — 167

highlights — 145

  • How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?
    Searching for God in Silicon Valley - by Avital Balwit
  • The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
    Searching for God in Silicon Valley - by Avital Balwit
  • I became so engrossed with regaling myself, preening over my own glorious victory, that I almost did not react in time for the road abruptly ending.
    The first thing I did last year was run | Henry From Online
  • But relating to something from a place of inadequacy introduces all sorts of blind spots. You’ll be biased to not seriously entertain counterarguments that threaten your new source of self-worth (e.g., dismissing critics who claim your work is actually causing harm in X way). You also end up judging others harshly based on whether they ‘get it’, since your judging yourself harshly on this.
    Tempering hardcoreness - by Ajeya Cotra - Good Bones
  • And people are fundamentally tolerant of one another’s personal choices, and resist engaging in purity death-spirals
    Tempering hardcoreness - by Ajeya Cotra - Good Bones
  • where they elicit proteotoxicity leading to profound chromatin defects. The latter include erosion of epigenomic signatures of MSN identity
    Neurosciences Seminar: X. William Yang, MD, PhD - Beyond the inherited CAG: Decoding a neuronal-selective pathogenic cascade in Huntington's disease | Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
  • where I actually couldn’t live with myself is the one where I took this thing that was a perfect match for everything I’ve always naturally loved and cared about, and been fortunate to have some aptitude for, and just didn’t give it my all
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • More seriously, I think this shift from survival mode to creative mode is the right one. It’s not going to be in the next two or four years, but it’s coming. At some point you really will only be capped by what you can imagine and the ideas you have for how you want to spend your life, which will be a very different life. To your question, I think a lot of it will be pure self-expression. People will get to live the lives they want to live. The bottleneck to turning our dreams into reality will dramatically narrow. And the way we live now will seem crazy.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • In some sense, solving AI really does mean solving cognition.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • I kind of like to say that retrieval is one of the things we really do best, which is actually kind of to your point about memory.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • However, I think of it less as a direct application and more as a proof of concept of what’s possible. In order to do some of these really hard problems, you need to develop a lot of fundamental logical reasoning, a lot of creativity, and the ability to string together very, very long chains of reasoning and make sure they all line up. Knowing that models can do this with sufficient reinforcement learning and the right training data does suggest, pretty clearly, that a lot of these practical tasks can be done.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • It’s in some ways a wonder that humans can do math problems at all.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • We’ve always lived in Minecraft survival mode, and now we’re going to be living in creative mode
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • I know it’s trite, but this is exactly how I feel when I see (for example) a paper that uses category theory to prove NL≠NP. We start in Boston, we end up in Beijing, and at no point is anything resembling an ocean ever crossed.
    Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong
  • How do we make a public AI debate substantive? How do we ensure policymakers can make informed decisions about AI, so that we can sensibly regulate some of the negative consequences of AI without stifling the positive uses?
    How AI Will Reshape Computer Systems by 2035: A Jeffersonian Dinner in San Francisco about Our 10,000x Future - CRA-I
  • It is our job to ensure that we develop and encourage the societally- beneficial aspects of AI, and we discussed education and healthcare as two domains with considerable early positive benefits and enormous further potential
    How AI Will Reshape Computer Systems by 2035: A Jeffersonian Dinner in San Francisco about Our 10,000x Future - CRA-I
  • Second, there is an existence proof that we can do much better since humans learning from birth to early adulthood are able to use 1,000x less input data than today’s largest ML models, suggesting that much more data-efficient learning algorithms are still possible
    How AI Will Reshape Computer Systems by 2035: A Jeffersonian Dinner in San Francisco about Our 10,000x Future - CRA-I
  • We conjecture that in five years 10,000x more AI inference will be done worldwide, with these gains hypothetically coming from multiplicative progress of 50x in AI algorithms, 50x in system/hardware optimization/specialization, and 4x from further data center growth.
    How AI Will Reshape Computer Systems by 2035: A Jeffersonian Dinner in San Francisco about Our 10,000x Future - CRA-I
  • “Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.” —Octavia E. Butler
    FSPO: Few-Shot Optimization of Synthetic Preferences Personalizes to Real Users
  • Filtering questions by LLM labeled difficulty or LLM response length yields better results than filters typical to pre-training data curation that use embeddings or fastText
    OpenThoughts3 - A new SOTA Reasoning Data Recipe | Open Thoughts
  • Many alternative names are exonyms in the practice of making new infectious diseases seem foreign.[36][37][38] This pattern was observed even before the 1889–1890 pandemic, also known as the 'Russian flu', when the Russians already called epidemic influenza the 'Chinese catarrh', the Germans called it the 'Russian pest', and the Italians called it the 'German disease'.[39][40] These epithets were re-used in the 1918 pandemic, along with new ones.[41]
    Spanish flu
  • They are more pregnant with meaning than any stanza of poetry: each word provides a logical toehold I can mount after extracting everything implicit in the preceding ones
    Understand - a novelette by Ted Chiang
  • they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do.
    Understand - a novelette by Ted Chiang
  • Blinding, joyous, fearful symmetry surrounds me.
    Understand - a novelette by Ted Chiang
  • My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt-oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech.
    Understand - a novelette by Ted Chiang
  • Sharpening. RL compresses variance and stabilizes known strategies: pass@1↑ without expanding the support at large K. Discovery. RL crosses a learnability gap: pass@K=0 → sustained solves after training, with a distinct phase transition in the learning curve. Which regime you get depends on reward topology, exploration duration, data mixture, and task hardness.
    Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence at Berkeley
  • In grug language: Smart man sees big problem. Often state of nature is many small things. Smart man make one big thing out of many small things to throw at big problem. But then evil man take big thing from smart man and make more problem. Or big thing grow legs and beat smart man without making problem go away. This is bad. Maybe better to throw small things at big problem and not make big thing, even if solve problem less. Or before make big thing have plan for how to not have big thing do evil.
    Do not conquer what you cannot defend — LessWrong
  • “Civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a baby detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.”
    Grimes and the Game Economy – Drew's Inkhaven Web Log
  • fortifying such an effort would be extremely difficult; the technology itself is destabilising and risks a loss of human control; and geopolitical adversaries would pre-emptively sabotage projects
    Dan Hendrycks warns America against launching a Manhattan Project for AI
  • As Geoffrey Hinton, an ai pioneer, warned with characteristic understatement, “There is not a good track record of less intelligent things controlling things of greater intelligence.”
    Dan Hendrycks warns America against launching a Manhattan Project for AI
  • ranging from the Hopfield model and Boltzmann machine (2024 physics Nobel prize), and the understanding of optimization dynamics and geometry in high dimensional disordered systems (2021 physics Nobel prize),
    Home | Physics Of Learning
  • Time spent isn’t an end goal and long hours are often a vanity metric - things that make you look good in front of others but don’t help you achieve the goal.
    It doesn’t matter how many hours you work
  • Bird that I am, I don't know where I need to go so much as that I need to. Not from this city, but from this work and this state of mind. I'd like to think that we're not entirely the same, though. The birds fly far away because they think the seasons are going to make their homes and habits unlivable; their anxiety to migrate is almost a form of generational trauma. But I could live like this forever. I'd like to think what drives me is almost a generational optimism. I have a sense that I can winter anywhere if need be, that the trade winds fluttering for me thousands of miles away are pecul…
    Zugunruhe - Aidan Smith
  • Mindy called me a hero. But I was simply a man in the right place at the right time. Dr. Hamilton is also a hero because he designed the Hopeful. Mindy is also a hero because she kept me awake. My mother is also a hero because she was willing to give me up so that I could survive. My father is also a hero because he showed me the right thing to do.
    Mono no aware - Lightspeed Magazine
  • The easy question, I think, is how the change should find us. In 1948 CS Lewis said “Let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, [etc…]” This ethos is sensible for most people (who are unable to contribute to solving these problems), but it is an unacceptable answer for those working on AI today. If you wake up every morning and try to improve the trajectory of the transformative AI systems that could remake the world, you have an obligation. What percentage of humanity gets to influence these decisions, even …
    Top Performers are Pathologically Ambitious - by Matt Beard
  • This is the person I got to know: curious, lively, sharp as a razor, and fun.
    Jim Simons - Emmanuel Candès
  • Jim: This does sound crazy. Should I believe you? Emmanuel: This is a mathematical fact. Jim: Do you have a proof? Emmanuel: I think so. Jim: I would like to see it.
    Jim Simons - Emmanuel Candès
  • “And finally you drive to the top of the highest peak and you find a sage, and you ask him what series of buttons on the dashboard you have to press to get out of the car. And he tells you that it’s not about pressing buttons on the dashboard and you just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR. And you say okay, fine, but what series of buttons will lead to you getting out of the car, and he says no, really, you need to stop thinking about dashboard buttons and GET OUT OF THE CAR. And you tell him maybe if the sage helps you change your oil or rotates your tires or something then it will improve your driv…
    Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person
  • The efficient market hypothesis is a lie At best it is a very lossy heuristic The best things in life occur where EMH is wrong In many cases it's more accurate to model the world as 500 people than 8 billion "Most people are other peo
    Nat Friedman
  • It's important to do things fast You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit "Slow is fake" A week is 2% of the year Time is the denominator
    Nat Friedman
  • Third, labour income can rise under partial automation because automation scales the value of remaining bottleneck tasks.
    O-Ring Automation - Marginal REVOLUTION
  • “Chess is a game of skirmishes,” I say. “The perspective of Go is bigger. It encompasses entire battles.” “There are no heroes in Go,” Bobby says, stubbornly.
    Mono no aware - Lightspeed Magazine
  • Understand that we are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we’re enmeshed. A person must rise above his selfish needs so that all of us can live in harmony. The individual is small and powerless, but bound tightly together, as a whole, the Japanese nation is invincible.”
    Mono no aware - Lightspeed Magazine
  • Trillions of dollars is going to tap out every source of venture capital, every investor who is willing to put in money now for an uncertain but potentially huge future return. To get trillions of dollars you will need boring debt investors, people who need their money back, people who are willing to put in money now for 9% a year and repayment in five years. Very different psychology.
    Musk Mars Merger, Maybe - Bloomberg
  • [Art history is] stereotypically a field for prep school graduates, especially women, with plenty of family wealth to fall back on. In fact, a New York Times analysis of Census data shows that art history majors are wildly overrepresented among those in the top 1 percent of incomes. Perhaps the causality runs from art history to high incomes, but I doubt it.
    Musk Mars Merger, Maybe - Bloomberg
  • Astrology-based investing
    Musk Mars Merger, Maybe - Bloomberg
  • Finance clubs I was a classics major in college, focused on reading Greek and Latin poetry. Somewhat later, I became an investment banker. That was a thing that people used to do. You treated college as a sort of luxury consumption good, you read some poetry, you had some fun, you lazed about on the quad, you graduated, you were like “ugh job I guess,” and you got a job. Some kinds of jobs (doctor) were only available to people who spent long years studying the relevant subject matter. Most kinds of jobs, though, were open to bright hard-working young people with good general educations and a …
    First Brands Did Some Round Trips - Bloomberg
  • Funds get more fragile with scale. So building competitive advantage becomes existential if you want to build an institution that endures. The problem is, that isn’t how fund managers are encouraged to spend their time or their focus. Most funds are run by an alpha decision maker who oversees all investments. They spend most of their time thinking about the next marginal deal, and not much time thinking about their moats. Compensation structures reward investment returns, split among small teams. Firms, on the other hand, are run by entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurs think constantly about compe…
    Firm > Fund - by David Haber - a16z
  • Even the people who love me don’t exist solely to love me; they have their own hangups and priorities and self-concept, and they must do what they can live with. This was a bitter lesson that I learned this year, but there was also an extreme sweetness to it, because in learning it I also realized: Other people are real, but so am I, and I am whole as I am, flawed and selfish and imperfect as I am. When I realized this, it was like I had been granted full permission to exist for the very first time.
    nothing will change your life more than saying what you actually want to say
  • My one goal of 2026, which has been my goal every year since 2020, is to be zen at all costs. As a formerly neurotic person I’ve come far on this front. I now have a reputation in my friend group as someone who is comfortable with sharing whatever deranged thought crosses her mind—I will wake up at 8:30 AM and send a loved one a three paragraph text about how I’m feeling paranoid. I can’t tell you how weird that feels to admit, as someone who used to be extremely focused on how everything was received. The reason I was obsessed with how someone received my message was because I cared so much a…
    nothing will change your life more than saying what you actually want to say