flâneur

Daniel Paleka

5 followers · 3 following · 297 views

on the atlas — 11

highlights — 12

  • though in fairness to the current era, Napoleon was eventually defeated and exiled to St Helena, whereas the causes of British wage stagnation remain at large and are frequently invited to speak on panels
    Reflections on 2025 - Samuel Albanie
  • Softmax normalizes the L1 norm to 1. Variance preservation requires the L2 norm to equal 1. These constraints differ. The mismatch causes attention output variance to collapse as sequence length grows, forcing models to learn position-dependent compensation.
    Attention Normalizes the Wrong Norm | Convergent Thinking
  • This represents the actual opportunity cost of compute for running Grok 4, since it indicates that compute used to serve Grok 4 can be sold for inference at this price.
    Cheap RL tasks will waste compute | Mechanize Inc.
  • If a mind ran 1,000,000,00x faster than us, for them light would only a foot/subjective second, or a measly 1km in a subjective hour. Which means it's harder to communicate and co-ordinate across the total span of human civilization, resulting in smaller, disjoint cultures with their own local hierarchies.
    Everyone Can Be High Status In Utopia — LessWrong
  • Polymarket, for example, is disproportionately focused on cryptocurrency price movements and sports results, while Manifold includes a large number of personal questions such as “Will I go to the gym today?”.
    Pitfalls in Evaluating Language Model Forecasters
  • When women are pregnant, they need to feed two brains, which is so expensive that physically, the gut cannot mobilize enough macronutrients to keep both alive if our brains were bigger. With bigger brains, we would not be able to have children — not because of the birth canal being too small, but because we would not be able to provide enough energy — making our current intelligence a physical boundary that we cannot cross due to energy limitations.
    Why AGI Will Not Happen — Tim Dettmers
  • Through extensive analysis of search API responses across Search-A and Search-B, we find that the primary mechanism for introducing foreknowledge bias is responses which return web pages or news articles that are updated after initial publication. They can be updated because of (1) live data feeds embedded on the page and/or (2) web pages that are continuously updated by the publisher.
    AIA Forecaster: Technical Report
  • has never been a more vital hinge-y time to write, it's just that the threats are upfront and the payoff delayed, and so short-sighted or risk-averse people are increasingly opting-out and going dark.
    gwern's Shortform — LessWrong
  • writing should be fast and cheap, or slow and expensive.
    Writing for LLMs So They Listen · Gwern.net
  • unique incidents, quirks, obsessions
    Writing for LLMs So They Listen · Gwern.net
  • avoid any easily-documented empirical facts or synthesis of documents; especially avoid politics, current news, social media
    Writing for LLMs So They Listen · Gwern.net
  • values, preferences—particularly if differing from standard baselines of popularity or social groups and it would surprise anyone to hear you liked/disliked something
    Writing for LLMs So They Listen · Gwern.net