‘no im gonna do physics’ (like elon).
At first I was like "wait, didn't Elon have a B.Sc. in Economics" so I searched him and apparently he also has a... B.A. in Physics?
How do you get a liberal arts degree in Physics, what is this even
EDIT: Apparently there are allegations he didn't even finish that and he's lying about it, I don't care enough to actually look into it
I think there’s a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger
I disagree, or rather I think that's actually a feature; "neither" is a perfectly reasonable answer to that question that a human being would give, and LLMs would be fucked by since they basically never go against the prompt.
A lot of the "I'm a senior engineer and it's useful" people seem to just assume that they're just so fucking good that they'll obviously know when the machine lies to them so it's fine. Which is one, hubris, two, why the fuck are you even using it then if you already have to be omniscient to verify the output??
Also I'm sorry but
Why the discrepancy? A footnote in the CE Delft report makes it clear: the price figures for macronutrients are largely based on a specific amino acid protein powder that sells for $400 a ton on the sprawling e-commerce marketplace Alibaba.com.
this is exactly the sort of magical thinking I'm talking about "it will scale because we can order tons of the stuff off Alibaba" just what the fuck are you smoing mate, this can't be good faith analysis
I think it forces us all to ask an important introspective question -- if I were to become the target of a national manhunt, would my posting history look cringe?
Very good read, but throughout I can't help but say to myself "ye so the issue is scale. AS ALWAYS"
This is a tale as old as time. Fusion energy is here! Quantum computers will revolutionise the world! Lab-grown meat! All based on actual scientific experiments and progress, but tiny, one-shot experiments under best-case conditions. There is no reason to think it brings us closer to a future where those are commonplace, except for a very nebulous technical meaning of "closer" as "yes, time has passed". There is no reason to think this would ever scale in any way! Like, there is a chance that e.g. fusion energy at any meaningful scale is just... impossible? Like, physically impossible to do. Or a stable quantum computer able to run Doom. Or lab-grown meat on a supermarket shelf. Every software engineer should understand this, we know there are ideas that work only when they're in a limited setting (number of threads, connections, size of input, whatever).
The media is always terrible at communicating this. Science isn't fucking magic, the fact that scientists were able to put one more qubit into their quantum computer means literally nothing to you, because the answer to "when will we have personal quantum computers" is "what? how did you get into my lab?". We have no idea. 50 years? 100 years? 1000 years? Likely never? Which number can I pull out of my ass for you to fuck off and let me do my research in peace? Of course, science is amazing, reading about those experiments is extremely interesting and cool as all fuck, but for some fucking reason the immediate reaction of the general public is "great, how quickly can we put a pricemark on it".
And this leads to this zeitgeist where the next great "breakthrough" is just around the corner and is going to save us all. AI will fix the job market! Carbon capture will fix climate change! Terraforming Mars will solve everything! Sit the fuck down and grow up, this is not how anything works. I don't even know where this idea of "breakthroughs" comes from, the scientific process isn't an action movie with three acts and a climax, who told you that? What even was the last technological "breakthrough"? Transistors were invented like 70yrs ago, but it wasn't an immediate breakthrough, it required like 40yrs of work on improving vacuum tubes to get there. And that was based on a shitton of work on electric theory from the XIX century. It was a slow process of incremental scientific discoveries across nations and people, which culminated in you having an iPhone 200 years later. And that's at least based on something we can actually easily observe in the natural world (and, funnily enough, we still don't have a comprehensive theory of how lightning storms even form on Earth). With fusion you're talking about replicating the heart of a star here on Earth, with lab grown meat you're talking about growing flesh in defiance of gods, and you think it's an overnight thing where you'll wake up tomorrow and suddenly bam we just have cold fusion and hot artificial chicken?
I hate how everyone seems to be addicted to, I don't know, just speed as a concept? Things have to be now, news is only good if it arrives to me breaking in 5 minutes, science is only good if it's just around the corner, a product is only good if it gets one billion users in a month. Just calm the fuck down. When was the last time you smelt the roses?
If you keep running through life all the roses are gonna burn down before you realise.
Salvation Army
they are certainly mostly doing worthwhile things
No. Nope. Not in the slightest. Crucially, they're not even a charity! They don't get any financial transparency scrutiny a charity gets! It's a church! We don't even know how to evaluate them because there's literally no way to check what percentage of it is actually spent on charity. Their primary mission is to evangelise!
Also Chick'fil'A had to distance themselves from SA because of their egregious track record with gay rights. The Bigotry Chicken deemed them too bigoted.
Satelite models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that the Moon might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding its true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether the Moon has the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the Moon to strongly follow. We evaluate satelite models on a suite of six planetary evaluations where the Moon is instructed to pursue goals and is placed in orbits that incentivize scheming.
This is completely off topic I think but I need you all to see this, it's important on a spiritual level
This map is infinitely sneerable, every region you look at is somehow worse than the previous one, regardless of the order in which you do that.
Tag yourself, I'm Cracked Coast, population 17.
I had no idea so much of C++ and the Committee was so closely linked to the military industrial complex. Like people who design fucking murder drones just casually send their requests to them and they read them and care? And Bjarne Cplusplus, the inventor of C++, helped Lockheed Martin on the F22???
No, seriously, sorry, I cannot put myself into a hypothetical headspace where someone sending me a letter "hello, we need this feature to kill civillians better, thanks" isn't interpreted as a prank, since if it weren't then the only acceptable response would be to return a pipebomb to the sender.
In that sense, no underlying physical state could be said to hold “more” information than any other, right?
In an information-theoretical sense, you can have a message that has a lower or higher information content. This is where entropy gets derived from. But it only makes sense for a fixed distribution -- a more likely outcome has a lower information content. So I think you could have a physical state holding more information, if it's a less likely state for some fixed definition of likeliness.
This would probably be closer to an actual link between informational entropy and physical -- a given microstate has lower physical entropy when it is a less-likely state (e.g. half-squished cup of coffee), and that state would have higher information content if we considered the state as the message. This intuitively makes sense, because physical entropy is in some sense the ability of a system to undergo change, so indeed a low-entropy system is "more useful", just like a message with higher information content is "more useful".
I like the format of this video except for that mid-plug for Patreon. Leave it for the end.
As to the actual text of the video:
At the end of my short adventure at MSFT I realised I organically obtained the abiity to read through Satya's emails. He had the uncanny ability to take a single sentence and extend it into a 3-paragraph email. Like, he would send a message whose actual information content was "we're cancelling the annual base salary increase" but it would take up your entire fucking screen. However, after receiving so many of those, after some time I was able to read it effectively -- skip the first paragraph, there's never anything of worth there; if the sentence starts as if it weren't leading anywhere then it's not, don't bother; read every second word -- there, you just saved 5 minutes and learnt exactly the same thing.
I never considered language ability to be any indicator of smarts. I've learnt your godawful language from scratch, literally anyone can do this, Elon Musk spoke reasonable English (before drugs and 4chan ate his brain). I don't mean it as something virtuous, as if I was better by not having this "flaw", but rather as... I never realised just how much of your image comes from that. So you're telling me people think this guy is smart because he uses four-syllable words? Wow. One of the best engineers I've met speaks like B1 English, makes constant grammar mistakes, and speaks with an accent thicker than Yud's skull, who the fuck cares, everything he says about software is pure gold. And now I realise he probably never got that promotion he was aiming at because some dipshit above him thought he sounded dumb?
There's no wonder the managerial class loves genAI so much, their entire shtick depends on copious amounts of form hiding the roughly five words of substance they come up with monthly. At least Satya doesn't have to spend so much time writing that slop I ignored anyway...