Posts

Saturday reads

The Adolescence of Technology Lots of good stuff, what’s more interesting to me is the beginning, where Dario roughly says, if I’m reading this right, that he’s not that worried about AI power seeking because you have to hammer these things a lot in post training for they to begin doing something useful, so maybe runway capability isn’t that automatic. Also, I laughed at “Democracies competitive in AI”. Something tells me he’s not talking about France’s Mistral. What else didn’t he say out loud? On The Adolescence of Technology Zvi’s commentary on the previous text. tl;dr he’s not impressed, still very worried and doesn’t think Dario is doing all he can. The Housing Ladder's Broken Promise Nothing new if you’re already landpilled. Why didn’t he add the happy/sad emojis to section 3, though? Vitol With Nukes The USSR had a place for people who belonged in hedge funds, and that place was managing the USSR's own commoditi...
Post a Comment
Read more

One pomodoro of Anki a day is enough for me

     I use Anki to learn, and for the last few years I've successfully built a habit of doing my daily cards. It's hard at first, sometimes you don't feel like it, but like any habit if you stick to it eventually becomes easier (not always "easy", just "easier").     But I'm not immune to falling behind, and like everyone who does Anki when life gets in the way of the daily sessions I struggle to keep up and start accumulating cards. Then one day you open the app, sees that there are 100 cards to study and you get that strong resistance to get started.     I could simply change the settings to lower the daily review limit, but I feel like I'd be just sweeping the problem under the rug then. I need to face the fact that I have to work through the backlog, which is also a signal to myself to pause adding more stuff until I get it into a manageable state.     So lately I decided that my ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Headless Mac mini home setup

     Recently I got myself a new Macbook which is a lot more capable than my previous daily driver - an M2 Mac mini. But I didn't want to retire the old fellow, it's a very capable personal computer still and I don't think it's a bad idea to have a backup in case I lose the Macbook or have it damaged. Besides, there are some applications that I use which are mostly local and even though migrating the related files would be trivial, if I then lost the Macbook I'd lose them, or I'd have to setup a backup strategy. So I decided to keep them in the Mac mini and just use it whenever I needed them - a good excuse to have it turned it on, headless, instead of storing it away in a drawer, unused.      I hadn't done this before so I was a little concerned I might need to install dedicated software (which I'd have to trust with unrestricted access to my home computer) or fiddle with weird settings. I was wrong, fortunately, and modern MacOS makes this a breeze. Bu...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Microsoft Employees dealing with Github Copilot PR - May 2025

     Related links: Reddit thread , HN thread     A few thoughts:     I fully understand the schadenfreude on the part of the SWE community. These things are possibly an existential threat to their livelihoods and the negativity is fully understandable if not misguided, but these victory laps seem to be repeating a common pattern of not waiting a couple months(!) before these systems improve, very publicly, from a mix of better models and now actively incremented training data from MSFT employees. This is the worst this system will ever be and looking in the improvement rate of the last few months should teach people to wait a little bit before condemning the effort fruitless     On a tangential note, I wonder if this public effort is somehow related to Github's new updated rate limits ( hn discussion ). All this juicy data PLUS expert human feedback out in the open ready to be used for distillation is an obvious target to upstarts trying to...
Post a Comment
Read more

Commentary on CWT w/ Jack Clark - Bullish case for AI impact on economic growth

     Link to MR post: MR     Jack and Tyler are both of the opinion that AI will cause lower economic growth than the 20%-30% estimates of those who are "feeling the agi" because  real world bottlenecks in the world of atoms, which still makes up the majority of the Economy by far, will put some brakes on that breakneck acceleration.     Now, I'm certain that both of them have already thought about the argument I'll make here, but I just want to spell it out loud. Many bottlenecks in the real world are consequences of political disputes (broadly speaking) in which parties have to rely on claims to support their side. In a world where more people rely on AI - and here I'm imagining the voting public using using AI to help them think about these disputes - it's possible that we'll see more rational, or at least better supported by evidence, policy getting an edge.     For example, a supporter of a proposal to reduce the maximum speed in a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Quoting Simon Willison on LLM-assisted search

I can feel my usage of Google search taking a nosedive already. I expect a bumpy ride as a new economic model for the Web lurches into view. —  Simon Willison, “AI assisted search-based research actually works now” I second the feeling
Post a Comment
Read more

Signal boost: Voronoi diagrams with SciPy

Image
[Link] Voronoi diagrams with SciPy  I was a bit confused by SciPy's documentation for its Voronoi class and wondering how I could easily draw the "infinite" regions from the output. After getting a somewhat verbose answer from ChatGPT, I decided to Google the question and found Voronoi diagrams with SciPy , by Martin McBride , which solved my problem. The solution is not different in spirit to ChatGPT's but it's simpler in my mind, so I went with it. The idea is to add the points of a very far off bounding box, then simply ignore regions with -1 vertices.
Post a Comment
Read more