vslira's blog

     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 ...

     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 ...

Computer Science Nominative Determinism - Edsger Dijkstra \(\text{Edsger } D^*_{ijk} \) Ok, that was awful, I know, I know. P.S.:If you're not getting this joke, maybe you have a terrible sense of humor your browser doesn't play nice with MathJax

 Reposting an anecdote I originally posted on Hacker News  regarding my trip to Pompeii:     We were walking around the city (the archeological park, that is) and I wanted to see one of those roman public bathrooms. So I googled "pompeii latrine" and got search results links for how to find the bathrooms (as in, the guest facilities). I was initially confused as to why such a clear query got me the completely wrong answer, until it hit me that bathroom and latrine are semantically similar, but not in my context.     At least that's my headcanon, who knows. And it seems like the cool preserved latrinae were in herculanum anyway. Still, fun to think about  Again, I have no way of knowing if this is why it happened, but I like to believe it is.

     One of the books on my reading list is Bryant and O'Hallaron's Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective . As the name implies, it teaches you how computers work. The book uses C since it's a low-level language that "exposes" the machine and it appeals to me because I've been eager to learn both systems-level programming and computer hardware, and this book addresses both areas using C.     Now, the reader might not be aware, but there's currently a low-level language holy war between Rust and C going on (well, more like a two-front war with Rust tackling C and C++ at the same time). Which is fine and all - I've got no dog in this fight - but it got me thinking: Is there some book or piece of content that can teach me the same breadth of hardware knowledge based on Rust? Even though learning is fun, I'd rather learn a language at the same time I learn about hardware.      I don't expect to become a systems programmer any time soon, ...

As I write this post, the board of directors of OpenAI is under extreme pressure to reinstate Sam Altman as CEO and giving him complete control of the company while they're at it. If they don't do that, it's likely that they'll lose the company's financial backers, compute enablers and a significant portion of their most important employees - the proverbial members of technical staff. Oh, and be sued to high Heaven by Satya  Nadella. Far from accusing Sam of being just talk as the title of this post may imply, but however intelligent he is what he brought for the company certainly wasn't his AI development capabilities, but the external and internal support that the company needed to move forward. Contrary to everything I would like to be true, this skill - convincing people, selling to them - is more important than being able to build what they want. Technically being able to, I mean, because actually forming a team to deliver, and presenting it in a way that c...

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! The common interpretation of the poem is that we're supposed to appreciate the irony of the self-styled king of kings' works not being around anymore. Time, like sand, eventually wears everything out. But I always found it funny that the pharaoh is addressing "ye Mighty,". Is it out of respect or irony that Ramesses II addresses his non-peers this way? The pharaoh not-so gently cues them to despair, so I don't suppose it's out of respect. But the irony is also a bit uncalled for: he already drove the point home about who's in charge with his title. Why "ye Mighty," then? Unless it's not supposed to be ironic, but earnest. Maybe Shelley isn't picturing a cocky, hubristic ruler, but a wise one. He was, after all, one of the most successful pharaohs of Egypt, in both war and diplomacy. Maybe the pharaoh is trying to send an important message to those who happen upon his works: "It doesn't m...

Carousel of Progress is one of the most famous attractions in Disney World. It's a 20-minute "ride" of pure, unadultered promethean americana and for anyone who believes in - and hopes for - the material progress of the human race it's hard to leave the show unmoved by the ideal of progress presented therein. As a non-American children who didn't speak English as his first language, though, I didn't quite understand the full lyrics for some time and even when I got fluent in English I still misheard one crucial part of the lyrics: instead of Man has a dream and that's the start I heard Man has a dream and that's the stars In other words, I thought old Walt was proclaiming his support for the exploration of the final frontier. And when got on that stage, that would be "a dream come true, for you and me". That always struck me as very romantic: this idea that after shaping our world to support our well-being - the obvious sequence to the peri...

File this under highly speculative. I’m sure there is better research on this topic than this writing This past week, for no obvious reason, I considered a few thoughts at the same time: Exercise is supposedly one of the best anti-aging “drugs”, and also highly effective (relatively speaking) against cognitive decline There’s this vague idea that after you become “professionally inactive”, you accelerate your cognitive decline To avoid cognitive decline, one must keep “exercising the brain”, so the incentive for seniors to have hobbies, do crosswords, sudoku, etc Now, from this point it seems that I’d go to a very commonplace conclusion about how exercising is probably better than sudoku or something, and to be frank that’s exactly where I’m going. But another two things crossed my mind at the same time: Recent advances in AI, and less recent advances in computing in general showed that a lot of the things we consider “cognitively hard” - from symbolic manipulation to arithmetic, “...